"When and how to reopen has become a matter of intense debate around the world, perhaps no more so than in the United States,” says The Associated Press. "Some states there have started lifting their coronavirus restrictions piecemeal and according to their own, often arbitrary, timetables, leaving Americans to make their own decisions about what they should and should not do to protect their health, their livelihoods and their neighbors."
“There will never be a perfect amount of protection,” says Josh Santarpia, a microbiology expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center who's studying the coronavirus. “It’s a personal risk assessment. Everybody has to decide, person by person, what risk they’re willing to tolerate.”
An article in The Atlantic focusing on the reopening in Europe says, "millions of people will have to make millions of small and large decisions about how to go about their daily life — balancing their own risk tolerance, mental health, and need for income.”
“It’s really a terrible moral choice,” says Boris Cyrulnik, a French psychologist and neurologist. “Freedom will lead to death, while constriction and denying people their freedom will stave off death but will bring economic ruin.”
I readily confess that I find this anxiety-producing.
There still is so much we don’t know about this virus. Asymptomatic transmission. The possibility that recovered patients can catch it again. Atypical symptoms and dangers such as blood clots and low oxygen levels.
Then there’s the complication that this medical issue has become politicized.
As you know, I write this blog because I’m not a fan of gaping unknowns. But every decision we make in this life is based on uncertainty. In this case, the uncertainties are just greater and the stakes higher.
Let’s have compassion for each other as we do the best we can.
This morning, I pass along to you what Christopher Robin told Pooh: “You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”
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