The Comment Word Mess May Not Like...

First of all, will everyone please read Jim Babka's post in its entirety, at his site, to show respect:

https://www.theadvocates.org/2020/05/ten-principles-of-the-reopening/

And you might even feel moved to send him money; that was an excellent post.

After reading it, if you read the comments, you might see a comment from a panic-prone person who frets that you might have coronavirus and not know it....just as you probably do have a lot of other virus, fungus, and bacterial infections that you don't know or care about, but that could easily kill a medically fragile person. That's why you might be advised to stay out of the intensive care unit or to shower and put on a paper mask and coverall before going in.

I typed this comment to him. Wordmess, er, Press, didn't like it. On consideration that may be because it turned out long enough to be a blog post. So the blog is where it ought to be. So here it is, edited to adjust to the fact that Blogspot offers italics and Wordmess comments don't.

"
@MikeHihn: As a health care practitioner in a city with a high rate of HIV, I've known for a long time that all of us normal healthy people are great big bundles of disease culture that can kill a severely immune-compromised person. My hesitation to work with an AIDS patient would be concern that I might make them sicker. Yet for years my professional code of ethics stated that we can warn AIDS patients, and take steps to protect them, but it's their responsibility to stay away from all of us "healthy" immune carriers of rhinovirus, staphylococcus, streptococcus, Epstein-Barr Virus, Aspergillus fungus (you knew that an AIDS patient's body will grow mildew, right?), and more--more than anybody's ever even listed.

I don't think that's changed.

For me and for most active "healthy" people, all the evidence indicates that COVID-19 is going to be just another chest cold that I probably won't notice when I have it. One more virus in an abundant existing supply. We'll get it, we'll spread it, and we'll think nothing of it because, like all the staph and strep and EBV we've been carrying around, it'll do us no harm. COVID has been thought to be related to SARS. There was a minor panic over the SARS virus too. What happened? SARS wasn't all that deadly, either.

For some people, it's not that COVID is going to be worse than rhinovirus; it's that rhinovirus could still kill them, too. Those people know who they are. Our society has needed to build more awareness of them and more ways they can engage with other people, non-suicidally, for a long time. Forcing everyone to live in a bogus simulation of their lives is not my idea of a good way to start building that, but it's a way.

I don't think we need a lockdown. I do think we have long needed a few tweaks, like:

* Public transportation...with separate compartments, no plopping down and rubbing knees and elbows with strangers.

* More work from home in more spacious offices. Absolutely no barging up behind co-workers to read over their shoulders, no matter how low their status may be, and no breathing down people's necks, even if that seems like the easiest way to "monitor" or "supervise." (I let a client stand behind me while dictating. I picked up her "little summer cold." I shared it with my husband. He shared it with a fragile child who developed pneumonia next week and died that fall. Yes, we healthy adults do  need social distancing.)

* Social etiquette that respects people's personal space. For instance, remembering that church is a place to worship God, not a place to run up and grab casual acquaintances while coughing in their faces.

But it's not true that COVID is so much worse than SARS or swine flu or Zika or Ebola or H1N1 or any of the other virus panics that it justifies totalitarianism. Even more than we need to think about ways to integrate medically fragile people into polite society, I think we need to oppose the dictatorship people are trying to build on the COVID panic.
"