Editorial – July 2020 : Watch That Space.

Hello everyone

Is the world going to pot and not of the smoking kind?

I don’t know how it is for you people across the world but I find it worrying when any government stops listening to scientific/medical advice citing financial reasons or examples based on other countries. The fact that the latter has often had different criteria or just ahead making the same mistake again has no effect on their decisions. When applied to the coronavirus, it is even more scary. After all, the same people who are making decisions are also the same people who have also been self-isolating for the most part. As such, if they are like other people not used to being alone all the time (remember, I’m an agoraphobic with a close proximity to people problem amongst others) are likely to get spells of depression, odd sorts of paranoia and a general dislike of seeing the same four walls all the time. You know, the same feelings a lot of you people can relate tales of in the past three months. So why should politicians be any different or the exception to the effect, even if they can get some work done? Then it becomes problematic that they are also in charge and want to break their own curfew or loosen it for everyone. You do have to ask yourself again: should they be any different to ourselves in all of this and make poor decisions? Having exaggerated worries can make the differences between the choices they make. Doing things for the wrong reasons means there is likely to be a backlash. Yes, the young will recover easily but the ethnic groups, the aged and those with particular illnesses will be made even more vulnerable.

It’s all very well wanting to open the economy and getting children back into schools. The kids might not suffer such ill effects of the coronavirus but it doesn’t mean the teachers or parents are equally immune. It’s just asking for trouble. It won’t take too many mistakes for infections to rear their heads. As part of my problem, there isn’t a week that goes past where I get a cold infection and that hasn’t stopped during this entire period. The germs for all kinds of infections are still out there and they are just as likely to spread as much as corbid-19 and a lot of people are going to be nervous no matter what they get now.

Seeing new or resurfacing coronavirus spikes in China, Germany, the USA and India, with the list of countries growing every time I see a newscast tends to make me think we still need to exercise caution and certainly find better distance solutions, even for when inoculations are found. If you want to be a bit pessimistic, you think something like this won’t happen again where you live?

Humans are a very easily conditioned species. Told they are in danger, many know enough to not be to risk their lives. Told to relax things and people relax things too much, more so as most can’t gauge distance and how far to stay apart and it doesn’t take many people to be affected to raise the R factor. People really can’t distinguish between extreme danger and safety danger distances.

There lies the rub. Considering how last month China and Germany have thought that they have got coronavirus under control, cutting restrictions and a sudden rise in the R factor to double what it was before should be ringing alarm bells world-wide. Something in check isn’t a victory but a brief reprieve. Everything else is semantics.

The world is still a dangerous place and especially if you’re susceptible to infection.

Considering how people have been stepping out with less constraint on confinement clearly shows most people don’t like being stuck at home. However, the recent showing of people visiting the beaches and partying just means a wait of 14 days to see how many will be infected before backing down again into more isolation.

I mention the Gaussian Mexican hat graph from time to time where the extremes are at the ends and the centre is the average. You’re always going to have people who don’t think medical safety is going to happen to them and at the other end, people who are more cautious. At the moment, the graph normality needs to move in their direction and the least cautious down to removal by natural selection to be brutally honest. Evolution favours survival and politicians who don’t listen to their scientific support are just asking for trouble.

It would be so easy to do a parody of the current situation, it isn’t as though I don’t have a vehicle for it in the likes of ‘Snuffworld’, but our current reality is fast out-doing fiction with so many wrong decisions that I doubt if any writer could top it.

 

Thank you, take care, good night and safe distance is better than no distance.

 

Geoff Willmetts

editor: www.SFCrowsnest.info

 

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