Better safe than sorry?

Everybody has an opinion – time will tell who is right about the level of response and its impacts on the economy and small business versus the actual health threat the COVID-19 Coronavirus presents to nations and the world as a whole.

However, when one lets partisan ideology interfere with one’s thought process, you tend to stray from objective, analysis-based opinion, into partisan justification and vilification, as Mr. Kushner appears to here. He criticizes Democratic Governor Northam for instituting front-end, proactive measures suggested by the scientific community, as other governors around the nation also are; while defending Republican President Trump for his 180-degree waffling, again blaming Democrats, and one guesses their “allies” in the scientific community, for actions including the president’s one-day flip from calling the COVID-19 Coronavirus “a Democratic hoax” on the campaign stump, to freezing all flights to, from Europe, initially save the two countries where he has golf courses.

If you let partisanship and political ideology prevent objective analysis of portions of your opinion, how measured should we take the rest of one’s analysis to be?

While I have initially tended to agree that much of the COVID-19 response has been over-cautious and perhaps not justified by the national or even international numbers, a medical-scientific-grounded friend has pointed out to me that the potential for viral mutations could suddenly expand the problem on a variety of levels, including numbers.

Doing little or nothing and see how things go without the means to adequately test for the disease to allow for accurate numbers to be calculated and targeted quarantines to be imposed, due to an early federal administrative lapse in response – seems a potentially dangerous course.

The experience of Vo, the small town in Italy where that nation’s first death was reported, points to the importance of being able to calculate ACCURATE numbers, rather than estimates, on how many and who is infected. That town of 3,300 tested every citizen, identifying both symptomatic and non-symptomatic infected people. They were able to isolate and treat all infected while letting the rest of their population function on a more normal level. And it is reported they have stopped the disease in the town.

In the absence of that ability to test all, treat and quarantine based on the result of comprehensive, accurate testing, I find myself drifting in the direction of perhaps “better safe than sorry” – without the mass hysteria hoarding of TP or forced small business closings – is the way to go.