Andrew Chase
Opinions Editor
On January 21, 2020, the CDC confirmed the first case of COVID-19 in the United States of America. This event would lead the U.S.A. to be descended into a year of death, dissension, and tragedy. I believe that the United States Government did the best job they could have done in some aspects of trying to contain and stop the spread of the virus.
One of the main aspects I think the United States Government did the best job it could have done was allowing the state governments to decide the extent of their lockdowns and restrictions, instead of having the federal government decide them. I feel like this was the right call for the federal government to make because every single state is different in terms of their distribution of population. An example of a state government issuing a COVID-19 preventative mandate was on March 19, when California was the first state to issue a stay-at-home order. I absolutely believe that it was the right move by California to do this because it would have been unnecessary if the federal government installed a national lockdown when some states had lower numbers of positive cases than others.
Once the world started to lock down, economies across the globe began to start crashing. Since many people were not able to work due to financial and health reasons, the United States Senate decided to pass the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act or the CARES Act for short. The CARES Act provided financial aid to businesses and state governments across the country. The CARES Act would eventually pave the way for the U.S. government to send out waves of stimulus checks to Americans.
As the days kept passing, more and more COVID-19 cases kept appearing. It eventually got to the point where on June 10, the United States reached 2 million confirmed cases of COVID-19. At the time that I heard this news, I was scared for the first time during the pandemic for myself, my family, and my friends. At that moment I realized just how infectious this virus is, and I could tell the pandemic wasn’t going away by the end of the year. It was also around this time that many states started to ease up on their lockdowns and social distancing measures. I honestly did not agree with many states’ decisions to start reopening everything this quickly because new and changing information about the virus was coming out on a consistent basis.
One of the most alarming pieces of information to come out during the summer of 2020 was on July 9 when the World Health Organization stated that COVID-19 can be airborne. The second that a virus or disease is classified as airborne, it very quickly changes the severity of the situation because transmitting an airborne virus or disease is a lot easier than transmitting a bloodborne virus or disease. An airborne virus or disease can travel a bit of distance and survive over a span of time, which allows these viruses and diseases to infect others a lot quicker than non-airborne viruses. Additionally, airborne viruses and diseases are a lot harder to contain and maintain because contact tracing is difficult when the virus is able to survive in the air or stick on surfaces since someone could contract it a while after the infected respiratory droplets are expelled from the host’s body.
Eventually, on September 28th, 2020, the global death count for COVID-19 surpassed the 1 million mark. The fact that a virus took less than a year to take more lives than HIV, dysentery, malaria, influenza, cholera, and measles combined in 2020 is incredibly saddening and scary. I personally believe that our country’s government should have spent more of the federal money towards preparing against pandemics and national health crises rather than spending hundreds of billion dollars towards the defense budget.
Andrew Chase can be contacted at
opinions@kscequinox.com
