Don’t take this the wrong way, but after the right-wing assholes finally manage to undo the stay-at-home restrictions keeping a whole lot of us safe from the worst effects of the pandemic, I’m not going out to dinner. I’m not going to see a movie, either. I’m not going to go browse the shelves in the bookstore, possibly my favorite pastime. And I’m not even considering the idea of going to the Great Taste of the Midwest, a beer-sampling party so popular, you have to camp overnight on the street outside a liquor store to even hope to have a shot at getting a ticket.
Until there’s a vaccine to protect us against this thing, I won’t be going to a crowded bar, a crowded theater, a crowded stadium, or anywhere crowds gather. I’ll go to work in a crowded office building if I’m forced to, breathing through a respirator all day and touching nothing without latex gloves on my hands, but after work I’ll go straight home and stay there until I have to go to work again.
And to anyone who says this is “living in fear:” There is so much still unknown about this disease, but what we do know is that it’s ten times more contagious than influenza, and you know how much that gets around. And once you get it, it eats your lungs and fills them with fluid, it crashes your kidneys and poisons your blood, it lets you think you’re getting better before it hammers you again, and then it fucks up your immune system so badly that it can re-infect you within months or weeks after you get better. And we’re only just finding out that it clots the blood so you stroke out. Spreading something like that around is so stupid it ought to be a felony.
So when the restrictions are lifted way too early, – and they will be – go hang out at the mall if you want, or go meet your friends at the supper club for dinner. That’s your right, I guess. Maybe you’ll wear a mask, maybe you’ll cough into your sleeve as a token gesture of protecting others, but none of that’s going to protect you in a crowd while there are millions of infected people, most of whom haven’t been tested and many of whom aren’t showing any symptoms of infection.
And then people will start dying in greater numbers again.
I hope I’m wrong. But I don’t believe I will be.
This Is Drivel 