Dear Board of Health: You have now voted to recommend a curfew. One wonders if we will need “proper authorization” to go out after hours. As I noted in my last missive, Papers, please! sounds so much more exotic in the original German.
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Regardless, now this goes to the Aldermen who, in full rubber-stamp mode, will doubtless intone SCIENCE! with prayerful reverence and hand it to the Mayor, who will solemnly chant “We’re doing something!” and “We’re all in this together!” and enact it. All that’s missing is the sacrifice on the Altar of Bold Action. Don’t worry, though, that will happen. Everything that happens to Nashua’s businesses next will then proceed as foreseen.
Despite pleas from businesses that are about to go under as our economy staggers and state after state in America witnesses businesses dying in pandemic numbers (you see what I did there?), you have enacted an economic body blow to the Nashua area.
Consider that New York and New Jersey both have seen 1/3 of small businesses fail. A similar statistic exists for just south in Massachusetts.
Across the country, over 100,000 businesses are now done. Gone. Kaput. Metaphorically, the bodies corporate are stacked high as smoke billows from the edict pyres lit to appease the Covid gods. Except, of course, the actual body count will mount too – and not just from the virus. Business owners are considering suicide in astonishing numbers over this.
Never mind the isolation. These deferred medical treatments subservient to Covid are costing lives too. And let’s not devalue the impact on our children. Imagine being the parents of one of the witnesses to this kid killing himself in a zoom class and having to explain it & comfort their child over a classmate’s suicide.
But you pay no price, do you, except – perhaps – the loss of a cherished eatery? Nor do I imagine you’ve missed a single paycheck, nor have the aldermen, nor has Hizzoner Himself. It’s good to be on the government clock.
All the worshipping of other countries’ handling of the virus – as a weapon to attack Trump and the 300,000 dead-with-not-of-covid (cough cough bullsh*t, see In Colorado, They’re Counting Gun Shot Fatalities as COVID Deaths) cited as examples of his mismanagement – is for naught. Across the world, cases are skyrocketing; look at Europe.
Germany is heading for another lockdown despite what many have previously praised as the “masterful” handling of the situation by Frau Merkel. A friend relates how his contact in the Netherlands cannot go out except for four reasons: food, doctor, dentist, or hospital. Israel, a country that has locked down twice and had a harsh-penalty mask mandate since March, is staring an imminent third lockdown in the face. Touted as examples of how Trump should have handled it, Japan and South Korea are no longer exemplars of what “should have been done.”
Let us compare & contrast, as an aside, the frantic warnings about using HCQ after Trump recommended it, with the rather meek nevermind from the AMA now – rather conveniently, after untold numbers have died that could have been helped by the Zelenko Protocol.
Early HCQ treatment works.
All done to hurt Trump’s election chances because Orange Man Bad, and damaging him by letting people die was more important than saving lives (let’s not even bring in the dead from five Democrat governors putting Covid patients into nursing homes). Meanwhile, other drugs are also proving effective, as stated in this heart-rending testimony:
But we understand. “Something must be done!” And thinking people understand the calculus you are making. Not the medical calculus, nor the epidemiological calculus. The political calculus.
If it is axiomatic that regardless of masks, regardless of lockdowns, regardless of anything human hubris believes will help, A virus will do what a virus will do: spread, then what will happen with the virus is what happens regardless of your action: contagion and regrettable deaths from a disease that we now have indications that was in America before January 2020. Certainly well before China told the world community.
So what is this calculus? Simple. If you take no action, if you help protect those truly vulnerable people but otherwise, let us live our lives, people will die. And the effects on your careers, standing, appointments, and political prestige is clear: you will be blamed for having taken no action. The fingers will point directly at you.
You have passed the mask mandate, as have myriad other places – and some far harsher than here. One town in Colorado has up to a year in jail for not wearing a mask! (I shouldn’t give you ideas.) One wonders – I can’t find it, perhaps some intrepid reader can – but how is Englewood, Colorado doing these days? A “Gentleman’s $1 bet” says they also see a new wave of cases.
Speaking of the mask mandate and what I can only assume will be the curfew, what are the end conditions? If A, and perhaps, B, and C conditions are satisfied, the curfew can fall. The same for the mask mandate. To me, the mere fact that you don’t publicly state these conditions means that, in the most innocent explanation, you’re Keystone Kops trying to look effective without any real clue what to do aside from the need to be seen doing something.
If, however, you do something and take “bold action,”… the virus will still spread, people will still catch it, but now – having set the blame-game up property – the blame cannot be on you, but on us mere hoi polloi for acting recklessly and violating the beneficent and wise directives with which you have blessed us. Of course, we must have violated the edicts, or people would not be catching it. The blame is therefore not upon your Philosopher-King selves but us.
Thus, in the inevitable rises in cases, and infections, with a parallel rise in deaths, you come up smelling like angels even as both businesses and people die regardless. And power, once the precedent is set, has been seized from The People by the government. What’s next, robots being deployed to enforce social distancing? Sci-fi? Not.
