Lots of metaphors around these days. Fire is one of the better ones. Fire spreads; disease spreads. Fire is dangerous; disease is dangerous.
War doesn’t spread the same way, though its devastation does. It’s more targeted. It is man-made.
Nobody says, “Let’s let the fire burn, we can’t shut the economy down because of a little fire.” Good people don’t offer up grandparents in immolation.
The administration’s response to the fire, to the disease, has not been good. It has gotten marginally better, but threatens to get worse again. The response, and the disease. Which is the big problem with letting a big-time loser direct the fire department. Not good.
Places that do not heed the basic rule of fire safety—deprive it of fuel—will be scorched worse than those places that do. For a disease, human contact is spreading the embers to new fuel.
With developed diseases, like influenza, we have vaccines. That’s a controlled burn or a fire break. Sets some distance. People still get flu, but we try to make it harder for that particular fire to spread. With this new fire, it will take time to develop a vaccine. So we have to spread the fuel apart—social distancing.
As with fire, this disease will spread to any fuel it can reach. Different houses will burn differently. Some will be spared, others will collapse. These are human lives we’re talking about.
You don’t reopen until the fire has abated, until it’s under control. You don’t mess around with fire. Places that do will, with high probability, get burned. Already, due to Donald John Trump’s errors of judgment, more are sick than should be. And some probably getting sick because of his unfounded optimism. All these Republicans who have downplayed the threat, and their counter-culture media drones, they’re fanning the fucking flames. Morons.
Anyway, stay safe out there. Be thankful for the mail carriers, the doctors, the grocery workers, and, yes, the firefighters. Right now they’re all firefighters.
Donald John Trump is a firebug. Don’t listen to his lies. His job is to make sure all those firefighters are equipped, and that we’re doing all we can to stop the spread, but he’s not. That’s a failure.
As a side note, the term shelter-in-place refers to an immediate stoppage of nonessential movement during an acute emergency. Basically, during a shelter-in-place situation, unless the danger to you is greater where you are than the risk of moving, you shouldn’t. It applies to wherever you happen to be at the time of the order.
The orders being issued aren’t correctly described as shelter-in-place. They are stay-at-home. Nobody expects someone to start living out of their local gas station if that’s where they are right now. During a real shelter-in-place, one would be expected to stay at the gas station until the immediate danger had abated and the order lifted.