One hundred and seven days ago, on March 25th, the governor of Wisconsin issued stay-home orders. Those of us who could stay home did. For seven weeks. Some states did similar. Other states did pretty much nothing. The point of staying home and isolating ourselves was to reduce the spread of the virus while the government mounted an effective response to keep the spread low when we eventually emerged. This response would involve widespread testing, doing contact tracing on every infected person, and isolation of everyone who tested positive. Once the infection rate is low, you can keep it low by doing these things.
As you may know, the government did not do any of this. Some state governments might have been willing to do so, but they don’t have the resources. Only the federal government could have mounted an effective response, but it did not do so. This, in my estimation, is largely because the 45th president of the United States does not care about anything but his reelection and he thinks–somehow–that ignoring the problem and sending everyone back to work will improve the economy and that this economic upturn will get him reelected.
So now here we are. Restaurant dining rooms are open. Bars are open. There are massive outbreaks happening in many of the sunbelt states and cases are on the rise even here in Wisconsin.
So I guess we’re going to carry on as if there had been an effective national response to the pandemic even though there wasn’t one. And there still isn’t one. And it appears that there will not be one any time soon.
There’s talk of sending kids back to school in the fall.
This. Is. Madness.
We are drifting through an ever-worsening disaster. What will it look like in a few weeks or months? Massive numbers of COVID-19 cases, health care systems overwhelmed, lots more deaths. Some predict we’ll be at 200,000 deaths by October.
Will some states be forced to issue stay-home orders again? Will there be mandatory mask-wearing? Or will we just…let it ride? The strategy adopted by the 45th president of the United States seems to be: pretend it isn’t happening.
But it is happening. I wonder how bad things will get.