Well, here we are in month four of our pandemic, and everyone is asking the same question: what's the end game? We have politicians and health care professionals on TV every day telling us to physically distance and wear a mask, but to what end?
There are only two ways out of this. The first is to do what we are doing and wait for a cure. The experts predict this will take at least two years. Businesses cannot continue to open and then close again because an employee/customer has symptoms. Movie theatres cannot make profits with customers six feet apart. Two years from now, there will not be any businesses except grocery stores left. The majority of Canadians will be out of work, leaving no one to pay the interest on this crushing debt. Even if we could wipe out every case in Canada, are we sealing our borders to keep it that way? We have Americans crossing our "supposed closed borders" saying they are traveling to Alaska, and vacationing in Banff instead.
If every international visitor must quarantine for two weeks (and who's monitoring that?) no one will be coming. No airline industry. No tourist industry. No economy. No future. They are talking about a second wave, when in fact the first wave will never end, it's just going to get worse. How many people are dying from not getting needed operations and treatments right now? No one's talking about that.
I don't know if we can survive the way we are going. The cure is worse than the disease. This is not even a disease, it's a virus. This is not the black plague. This is simply nature trying to trim the herd because the population is out of control. Nature is just trying to get back a little balance, I mean who knew that the sky above India was blue?
People not able to attend funerals. Weddings cancelled. No graduations and proms. No sports events. No concerts. No festivals. No travel. All the things that make life worth living are gone. Again I ask, to what end?
Children are not getting sick. Young people and anyone else who is healthy that contracts this, gets better. (This includes several people over 100). So why are we treating this like the black plague? People over 80 are dying from this – they are the ones who should be isolated. I am almost 60 but would rather get COVID-19 than go on not being able to live life.
I know many people who against all good advice smoked, drank and put gravy on everything else. That was a choice. If you have substituted fast food burgers for vegetables for the last twenty years, you should be scared, but why should the rest of us suffer? Actions have consequences. People are putting so much sanitizer on that we will have no immunity to anything left and the next flu bug will kill us all. We need to let this run its course. The majority of us want to live life. It's a free country, you are free to lock yourself away and order your groceries online. Personally I am sick of wearing a mask and feeling like I'm an extra in a Purge movie.
The problem is that collectively we have spent trillions to date, and no one wants to admit it didn't work. How much more do we spend before we stop throwing good money after bad?
If you believe that the answer is to wait for a cure, what's the plan for the next virus – same thing?
Tim Andrew
St. Albert
