I am very aware of the toll that quarantine is taking on people, both financial and psychological. One of my dearest friends has pretty much given her life over to babysitting her granddaughter every school day - attending virtual classes with her, as the child’s mother is in the other room being a virtual school counselor - to dozens of kids with special needs, who are also isolated at home with (or maybe without) parents distracted by other obligations. This is taking a serious toll on Pam, and her relationships with her family. So many kids don’t have a grandmother who can just drop everything to be a full-time nanny. This can only be much tougher for them - and a serious setback to the children’s education.
We are ALL ready for this to be over. I don’t compare my sacrifice to that of others, but I was supposed to be in Europe for two months this spring, taking the unstructured vacation I should have taken when I was nineteen. I will not be hosting my family’s Thanksgiving dinner this year - which is the first time in almost a decade. Since I live alone, and don’t see my family that often that means a great deal to me each year - but so does the safety of my loved ones. We also lost our brother this spring, and have not been able to gather to commemorate him. Compared to what Pam, her daughter and grand-daughter, and your grand-children are facing, my story is inconsequential - but still worth sharing.
Worldwide, this plague is taking a toll, both where restrictions are stric, as well as where they are lax. In most of Europe, they imposed strict quarantine measures in the early spring, and held this disease at bay for months. But isolation was exhausting for them, and they eased the restrictions, or people started violating them, and now their infection rate comes close to ours.
My comment about mass murder wasn’t intended to suggest motivation. But the reality is that large-scale infections and deaths are the inevitable result of loosening restrictions when there is no other way of limiting infection rates. The concept of ‘herd-immunity’ is only humane when it is achieved through vaccination. There is no way of truly isolating vulnerable populations as a deadly disease runs its course through the general population. Because we don’t have a national approach to handling this, each state has run it as they choose. The results speak for themselves.
To complicate matters, this disease seems to be mutating in such a way that surviving it may only afford a person a brief period of partial immunity … which means that letting it run its course through the population would not result in herd immunity anyway. It is to be hoped that researchers will develop a vaccine with broad enough effect that the immune response will be durable for a long period of time.
Minority viewpoints DO need to be heard. And the consequences of choices need to be weighed against one another, so the decision can be informed. Unfortunately, a pandemic is not a place where each family should be allowed to decide for themselves how to approach it.
I wish I had assurance that if we all just hunkered down for a few more months, this would go away … or, alternately, that if we just let it run its course, it would soon be over with. The reality is that nobody knows … not you or me, not Anthony Fauci, and the majority of the world's epidemiologists, and not those who promote the Great Barrington Declaration.
