Containment

When the early reports about Coronavirus came out, I didn’t pay much attention. We traveled to Disney World for a week in those early days and the extent of the thought was that if it were to spread around the world, Disney would be a great place to contract it.

Now, the disease has spread around the world. The CDC and WHO are using the word pandemic, and there’s been more than 100k infections and 5k+ deaths.My area of Texas has only had a few confirmed reports, none that I am aware have come from community spread. Even still, every community activity has shut down. School, our son’s baseball league and scouts. From our very busiest time of year it has become very quiet.

On one hand, this all may seem like an over reaction. No one here has the virus so why shut everything down? But then, places like Italy have shown what happens when you don’t make efforts to contain the spread.

People complain about the inconvenience, the economic impact, etc, etc. These will be the same people who will point to a relatively low death rate when this is all over and say all of this was unnecessary. Not realizing that a low death rate will only happen because of containment efforts.

These are also the people who balk any time someone points out how this situation is a perfect example of why our healthcare and economic system sucks ass. Majority of workers can ill afford to stay home for two weeks. Nor do they have (good) healthcare coverage should they get sick with anything. So there is an economic impact but it has nothing to do with the stock market. It has everything to do with the workers who can’t work from home and have no paid sick leave.

If there’s a bright side to all of this, maybe this will highlight those inadequacies of our current economic system, show how completely incompetent the Trump administration is and rally a push for real change in November. But I’m not going to hold my breath.

All in all, I hope you have your toilet paper.