Covid-19: The end is near. Or is it?

This is my imperfect attempt to put into words my current thoughts and feelings regarding this entire Covid-19 situation. Today, after more than five weeks of sheltering-in-place, social distancing, and being prohibited by the powers-that-be from practicing my profession, I thought I would be delighted at the welcome news that the governor has given the go ahead to resume elective surgery on May 4. Instead, I find myself angry and sick at heart. Having no better appropriate outlet for my anger- going into a quiet corner somewhere and shouting obscenities at nobody doesn’t seem productive- I am sitting here writing down some thoughts. I will go over this later and see if any of it is worth sharing otherwise it will never see the light of day.

I see a world I no longer recognize. It is a world in which there appears to be a deliberate campaign of disinformation and misinformation the purpose of which, more than anything else, seems to be to instill and maintain an atmosphere of unreasonable fear. The underlying purpose of this is still unclear. I think we have long passed the point where we can justify the current situation on the basis of public health. The American people have accepted almost without question a degree of government encroachment of their personal liberties which would have been impossible without the fear factor. We have permitted the Federal, state, and even local city governments to tell us we cannot leave our homes, we cannot keep our businesses open, and we cannot gather in other than tiny groups. A population of 300 million people has allowed itself to be quarantined and a trillion dollar economy has been shutdown, without a timetable or any inkling of the possible repercussions, for the first time in our history. All this because of fear. Fear of a virus about which we admittedly do not know everything, which is not to say that we do not know a lot about it.