Social Distancing Is Impossible. We Can’t Blame People
My family is sheltering largely to protect our 90-year old grandfather, but he just went to a wedding. The bride’s parents insisted that this old man come, and he said “what can I do?” What can we do? Who do we even blame here? Social distancing is impossible.
If we’re asking people to social distance for over nine months now it A) obviously doesn’t work and B) is the wrong point of intervention. Social distancing is part of a coordinated response, not the whole. It’s like telling soldiers to polish their boots and then run into war butt naked, unled, and unarmed. You can’t take personal responsibility for a pandemic. It takes leadership, it takes a society, it takes government.
Just look at the countries that beat this, and learn.
The Possible
Vietnam didn’t just wear masks. Their government closed the border with China, they rapidly scaled up PCR testing, they quarantined every first degree contact away from home. They eliminated the virus once, and kept testing and finding flare-ups to keep it eliminated. Yes, they washed their hands and wore masks, but that was 1% of what they did. They didn’t depend on the personal actions of their dumbest members. They had…
