Lock down is not enough

Day 73 of coronavirus in France

Day 22 of enforced confinement

Some of you are wondering if the protocol is too strict, while governments are willing to risk bankruptcy to tighten them even more.

How is it, I ask, that a global order self-isolate for fifteen days is not enough to allow this contagion to die? Isn’t that supposed to be the incubation time? None-the-less, world class hospitals are over run, they were never structured to attend to hundreds of patients requiring life support.

Here we are, day 22, everyone projected that the confinement restrictions would loosen over time and instead we are informed that being isolated in our houses is not enough. Leaving the whole world wondering, what will be enough?

If you are not in a metropolitan city, then I don’t imagine that you’ll experience this in the same way. When I lived at Place Saint Michel across from Notre Dame I used to be able to count 200 people walking past my door in five minutes. How do you slow down a contagion that is running rampant in a city where 4.16 million people ride the metro every day? Or at least, they did before they were asked to work from home.

Hundreds of cities have instituted a curfew. (source)

As of yesterday, you may not run two approved essential errands in the same day. There’s a new app for permission slips that you can opt to use rather than printing a paper and signing it each time, but unlike paper, it also keeps track of how often you request authorization. (source)

Starting tomorrow jogging and sports outside your apartment is forbidden in Paris and five departments in the greater Paris area, between 10am and 7pm. (source)

Several mayors are making it mandatory that everyone to wear masks in public during their approved essential errands. (source)

Check every source that anyone quotes. Don’t get your scientific research from a daily newspaper go straight to their sources to read the scholarly articles they were based on, or not.

Did someone tell you that you could only transmit this contagion by physical contact with someone who was sick? The world would welcome such good news, unfortunately that is not how this one works. Entire countries prohibited traditional greetings and touching months ago. (source) Did you know it could live up to 9 days on steel surfaces? (source) But wearing rubber gloves isn’t enough because it lasts for 3 days on plastic so that means you can’t touch the gloves to get them off. (same source) Read science, do the math.

Kristalina Georgieva, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) protecting the health of the world economy, says, “At face value there is a trade-off to make: either save lives or save livelihoods. This is a false dilemma – getting the virus under control is, if anything, a prerequisite to saving livelihoods.” (source)

If you have health and energy volunteer at a hospital. See if they’ll let you, but they probably won’t, because their first priority is that you stay home and stop the spread of the contagion.

unsplash-logoJon Tyson

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.