About Ending Self-Isolation
Give you liberty or give you death. It should acceptable to lose 2% of schoolchildren in order to keep the economy ‘open’. The elder generation should be happy to die for the financial welfare of the younger generations. The maladaptation of the first sentence would make Patrick Henry cringe. Don’t believe me? Read his writings. And remember that he was offering no one else’s life in that speech but his own.
Whose lives are the people saying these awful sentences offering? Not theirs. The heinous moral bankruptcy of the other two sentences belongs in an archive that includes most of the Marquis de Sade’s essays, Mengele’s research and Jeffrey Dahmer’s statements about how satisfying it was to orgasm as his ‘partner’ gasped his last breath.
But, fine. It's inevitable that people will get tired of this, and since they can't argue with a virus, some are yelling at the rest of the multicellular - or even just cellular, since a virus isn't even a cell - organisms.
You want to stop the practice best proven to save a large population and practice ‘liberty’. This isn’t political, it’s a pursuit of free will, and quite human. Cain exercised free will when he murdered his brother. Everyone since then has as much right as he did to commit a dreadful, dreadful crime. Keep in mind every criminal has the same right that he did to be made to pay for a crime.
But at least, please do this thing with some forethought. There are people who have done what you want to do because their vocations and skills were needed to save the rest of us, even your narcissistic hide. Know that medical people didn’t just get up, get dressed and go to work without a plan:
1. We made sure we have a will. Of course, you should already have one if you have a spouse or kids. If you don’t, we can address your idiocy later, but NOW make a will, or update the one you have. Do it now, before you get too deep in fever, coughing and diarrhea to be able to think. Even if you have no money, there’s a use for this, particularly regarding plan #2:
2. We decided who will take care of our families, ESPECIALLY OUR KIDS, when we get sick, if we go to the hospital of if we die (this last is where the will comes in, so your kids don’t wind up in foster care). Decide who will look after the welfare of your elderly relatives. Formalize this before you walk out that door, make the agreement with the chosen adoptive parents and PUT IT ON PAPER, that is, in a will.
And don’t count on your spouse to be that person. If one person in the house falls ill, there’s a strong likelihood others will, too. My family learned this the hard way from the Swine Flu. All three of us, including our school-age son, were sick at the same time. The day that neither my husband nor I could stand up to check on The Boy, much less heat up soup for him, was one of the most frightening days in my life.
3. We made living wills. Decide whether you want prolonged life support if there’s so much lung or brain damage that your body will never again breathe on its own. Keep in mind that temporary problems aren’t part of this. Designate a decision-maker for times when you will be too sick to make decisions yourself. Someone needs to give consent for life-saving central lines and so forth. Talk to that person about your wishes before you put their name on your living will. You can find a one-page document you can print out from lots of websites.
4. We have a serious quarantine plan in place. If you realize you’ve been exposed to someone with the virus (as we are at work), or you develop symptoms yourself, you MUST separate yourself from everyone in the house. And six feet isn’t enough. Stay in a room no one enters but you. Use a bathroom no one else does. DO NOT use the kitchen. Soap is your weapon, because it denatures the virus very well. Your sheets and clothes must be washed separately from everyone else’s. Health care workers undress and put their clothes in the laundry as they enter the house, and they leave their shoes in the garage. Clean your space and bathroom every day, including the outside of the door. Sadly, you’ll have to be the one to do this, which is no big hassle if you’re not sick yet, but even if you are, no one else should do this for you. Someone must cook for you and leave it outside your door. Disposable dinnerware is good, here, and throw the trash out every day. Otherwise, the smart/nice thing to do is wash them yourself (soap, again!) in the bathroom no one else uses before you put them outside the door for someone to collect. Your helpers should wear gloves to do this. If you open your door or have to leave the room, wear a mask. Keep your germs to yourself. Make a plan about when your family will know to call an ambulance.
DO NOT TOUCH ANYONE.
If you’ve been exposed and remain asymptomatic after two weeks of quarantine, you can join the rest of the family. If you get sick, try, try to get a COVID-19 test. Read the CDC webpage or the information page from your state health department or even local hospital about what symptoms to expect and what recovery will be like. We’ve thought that if a person stays without fever for 72 hours without Tylenol or the like, then they aren’t infectious any more. There’s new evidence that this isn’t true. Get re-tested.
If you don’t have the living space to take these precautions when you get sick, figure out something else now, before you infect the whole household.
5. Use the damn masks and gloves when you go out. Without them, you don’t look brave, you don’t look like an individual, you look like a fool. A malicious one. In this story, Jason Voorhees would be the one NOT wearing a mask.
6. If you get sick and infect someone else who gets sicker than you did or dies, and you feel guilty about that, you should. You could have prevented it and willfully chose to endanger others. The mark of Cain will be yours. And if your ‘liberty’ gets your child sick and that child passes it on to someone else with resulting tragedy, realize that at some point, your child will figure out that he/she killed Grandma. Ask yourself - and really think about this - is that how you want to raise your kids?
Another thing to think about: no matter what, the aftermath of this mess will be financial hardship the world over. And societies like ours and governments (at least governments of countries that aren’t ours) will find ways to help others through it. There will be help. There are people who do that, even if you’re not one of them. There will be economic mitigations to help everyone get back on track.
If people don’t participate in helping to control the pandemic, there will still be financial hardship, with many more dead people. There are no ways to bring people back from the dead. Lost money can be re-earned. Lost lives stay lost. Do you want to be part of a permanent solution to a temporary problem?
If you’re volunteering to sacrifice lives in order to save some people some money, please, make it your own.