Jeremy C Kester

I was supposed to make a trip this weekend to pick up family that is spending the summer with us. That trip was postponed. In the age of COVID, said family member had come into direct contact with someone else we know who tested positive for the virus the next day. In fact, said family member is in a household of those in a higher-risk category.

This story isn’t told for any reason to further question the continued mismanagement of everything surrounding this pandemic through a story I am connected to. Well, given that they came into contact the virus, the household all went to get tested. They were all turned away and told to only come back if they had symptoms.

Conversely, in another instance of people I know, a group came into direct contact with another person who tested positive and they were all permitted to be tested immediately.
This all got me thinking as this isn’t only the question of two different groups, but also of two different states in the US: Pennsylvania and Illinois. Both states were listed as stable in a few articles I’ve seen in the last week amid the continued releasing of the economy. It serves to wonder however if this is truly the case in one of those states. How can we be sure?

Reason can be made that the inept leadership and inability to lead with facts continues. Why refuse to test high-risk individuals who came into direct contact except for two reasons: 1) allowing for a confirmed incubation period (which I find difficult located solid data on this) or 2) stacking numbers in favor of showing the state as making headway against the spread of the virus. If it is the first, then such needs to be said, otherwise folks like myself begin to ponder other, more sinister reasons.

My perception as to the path to take rests on a fine line between full release and full quarantine. There’s an aspect of keeping people safe that is undeniable. Even with a 2% death rate, that would mean that over 6 million people could potentially die if in a hypothetical scenario everyone in the country becomes infected. Yet we haven’t even spoken on how there is always an inherent immunity that most biological populations have against varying viruses— in other words, there’s always a percentage of the population who will be perfectly OK in a pandemic through what one could call pure luck. On the full release, there’s the part of me that says that the world should be allowed to continue on as “normal” so long as the governments of the world could be honest to the facts, considering nature is not a soft and fluffy kitten— it has teeth and is always trying to kill us, we’ve just forgotten that.

Needless to say, I have little trust that any government in this world will be honest with the population, especially if it meant them having to admit to their own ineptitude or that it would risk exposing their underlying goals. Individuals can’t do that; how could we expect governments to… meaning that we’ll continue being stuck.