A person can have COVID-19, show no symptoms and still infect others. Masks don’t protect the wearer against COVID-19; they stop wearers from spreading COVID-19.
Marty Causer and Glenn Thompson are doing what they can in this crisis …for businesses, nothing for people. With no mass testing hereabouts, you’d think they‘d help those who elected them.
The infection rate here is low. Testing can help keep it that way. Without testing there is no way to tell who is infected, asymptomatic and contagious. This makes wearing masks even more crucial.
Wearing masks, staying home and social distancing are not fearful behaviors. They do not make anyone weak, scared, stupid or controlled. Wearing a mask can make you look funny. It’s inconvenient. That’s nothing compared to infecting someone’s child, father, mother, spouse, grandparent, aunt or uncle. Whose self-centeredness and personal convenience is worth leaving others to suffocate on a respirator, dying alone, no family allowed at their bedside? If it’s not in your nature to commit murder, wear a mask.
There’s a saying, “Your rights end where my nose begins.” COVID-19 is not about civil rights, it’s about everybody’s health. Our rights end at the point where exercising them endangers other peoples’ health and safety. Reasonably intelligent people possessing moral integrity do not find this difficult to understand.
As the country reopens, the U.S. death toll is approaching 84,000 and not slowing down. Willful ignorance of COVID-19 deniers will run up the body count. Too bad the U.S. no longer has a Pandemic Response Team.
Our educational system has failed. COVID-19 deniers don’t understand science and can’t distinguish civil rights from public health. Believing harebrained internet conspiracies, some feel their noncompliance lack of consideration for others makes them tough, bad-to-the-bone super-patriots. Toughness and ignorance are not mutually exclusive. Ignorance can be fatal to self and others.
Reports of COVID-19 infecting the White House makes me think we are living Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.”
H.L. Menken said, “The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.”
Eugene Johnson, Hazel Hurst
