Journaling the Coronavirus (COVID19) Pandemic,
Reflection #69

May 29, 2020

The testing sites in Wisconsin have fallen on hard times.

Nobody is going to be tested anymore. What happened? Only a week ago the few testing sites were overwhelmed by cars lined up and people waiting for hours to be tested. What happened was the media. The new effort to appoint, hire, or whatever, hundreds of thousands of tracers has begun and the potential effects of that hiring have begun to sink in. It’s one thing to be found positive after testing, especially for those with no symptoms. It is quite another to turn in one’s friends to be quarantined. These are tough relationship times if you haven’t noticed. The last thing that needs to happen in most people’s lives in America today is to lose what close friends they might have.

The logic of turning in associates, fellow workers, friends, and family so that these people can be put in (at first) voluntary quarantine in their homes for weeks on end, is going to have an effect on relationships, and this is not escaping most people. If those ‘turned in,’ or snitched on, cannot afford to be quarantined then how do you think they are going to feel about the person who turned them in and got them quarantined in the first place? As I wrote much earlier, when tracing was just an idea and not a new applied social and legal force, it is turning in names over to a tracer, not a practice that might serve one well if you gave the tracer a list of enemies instead of those close to you?

This is real life out here, not some sort of idyllic result of rose sunshine – induced vacation play. This tracing thing is already starting to have an effect, but, like so much of the reaction to the virus has already proven, the results of applied actions to stem the virus or hold back the spread of it, where any of this is going to go over time is almost impossible to predict, but be assured that friendly, open and self-sacrificing cooperation is not going to be a huge part of it.

Come on!
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