If anyone cares, GA was shutdown in Idaho yesterday by our moronic gov.
I'm torn by this. On one level I want to say good on your moronic gov. for taking action.
But on another level, I'm fascinated to know how exactly they intend to enforce a 'no GA flying' rule and make the charges stick. It ain't their airspace to regulate. They may as well start writing tickets for having a dog off a leash and giving them to people in Maine.
WRT "flattening the curve", what everyone fails to understand is that it's impossible to get the curve "flat" enough. Given that in my state there are only 2,470 hospital beds and that the COVID-19 hospitalization rate is 20.7% - 31.4% the hospitals will be overwhelmed with just 12,350 or fewer cases...
I get where you're coming from with this, i.e. no matter how much we flatten the curve, its just going to spike again when the shelter in place type restrictions are lifted. I get that, but here's my perspective on it.
There are some people, my scientist wife for example, who could look at the knowns early on (symptoms, incubation period, rate of serious sickness etc) and knew instantly this was going to be bad. Then there's the rest of us who may or may not trust what we hear or read.
As you might expect, I trust my wife when she's talking about things that are in her wheelhouse. My boss, like me, knows nothing of these sorts of things, but he respects me and he respects my wife. He's also kind of a germophobe so I had his buy in early on. And when I said I think its time to separate as a company and send a memo telling the drivers to stay out of our office as much as possible and to not get within arms reach of any office staff or any other company driver, he was on board immediately. But some of our drivers? Not so much. They thought we were over reacting and a few of them got pretty butt hurt when we put our foot down and confronted them point blank to get 'eff out of the office if they didn't need to be in there.
That was two weeks ago. Now? Every single one of them gets it. A few of our office rooms (mine included) have split doors so you can shut the lower half only. We've never used them as split doors. But we've been closing the lower halves for the last week or so. But of course I forget to close mine sometimes because its just not habit yet. Doesn't matter though. If I ask a driver to come into the office because I need to see them, they walk to my office door, close the lower half of my door and stand out in the hallway while they talk to me. Every one of them. I don't have to tell them, they just do it. They all get it now.
That would not have happened if we as a country hadn't taken the measures we've taken. And what that tells me is if we foolishly lifted all the restrictions tomorrow, a significant portion of the population is going to behave differently for some time to come because they don't want to get infected nor infect others. That is good. Its great actually. Because a lot of these people would never have bought in if we hadn't done what we've done.
So why not lift the restrictions tomorrow then? Here's why. Because we still have hold outs. And every day that we keep things locked down, more people will come to understand that changing their behavior is important and will start to get on board. We'll never get the all to buy it, but we need to get more. And we will the more time we hold out.
The idea is that when we finally say uncle and all go back to work, a huge chunk of us will still find ways to minimize our close contact with others. We''l screw it up and won't do it 100% of the time so it won't stop the spread of infection at all. But we'll do it far more than we would have if we didn't take the actions we've taken and hold out as long as we did, and that could very well be enough to slow the spread to the point where the healthcare system is able to keep up.