Tantum Ergo<\/em> in the church\u2019s choir loft, to say nothing of dining out at your beloved steakhouse and then working off those calories the next day indoors at the gym.<\/p>\nThe news has been particularly demoralizing coming as it has during the holiday season, with a dire warning against traveling by car, train or plane to gather with relatives, and it\u2019s demoralizing because of how the disease is spreading, which, when you finally get down to it, is largely due to arrogance, rumor, misinformation and ignorance.<\/p>\n
The attempted remedy of a large-scale shutdown in March worked to a certain promising extent, and surely would have worked to a larger degree were it not for the fact that many people figured, as the numbers decreased, that the worst was over and that we should hurry up and open restaurants and bars and businesses. And, so, we did to a certain degree. Parklets sprang up on the city\u2019s restaurant rows for outdoor dining. People traveled and congregated, though with warnings about the consequences of doing so, and some went back to work.<\/p>\n
People were relatively, cautiously, happy for a bit, and now here we are, backsliding perilously close to the beginning, with restaurants closed, businesses shuttered save for markets and large retail stores and home improvement centers, and the COVID numbers are truly staggering.<\/p>\n
Dr. Brian Monahan, attending physician for Congress and the Supreme Court of the United States, reckoned back in March that the virus would go away after anywhere from 700,000 to 1.5 million people in the US became infected with COVID, and now here we are with 14.8 million cases in the country, and 1.37 million in California alone and COVID hasn\u2019t gone away\u2014at all.<\/p>\n
Discussion and disagreements regarding the disease basically involves politics vs. science vs. business, and in terms of the public\u2019s acceptance of Newsom\u2019s mandate, politics and business have trumped science.<\/p>\n
In politics, the business of doing the minimum\u2014wearing masks and observing social distancing\u2014it\u2019s more or less been accepted along party lines, with thousands continuing to appear free of masks at Trump rallies and marching and congregating in defense of their \u201cliberties,\u201d the most precious of which appears to be the right to eat at restaurants. Many still, unbelievably, consider COVID to be a hoax and if \u201csheeple\u201d continue to abide by state mandates, can their right to bear, or even own, arms be far behind?<\/p>\n
Business is a more precarious issue in that unemployment is rising more or less along with COVID rates and owners and employees are protesting to be allowed to reopen, because (and here comes some misinformation), after all, COVID is no more deadly than the seasonal flu and the survival rate hovers somewhere near 99%. That\u2019s nowhere near serious enough, some claim, to warrant the closure of shops and services.<\/p>\n
The 1% death rate that some opponents to the stay-home mandate employ in argument for a reopening, is both small and large\u2013and generally inaccurate. Small, because, well it is small; large, because it\u2019s also a lot; inaccurate because in California right now the death rate is closer to 1.45%, and it\u2019s 1.91% in the US, but let\u2019s go with 1% which, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, makes it about 10 times more lethal than seasonal flu, and, further, when you scale it out to 329 million people in the US, even the wobbliest of math students can see it pencils out to 3.29 million lives. At 1%. And it\u2019s more than 1%.<\/p>\n
So, stay home, because science recommends it. Vaccines should come soon, avail yourself of them because science says to. Will sacrifices have to be made? Yes, sacrifices that Americans aren\u2019t used to, and against which many will continue to bristle and protest.<\/p>\n
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the three unalienable rights which the Declaration of Independence says have been given to all humans by their creator, and which governments are created to protect. We\u2019re at a sad time when all three can\u2019t be granted or enjoyed equally. And the greatest and most important of the three rights right now is life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Discussion and disagreements regarding the disease basically involves politics vs. science vs. business, and in terms of the public\u2019s acceptance of Newsom\u2019s mandate, politics and business have trumped science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":208,"featured_media":1088,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"newspack_sponsor_sponsorship_scope":"","newspack_sponsor_native_byline_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_native_category_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_style":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_placement":"inherit","inline_featured_image":false,"newspack_ads_suppress_ads":false,"newspack_popups_has_disabled_popups":"","_":"","_author_alias":"","cap-aim":"","cap-description":"","cap-display_name":"","cap-first_name":"","cap-jabber":"","cap-last_name":"","cap-linked_account":"","cap-newspack_employer":"","cap-newspack_job_title":"","cap-newspack_phone_number":"","cap-newspack_role":"","cap-user_email":"","cap-user_login":"","cap-website":"","cap-yahooim":"","newspack_article_summary":"","newspack_email_html":"","newspack_email_type":"","newspack_featured_image_position":"","newspack_hide_page_title":"","newspack_hide_updated_date":false,"newspack_post_subtitle":"","newspack_show_share_buttons":"","newspack_sponsor_byline_prefix":"","newspack_sponsor_disclaimer_override":"","newspack_sponsor_flag_override":"","newspack_sponsor_only_direct":"","newspack_sponsor_url":"","newspack_article_summary_title":"Overview:","newspack_show_updated_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[75,20],"newspack_spnsrs_tax":[],"coauthors":[22],"class_list":["post-168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","tag-covid-19","tag-tim-grobaty","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/208"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168"},{"taxonomy":"newspack_spnsrs_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newspack_spnsrs_tax?post=168"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}