Originally posted by Dartmoor Dave Over the past few days I've been fielding an increasing number of comments from family and friends on other social media who have clearly decided that they've had enough of lockdown and are just looking for excuses to abandon it. These are not stupid people; these are intelligent, educated, thoughtful folk who can usually be relied on to support their opinions with strong reasoning and evidence. But right now they are all seemingly determined to convince themselves that Covid hasn't really been so bad and that it's okay to forget about it. After all, they say, they're all still alive, and the few people who they know personally who have been infected have all made it through. So for now their desire to return to the privileges of their normal lives has overwhelmed their capacity to think rationally about the long term.
Sadly, I've resigned myself to the thought that a second wave is inevitable. People in my part of the world are starting to vote with their feet, and by the time the death rate has climbed high enough again for them to realise what they've done, it'll be too late.
I think there is a tendency for us to look for opinion pieces that tell us what we want to hear. On the Internet you can always find that. Moderate views are often drowned out by the folks at the extremes. There are a couple of urgent care docs in California who claim to have expertise and have diagnosed "thousands of people with COVID" and they made a YouTube clip that says that this is just like influenza and people aren't that sick, etc. Oddly, they say things about not washing your hands because you want to build up your immunity.
YouTube eventually took the video down, but not before it had been viewed by nearly 6 million people. I didn't view the whole thing, but the little bit I did see made it clear that they weren't speaking based on science and further, that they had a private urgent care and the number of patients they were seeing had fallen disastrously due to quarantine in California. I had an uncomfortable feeling that they were more concerned about their incomes than the safety of the lives of the people around them.
In the end we will need to get back to normal. Governments need to have staged plans for returning people to work and letting people return to places like campgrounds. But it is tough. The local hospital in my community (Lynchburg, VA) currently has 6 patients in it with covid. 5 are on ventilators, but the hospital is relatively empty right now because all elective procedures have been cancelled by the governors orders. It is probably time to think about starting some of that again, but everyone is afraid and other parts of Virginia are a different story. Hopefully smarter people than I am are figuring these things out, but in the end, it is politicians who make the decisions.