Comment: This is a sacrifice; it won't have been wasted effort
By Alex Long / Special to The Washington Post
As I spent hours trying to figure out the most cost-efficient way to cancel flights, hotels and events scheduled for the next three weeks and commiserating with friends and colleagues who were doing the same, the word “overreacting,” or that notion, came up again and again in relation to the novel coronavirus. As in: “I would hate to lose all this money for nothing” or, “If there isn’t a spike in transmission in [insert any location here] I’ll regret not going” or, “I can’t help but feel we are overreacting here; I still have to live my life!”
President John F. Kennedy said in a State of the Union address that “the time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.” He was referring to recession-proofing measures, but the analogy serves to communicate the need for all preparation. What if, however, after this preparation to slow the advance of the pandemic, there is less spread and fewer deaths than were forecast? Does that mean it was for nothing? That it was an “overreaction”? Many Americans, burdened by sacrifices large and small, may be persuaded by cynics to see it that way. But what this scenario will really mean is that all the drastic measures, all the discomfort, actually worked. An absence of the worst would mean the presence of success.
To the everyday citizen, this is vexing, especially for those hurting from the overwhelming sacrifice forced on them. When extreme measures are taken, the public has come to expect extreme outcomes; or some overwhelming clarity that all the caution and controlled chaos was worth it.
On one hand, in a promising note, my private social media has been flooded by once epidemiologically illiterate people encouraging their friends and family to help flatten the curve. The curve here refers to a graph, provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, depicting the effects of delaying an outbreak. Through measures such as social distancing, we have the chance to lower the number of cases and space out transmission to make it easier for our health-care system to allocate the beds, medicine and other vital resources needed during a pandemic. My professional social media, too, has been flooded with talk of flattening the curve.
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