Bite the Bullet

While much of the rest of the world is slowly and cautiously reopening, the US seems doomed to just accept high infection and death rates while people who don't have a choice (e.g. "essential" workers, students, teachers) are forced to go about their daily lives.

No progress is going to be made until people accept that whatever you were doing before, you just can't now. It's going to be dramatically different from now on, and maybe someday it will get back to something like the way it was before, but it will never be the same.

I'm thinking now that nothing will change until so many people have gotten sick and either died or have lasting damage; the healthcare system is stretched so thin that we don't have the people or supplies to deal with anything anymore; and the economy is so wrecked from businesses shutting down, supply chain and staffing issues, and just trying to operate without enough willing patrons (because of the aforementioned death and suffering); that people will be willing to finally listen, bite the bullet, truly shut down everything for a couple months, and make a dent in this thing through testing and real contact tracing and isolation of the sick and exposed. Ok, you might be giving up your "freedoms" for a couple weeks while you go into quarantine, but how much freedom do you really have right now?

Of course, it's not just the US - the WHO says "too many countries are headed in the wrong direction." But most of them aren't as dramatically wrong as the US. For a while I was thinking, "Maybe everyone who's going to get sick will get sick, and then eventually things will start getting better. But that probably wouldn't even happen because people's antibodies will wear off and they'll get infected all over again.

Also, we need to stop with the "Until there's a vaccine" or "Once there's a vaccine" comments. The existence of an effective vaccine is not going to clean up the world overnight. And the worse we let things get now, the harder it's going to be whenever a vaccine does become available.

...Just some thoughts that have been on my mind the past few days...