A lot of politicians are fucking idiots, and it shows.

I'm sure you've all been mostly stuck in your houses for what feels like far too long by now. So you know full well everything that has been shut down in various areas.

The thing is though, that all of those things don't really need to be.

Someone can easily enough take a walk without catching corona magically from the wind. Unless they're gonna claim Corona is in the wind now? You aren't gonna catch it magically from maintaining appropriate distance at a beach or a restaurant even.

That's right, I said a restaurant. Grab your pitch forks and crosses. I don't think that you should necessarily shut down all restaurants. Because some people can't cook, and maybe wanna go out. And a restaurant operating at half capacity doesn't really expose more than 2 or 3 people if someone sick comes in. Maybe if they openly sneeze all over the place they might get a half dozen. Maybe if a sick worker is in they might expose some people.

Not if they all wore masks though.

Oh wait, they're spreading that lie about how masks should only be worn by sick people though. Because they don't have proper production.

But see, if we had normalized their use a long time ago, and people bought them to use for the family every time a family member was sick, then everyone would have them.

Shocker, but masks really do lower your risk of infection.

Even a fuckin scarf lowers your risk.

Even if they don't actually protect you from direct inhalation, due to virus particles being all small and all, they limit the amount you touch your mouth.

So really, we all should be wearing something over our face and some eye protection when we go out. Except we don't have enough production for even the healthcare providers, and hospitals haven't even kept enough on hand, so we're all fucked.

Back to the restaurants. The exposure that one person might cause in a restaurant is really minimal. Your close contact, when you're social distancing properly, should really only be with a server, who really should be wearing a mask, if we even had enough.

The truth of the matter though is that we don't have enough masks, and we really can't deal with anyone getting sick. Hospitals are already nearly at capacity on a good day. We're basically all fucked.

Same thing with a beach. Early in the pandemic some stupid kids who didn't get the gravity of the situation, after months of the news not getting the gravity of the situation, and broadcasting it for everyone, wanted to have fun, and did the same thing kids do every year, and whenever they can, tried to have fun. Just so happens that was on a beach with some other kids.

If they were keeping responsible distance, they should have been able to lay in the sun and talk and jump in the waves. I doubt that the exposure of a few people who were asymptomatic to some salt water would suddenly infect everyone there.

So, rather than the cops coming in, and dispersing the crowds, like they rain down on any parade at any other time of the year, they closed all of the beaches.

I would like to remind you that while the news was shitting on kids partying at the beach, there were still people going to bars, and country clubs, and golf courses, and all manner of other places.

Really it was just another reason to shit on young people having fun.

There is a risk with all sorts of activities. Just like there's a risk with visiting a friend or a relative or talking to a neighbor. But there's also something key to America that we are supposed to have, that we really lost a long time ago. Freedom.

It's one thing for a government to issue directives to social distance and for people to be more responsible, and it's another thing entirely for them to declare that everyone shut down all business and stay in their houses.

There is a massive risk. And maybe we would all be safer in our houses. Or maybe we'll be at higher risk being stuck in our houses all day, unable to exercise, with recirculating air, just waiting for one of the people that does go our for a food run or some other errand to come back sick, and infect the whole house.

See, exercise raises our immunity. So does getting outside. Staying inside all day has it's issues. If we all stay on the couch watching TV all day, we'll all be ripe for the picking when corona comes our way.

We need to be able to still get out there. We just need to keep our distance. We need to still take walks and ride bikes, responsibly. We need to still be able to have a little bit of fun, responsibly. The risk of sitting at a table quite a few feet away from anyone else is probably lower than it is going to a store. It's probably lower than going to a gathering of 10 people or less. It's definitely lower than the risk when they were still putting on political rallies. It's lower than all of those people standing with the president and others and shaking hands.

Now that you're probably freaking out and convinced that I'm not taking this seriously, lets talk about other things that don't make you safer.

Curfews don't do jack shit. You aren't going to magically catch Corona after midnight. If anything, it forces people to get more done earlier, raising their risk.

Closing the doors of shops early likewise just puts people at greater risk. Keep the shops open longer, not shorter hours, and ensure that carts are wiped down, and the number of people inside at any one time are minimal.

There are things that you won't deem to be "essential" that others will. A hardware store is absolutely essential. Where do you think most people got their N95 masks? Where do you think they'll get the boards to board up their windows if shit hits the fan and people start looting? What do you expect them to do if something breaks and they gotta fix it? Like their locks. Or if they need any of hundreds of things you find at a hardware store that you might just need in a pandemic.

There are local governments actually turning off the utilities of shops they don't deem essential.

Who the fuck decides that?

Lets say you don't deem some book store to be essential. But it turns out that's not just any book store, but a magick shop, and they actually have things like natural hand sanitizer and medical supplies that you would probably scoff at because you are too stuck in your ways to realize they have real use.

All of this I'm saying not because it's not a good idea to shut down some of these places. Yeah, maybe it is for the best. Maybe a lot of different places should shut down.

Or maybe we just need to get people to realize how they need to act responsibly and we don't have to go under martial law to lower the risk of infection.

Or maybe this wouldn't be an issue at all if we had fixed the healthcare industry years ago when we knew we should have. Then we wouldn't be facing possibly millions of deaths because some kids wanted to have a summer vacation and didn't realize their summer vacation was preempted by the apocalypse.

_{Business Man Podium Silhouette by GDJ 2015-07-04 02:43:42 (source)
Used under Public Domain CC0 1.0 License}