There seem to be differences in what "lock-down" means for different towns, states, etc.
For me, lock-down has meant
- Stay home, but you can go out if you need toilet paper and milk. Wear a mask.
- You can walk around your neighborhood. Just cross to the other side of the street when you're passing someone. It's a suburb, so nobody is really driving. People are walking their dogs, but absolutely social distancing.
- In some instances, close neighbors are behaving like family, doing things together, but they do not socialize with anyone else.
- There is no law saying you can't be out getting ice-cream, but it's probably wiser if you're out getting medications or food shopping, getting mail or donating goods to the appropriate venue. Exercise includes being allowed to go to the local public garden. It involves a five-mile drive from most anywhere in town, so it's not like you could just walk there. It's never really full of people because it is distant, but there's always just loose enough people density that you can easily social distance. They closed the kids garden because its essential a playground, and yeah, that would be bad.
Stores that are open include: food stores, hardware stores, garden centers, restaurants
All stores are generally enforcing social distancing. Some stores are better at this than others. Only so many people in the store at one time. One in, one out. Everyone is wearing face masks. Restaurants are take-out only. Order our cats' kibble over the phone and pick it up at the vet, but we never get out of the car. The vet has
entirely isolated their space.
Being mostly a homebody, this has not really affected me or my wife much so far. We already had toilet paper. We're only now seeing shortages like dishwashing detergent and frozen veg. Now, more and more store shelves are empty, but most of that stuff was stuff I couldn't eat, so we haven't really been affected there either. We still get plenty of fresh veggies and fruits.
I can imagine that if you live in an apartment, especially a densely packed apartment complex in the middle of a densely populated city, the lock-down would be a lot different.
We're also mostly work-at-home. Most other people not. That's a challenge.
America is the third-most populous country in the world after China and India. Managing the needs of that many people has pros and cons. We often wrap ourselves in the bill of rights, wear the flag as a cape and shout "MURKA, YEAH!", endorsing and embracing the bill of rights that bestows freedoms on citizens born here and citizens made. Yet we rarely talk about the responsibilities that those freedoms are tied to. Maybe part of living in the land of the free is being brave enough to recognize that occasionally we have to work together as one country toward a common goal, even giving up some of those freedoms at least temporarily while we're working on that goal.
In WWII there was rationing of just about everything. We got ration cards. Victory gardens were planted. The best of our supplies went to the soldiers on the front line. We suffered the inconvenience in silence knowing that it was for a good cause. It seems we're in a similar situation today.
- The disease is causing some people to stop being able to breathe on their own.
- This is new: It's causing blot clots that are partly responsible everything from pulmonary embolisms to full-on strokes in a wide age range. People ages 30-40 are being most heavily hit - prime of life. We haven't been watching this, so we don't have a good count. This is on top of the elderly, young and immunocompromised.
- There's no vaccination. We have no wide-spread reliable immunoassay 15-minute tests for IgA (contagious) or IgM (past contagion). We're not contact tracing. We have no federally aligned path forward. We are essentially leaderless on this front.
- Fullly opening stores when you can't possibly know who is infected seems foolhardy at best, and likely to kill far more than have already died at worst.
- We two choices: damn the torpedos like Sweden and Japan, or wait it out.
- We don't have the third choice of limited opening because we don't have anything from "3" above. If we had these options, we could have a firmer grasp on exactly who is sick before they even show as sick, isolate them and treat them separately from the rest of us and re-introduce them after they're no longer contagious, 2 to 6 weeks later.
The only way to contact trace the third most populous country in the world is to use a massive database, probably via apple and google. Nobody else has the capacity. Nobody else is more aware of the privacy issues that are involved because they already deal with that only daily basis for doctors, lawyers... lots of professionals.
In the absence of actual leadership, someone must take up the mantle and say
something. The president is the only person who can be reasonably tasked with this job, but he has fumbled this play. So it sounds less credible when it comes from the mouths of a few governors and business people. In an age when social media makes everything seem like a conspiracy theory, if it's not coming from the lips of your
preferred leader, well then, it must not be true. Science has left the building. Yet the message is still just waiting to be delivered. It's a message that should have been delivered in December of last year:
Some Unknown Leader wrote:It's time to give up some of your freedom today so that we can survive and thrive after this is over. Make the tests, do the contact tracing, isolate and care for the sick. Stay home. Do this for your country. It takes all of us working together.
The message was never delivered in time. Unfortunately...
it never will be.
THAT is the crux of where we are.
