Lockdowns are coming.
It’s not so much a matter of if anymore as it is a matter of when. And people know it, too. Already, paper towels and toilet paper are becoming scarce.
Between the time of writing Sunday’s editorial and writing today’s editorial, West Virginia has seen 30 more deaths and more than 2,000 more active cases.
Before you start bemoaning the inconvenience of another shutdown, please think about that. A total of 585 West Virginians’ families are trying to figure out how to hold a funeral or memorial service for their loved one while contending with increasing restrictions — how to celebrate the memory of someone’s life even as our own lives become more and more circumscribed. Some of those friends and family won’t have the opportunity to pay their respects at all.
Five hundred and eighty-five people’s families are making holiday arrangements with the knowledge that there will be one less seat at the table, one less square in the Zoom call, one less loved one to buy gifts for. The first holiday season after a loss is the hardest, and with everything else 2020 has thrown our way, the grief will be even more agonizing.
There are now 10,000-plus lives that hang in the balance. We don’t know how many of those will join the recovered list or add to the death toll. More than 10,000 people and their families are hanging in a kind of limbo: Will COVID-19 prove fatal, or will it pass? For those fortunate to survive, their long-term health becomes a question: Will the coronavirus leave them unscathed, or will it cause life-long problems?
As long as the pandemic rages, patients in hospitals and residents of long-term care facilities can only have limited visitations — if they are permitted visitors at all. Human contact has been reduced to muffled conversations through masks and face shields; holding latex- or rubber-covered hands; trying to find a smile in someone’s eyes because mouths are obscured.
Remember this before you complain about the nuisance of tightening restrictions — before you flout mask wearing and social distancing rules. Allowing ourselves to be inconvenienced for a time is a small sacrifice to make when we consider the devastating losses others have experienced. Please remember that just because you might survive COVID-19 doesn’t mean that someone you spread it to will also recover.
We know a new round of lockdowns will be economically disastrous. Businesses will close, some to never open again. Unemployment will spike and the jobless will struggle, especially since there is no sign of another stimulus package. But we had our chance to show we could open up safely, and we blew it — as a state and a country. We had late summer and early fall to show that we could eat out at restaurants and bars responsibly; that we could shop for more than the bare necessities using sensible precautions; that we could gather outdoors without it becoming a super-spreader event — but we didn’t. And now we face the consequences.
