This is one of the headlines that came across my news feed several times yesterday, “Ontario to maintain group size restrictions amid rising COVID-19 cases, crowded parks”
It seems that many people wanted to take advantage of the great weather and social distancing took a back seat to social gathering, despite an uptick of COVID-19 cases in southern Ontario.
This isn’t unusual behaviour, with similar things happening in parks and on beaches across North America. It isn’t something that bodes well when considering that economies are opening up and people are beginning to be exposed to more interactions with others. Social distancing needs to be something that we continue while things open up. So, why are people behaving like this?
We have a natural affinity to want to spend time with people and to be social… well, most people do, definitely not everyone. This is the typical overreaction we see with teenagers, when they get new freedoms and want to push the line. How many times have you heard a phrase like, “Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.” Well, seems like this is as true for adults as it is for kids.
People want to connect. They want to congregate, they want to celebrate.
I know many people that have had to cancel travel plans. My own summer plans with my wife and two other couples is no longer going to happen. I know of two cancelled weddings, one was a local celebration and one was a destination wedding. These are big events to change! These are celebrated gatherings that will not happen for a while yet. This is tough to miss out on.
But it’s not as tough as not being able to visit another country to say goodbye to a loved one who is dying, it’s not as tough as knowing you are the one that spread a virus to someone that didn’t recover like you did. It’s not as tough as shutting down the economy a second time, when the curve isn’t flattened enough and there is a fear of hospitals being overwhelmed.
The economy has to be opened up. We need to be returning to some sense of normalcy, we need to create opportunities to connect with others in our communities, to work along side each other, and to do things that are more social than they have been. But we need to do so in recommended and respectful ways.
We need to accept some risk, but not be risky. We need to connect, and not crowd each other. We can’t wait for a vaccine, and we can’t stay shuttered in place indefinitely. We need to connect responsibly, and in ways recommend by experts. We can’t ignore the need to engage in our society, but we also can’t be reckless.
