Telework Journal: Irrational exuberance

Another week working from home kicks off with a few changes.  My wife is also working remotely but is spending this week helping her mother who just got out of the hospital, so I am working from the house by myself, unless you count the two dogs.  They are not working at all, except for pouting because I won’t feed them treats all day long.

The “new” in the “news” is coming from here in Texas and other locations where people are ignoring stay-at-home warnings and social distancing recommendations to express their…their what, their unhappiness with the pandemic, I guess.  I don’t know anyone who’s pleased with the situation, but some folks are taking a threatening stance to “demonstrate” their desire that government officials ease restrictions that have—no doubt about it—cost millions of Americans their jobs and others their businesses, in an effort to fight the spread of a deadly disease for which we don’t have another effective weapon.

Let me get this straight.  There have been some 42,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the United States to this point, out of almost 800,000 confirmed cases.  When the medical experts called for social distancing and self quarantine to fight the spread of the novel coronavirus, they warned that if we didn’t take these drastic steps there could be deaths in the hundreds of thousands.  Right now it seems there will be far less than that…emphasis on “seems,” since nothing’s for sure.

And people are taking to the streets, wearing their camouflage and carrying long guns, making the argument that the relatively few deaths suffered so far, an amount comparable to a season of the flu, are prima facie evidence that the dramatic actions taken to curtail COVID-19 are not needed?

No.  It’s because of those actions—the social distancing, the restaurants and bars and all manner of places of business shut down to prevent us from infecting each other with a virus for which we have no vaccine and no immunity—that we have not had the hundreds of thousands of deaths that had been predicted.  They are arguing that the results of the preventative actions they oppose are evidence that those actions are no longer needed (if they ever were), but it’s the opposite: the results of the actions they’re protesting are pretty clear proof that the actions were successful, were necessary, based on the best medical evidence as interpreted by the medical experts.  The same experts who are warning us that if we’re not patient, if break this quarantine too soon, the virus will surge through the population.  Listen to the doctors, not the other dopes.

Trump is angry that “he wasn’t told” there was a problem?  No one mentioned the pandemic, huh?  Is that the same pandemic that he told us he knew all about even before everyone else did?  That pandemic?  Jeez…