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Humans aren’t built for isolation. As the days get longer and the sun leaps higher into cobalt skies, the delicious season of summer looms.
We miss simple pleasures –visiting grandma, high-fiving at Fenway and McCoy, plates piled with steamers awaiting a swim in broth and melted butter.
In our slice of New England, we await the crash and wheeze of waves at Race Point, Misquamicut and Easton’s. We long for the enforced intimacy of a dark movie theater, mornings at the coffee shop, evenings swapping tales at the neighborhood tavern. Not to mention the music festivals, golf outings and berry-picking that define our summers. Or June weddings and graduations filled with pungent lilacs, proud parents and bored siblings.
So it’s no surprise that the collective clamor across the nation is to get things back to something resembling normal. Job losses are soaring, states and cities are facing bare cupboards and the young are deferring dreams. In some states, there have been vigorous Tea Party-style protests –with some brandishing rifles–demanding reopenings. The Red-Blue fractures in our society have infected everything, even infections.
Then there is the grim reality. In less than two months, deaths from Covid 19 have morphed from almost none to more than 60,000. That’s more than the toll from a dozen years of the Vietnam War.
There’s no vaccine. No definitive treatment. Even the tests aren’t reliable; up to a third can be inaccurate.
That means the fellow in the next aisle buying potatoes may be contagious and not know it. And new data from the CDC suggests the death toll is higher than we have been led to believe so far.
Rhode Island and harder-hit Massachusetts have done better than some other states, particularly on testing. Both governors Charlie Baker and Gina Raimondo have been relentless advocates of social distancing.
Yet the numbers tell a gloomy tale. Rhode Island has been forced to reconfigure data that undercounted the sick. It’s even worse in Massachusetts, where nearly seven weeks of lockdown show how stubborn this contagion is. The number of hospitalizations is stuck at nearly 4,000, a number that has barely dropped in two weeks, according to the Boston Globe.
The original models were misleading in Massachusetts, a Harvard expert told the Globe, because they projected a perfect bell curve. That hasn’t happened; the hope that shutdowns and social distancing would solve the problem is still elusive.
From President Donald Trump on down, the federal government has mostly deferred to governors on reopening decisions. This ensures that the president and members of Congress don’t have to shoulder responsibility for whatever happens if we try to get back to normal too early. Voters, of course, will have the final say on this policy.
Any return to normal must be conservative and gradual. It’s well nigh impossible to close all the beaches in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. We’ve got hundreds of miles of coastline. Many of us have our secret pockets of sand and surf hidden in places such as Falmouth and Little Compton that are not policed.
When sun and humidity collide, we are going to seek the familiar respite of sand, surf and cooling dips. First, we’ve got to figure out a way to do this without jeopardizing our health and sanity. The photos of people cavorting on beaches in Florida and Georgia are frightening. And we’ve got to devise ways of pouring old wine into new wineskins, embracing mask-wearing at work, mail-in elections and maintaining distancing.
We value our freedoms. We also live in a modern, integrated world. Your freedom to do whatever you please ends with our right to health and safety. You are free to try whatever quack cure you want. So long as you respect the rights of those of us who are listening to science.
It’s a time to listen to experts, not those who pretend to be. Your life may depend on it.
