Coronavirus exposes how spoiled we’ve become in Idaho and beyond
Postponing Treefort, Boise’s wickedly popular music and culture festival, because of the COVID-19 pandemic must not have been an easy decision, but it was certainly the right decision.
Canceling the South By Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, was perhaps the first signal to the United States that we are in the midst of extraordinary times. Suspending the rest of the NBA season this week was another major wake-up call. Prohibiting fans from the NCAA Tournament was another bold move, yet met with a mix of reactions.
If there’s one thing that the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed, it’s how spoiled we have become.
To complain about not being able to watch a couple of basketball games or go watch a couple of bands in the face of a global health crisis is petty.
My son is graduating from high school this year. It truly is a once-in-a-lifetime event. My parents, in their 70s, have been planning on being here for it, and we have been preparing invitations for other family members.
But we likely will cancel all those plans and tell my folks and other relatives to stay home. If graduation is canceled altogether, I’ll be OK with that. Of course, I’ll be disappointed, but in the grand scheme of things, I’d rather have the chance to see my parents 10 years from now than risk having them catch the novel coronavirus.
There are many who are downplaying the risks of COVID-19, who say we’re needlessly panicking over something that likely will just blow over. Remember SARS? Swine flu? Hanta virus?
COVID-19, though, is unlike those others, if for no other reason than that the unknowns are far greater. Already we’ve seen COVID-19 spread like wildfire through Italy, killing 200 people in just one day.
We’ve been lulled into complacency by sporting events and a comfortable lifestyle that has seemed at times to be impenetrable. And because of that seeming invincibility, we’ve been slow to react — and quick to complain — when our regularly scheduled programming has been preempted.
When I spoke with the Central District Health Department here a couple of weeks ago, they were still mostly concerned about a hepatitis A outbreak from a local food service worker. They were taking direction from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was directing them to simply monitor anyone who had recently flown into the country from China or South Korea. No other steps or measures were being taken.
That same week, my wife was scheduled to go to a large conference in San Diego for work. At the time, it seemed almost silly to even consider not going. I know she felt somewhat embarrassed to broach it with her bosses. Even then, it seemed an overreaction. Today, our decision for her to not go to that conference seems prescient. The following week, several similar conferences announced they were canceling.
Looking back, it seems ridiculous that we had to make that decision for ourselves for our own health concerns rather than have someone else make that decision out of concern for the health of the entire community.
There’s a fine line between exercising caution and inducing panic. In this case, I think we were more concerned with not inducing panic than we were in exercising caution.
We still don’t know how bad this is going to get. Hopefully, we get a handle on it and control it to minimize the death toll. Canceling conferences and mass gatherings at festivals and sporting events is a good start.
Hopefully, years from now, we’ll look back at the minor inconveniences we’ve had to “suffer” through and recognize that temporarily giving up a few simple pleasures we’ve come to enjoy in life means we’ll get to visit Mom and Dad again in their very old age.
This story was originally published March 12, 2020 at 9:16 AM.
