I’m wondering what the death toll has to get to for people to start caring. 100? 1000? 100,000?
How close to home does it have to be for you to care?
When it killed the Chinese, no one batted an eye. While it’s killing the Italians, we don’t care. When it’s just a few Americans in Washington state, we aren’t concerned. When it’s next door to you, will you start to worry? When it’s your grandmother, will you write it off because it’s only killing the elderly?
One of my favorite people on this planet is older than 80 and my friends that repeatedly say it’s just the elderly tell her over and over again that she doesn’t matter, when she’s five times the person that you could ever hope to be.
But the truth is, this doesn’t just threaten people over 80, It threatens people in their 40s with asthma that have 10 year olds to raise. The elderly and people with respiratory issues are just more threatened.
You as a healthy 25 year old, can get sick and your immune system could fail you.
And if you keep saying that a 3% death rate is low, then you have a very poor understanding of percentages. 3% is one out of every 30 people. One out of every 30 people will die just because they shook hands with someone already infected or got coughed on. That is statistically, one person in every family.
When Red River allowed 500 people to dance on Saturday, if one of those people was infected, they just killed statistically 17 people. And the reason only 17 of those people will die is under the assumption that the other people that would survive under care would get care. If this allowed to get out of control many more than 17 will die because our hospitals simply don’t have the capacity to take care of the others.
Maybe this is just a conspiracy and we find out in the future. We can deal with that and be angry about that in the future when we are all still alive.
Maybe the media is causing hysteria, and if that’s true we can deal with that later too, when we are certain this virus isn’t as bad as we think it is right now.
Maybe it’s barely worse than the flu or equal to the flu. But the thing is, when the flu first started to emerge in modern society, it decimated us. The flu is actually pretty bad. Virus’ don’t have a cure once you get them, you just have to treat symptoms.
In two months I want to be bowing to everyone saying that we overreacted because the death toll stayed low. I want time to pass and us to realize this virus was nothing. I want to be really wrong here. I want to laugh at red river with all of my friends young, old, healthy or immune compromised to be teasing me that I freaked out for no reason. I want the morgues and the cemeteries to stay empty. I want everyone to be around so we can clean up the economy after. Because that can be repaired but once loved ones are lost, there’s nothing we can do. We wont be able to go to funerals together or console each other.
They will just be lost forever.
And we will have to continue to hide alone.
Please prove me wrong. Fight your desire to be rebellious and the fear you feel about being alone so that we can be together later.
I am not in the media, I am not part of any conspiracy, and I’m not saying that those aren’t possible but the risk that this virus is real and deadly is there too. If you aren’t considering that the virus is real and could not only kill you and someone you love, then you are setting up our country for a heartbreak as bad or worse then Italy.
Please, prove me wrong. I’d rather be wrong and us be alive together later.
Closed System 