Lock it down. The only surprise is that it didn’t happen 10 days ago.
It’s just math. If you don’t have a vaccine, and you aren’t able to test people to the extent that you know who’s carrying and who isn’t, then what sense would it make for unaware carriers to be injecting germs into countless groups of people. Rhetorical.
I was waiting for one big sports league to shut down. After that, it seemed only logical that all the other dominoes would fall.
My Dad called me last Thursday night to tell me that The Masters was going to only allow 50% of ticket holders to attend the tournament on April 8th — 25,000 instead of 50,000. He said it in a hopeful fashion, as we were planning to go. I told him that night that there would be no Masters. Get ready for the news. Canceled the next day.
Saturday night I took someone out to dinner at a restaurant. I said to her: “I’m surprised that all of these people are here. But then that’s kind of a stupid thing to say since we decided to come here as well. Strange, isn’t it? I’d have thought all of this would be shut down by now!”
Thirty-six hours later, CA, IL & NY have closed down all their bars and restaurants. And just like the sports leagues, I would expect that every other state will soon follow suit.
It’s a lot harder to shut down all commercial airlines, but I can’t imagine that’s far away either.
I’m writing this on a Monday morning. Since Friday, the number of Coronavirus cases in the United States has doubled. It’s a pandemic; we just keep passing it to each other…
In a golf tournament, there’s no single referee like in all other sports. The reason for this is because the game is being played in dozens of different groups on different holes. So if you see a penalty in your own group and that player hasn’t called it on herself — YOU have to call it on them to “protect the field.”
Now all of us have to protect the field, by staying home as much as possible for the next few weeks (if not months).
I would imagine that the two big remaining challenges are: 1) How to ensure that all food and medical supply lines are sustained, and; 2) How to figure out a way to organize people’s pickup of supplies in drive-through lanes that don’t overwhelm the system.
Notwithstanding the shortage of testing kits, I wound think that priority testing would be administered to all healthcare officials and all employees at drug stores, grocery stores and restaurants who are still executing food deliveries.
We put a man on the moon in 1969 and the personal computer was invented about 40 years ago. Now we walk around with our entire photo albums, music libraries, email histories and hundreds of other life-enhancing apps in the palms of our hands.
So this is not some historically challenging intellectual puzzle to solve. I’m sure we will come together, listen to our smartest brains, be unselfish for the most part and get through a few months of social austerity.
People laughed at Italy. I didn’t. It made perfect sense to me. When a hurricane is about to blow through your community, you don’t stand outside your house, wave and wait for it to beat the shit out of you. You get to safety. Hunker down. Wait.
See y’all after the storm has passed.