Questioning Sanity

OK...so we have this pandemic going on. We are seeing the shutdown of schools, most sports and other large-audience gatherings. And we have a lot of folks on social media contending that the whole thing should be blamed on overactive, or ineffective, political leaders. Have you really given any thought to what you're saying? Or do you hate some official, or group of them, so much that you can't help yourself?

Did your least favorite politician(s)-
-Create the coronavirus?
-Cause it to mutate?
-Cause it to spread from China to the rest of the world?
-Cause it to be fatal to mostly older people and the immune-compromised?
-Prevent it from being treated effectively?

I get that whenever something that makes someone uncomfortable happens, it creates the need to blame somebody...and that the easiest target is somebody in charge of public policy. When someone kicks your cat, you need to kick a bigger cat, right? But when you say that all of the protective measures being taken are crazy, or elected official X has gone off the deep end, you are calling your own sanity into question. This situation isn't regular business. There is no standard-operating-procedure in place for how to deal with a pandemic. It seems to me that the safety of the most people possible without a total shutdown of activity, (as happened in parts of China) is a reasonable approach.

I think of my young friend Laila Anderson who is just getting to the point where she is able to fight off disease with her new bone marrow. She's undergoing a series of shots every month for the next year just so her immune system is something close to what most of us have. I also think of my friend Scott Cummings who has been undergoing treatment for throat cancer. Chemo and radiation puts him at high risk for any sort of potentially fatal communicable disease. If the current measures weren't put in place, these two extremely special people, and others close to you, would be put in deadly jeopardy. Just about anybody over 60 is also more of a target for this thing too. Would you really like to see your mom, dad, or grandparent have to go to battle with COVID-19?

What about the healthcare industry and our first-responders? If the virus were to spread close to the way it has in other countries the people and facilities in healthcare would be swamped and put in an impossible place to take care of regular patients, emergency business, and the flood of coronavirus patients. Who would want to show up at a hospital for an emergency and not be able to be treated? First-responders, doctors, nurses and everyone else in the healthcare industry would also be at risk because of the shortage of protective gear.

Some among us need to give it some serious thought before posting some  knee-jerk "This is crazy so our leaders are stupid" comment.  Would you, if you were an elected official, really put thousands, or millions, of your fellow citizens at risk just to be able to say that you knew better than the disease experts on how many people this bug could potentially kill? I hope not.

God bless us all, stay safe, and let's take some of this time to think positively and re-examine values.

Addendum- I also see people trying to compare this event to other diseases to imply we're overreacting to it. Cancer kills so many people...flu kills so many people...diabetes kills so many people..etc. Why aren't we freaking out about those things? They ask...Why aren't we throwing billions of dollars at them? Am I wrong when I say we are already familiar with those other things and doing the best we can? We are NOT familiar with the coronavirus...and we don't know how many of us it can kill. We also have no cure for this new bug and don't know how long it can hang on. The other problems we have been dealing with for some time and know their capabilities. We may, or may not, be able to treat them effectively. But at least we don't have the unknown associated with them. COVID-19 is a new and different threat...it's that simple.