COVID-19: It's time to reopen America

I'm still  choosing to be coy about where fate landed me after I left North Carolina almost four years ago.  Even so, I still keep an eye on my old home state, and I'll forever be proud to have been a son of the Tarheel State (even if my basketball proclivities lay toward Duke, but I digress...).

Right now I'm sitting in some abject disbelief at North Carolina's governor Roy Cooper insisting on keeping the state closed for all intents and purposes.  Neighboring states like Georgia are slamming the doors wide open for businesses large and small.  South Carolina places of worship have begun to crank up for regular services.  So far none of these places have recorded a rise in COVID-19 cases.  If anything the infection rate is dropping.

There is good reason for that.  We are definitely on the back side of the coronavirus situation.  "Shelter in place" deterred the virus from spreading when it was most contagious.  It served its purpose and it served it well.  But there is very little good that will come out of continuing this hunkering-down.  Viruses of the airborne vector - like COVID-19 - tend to follow a very defined track of lifespan over the course of a few weeks or months at most.  To be brief about it: the virus has been mutating into strains that are less contagious and hostile to human physiology.  As I like to put it they are "mutating downward", not up and into worse strains.

So what would I recommend to North Carolina, and to the United States as a whole?

Reopen.  End shelter in place.  Ask that those who are most susceptible and concerned about COVID-19 to remain in self-isolation for the next few weeks or even months.  But as for everyone else it should be business as usual again.  It's almost purposefully infecting the virus into oblivion as the much-ballyhooed herd immunity kicks in.  It won't fully eradicate the virus, but it will put us on track toward ending the threat much faster and more reliably than waiting for an effective vaccine which may never come or will arrive, at earliest, a year and a half from now.

We have shied away from the virus.  Now it is time to begin aggressively confronting it when it is most vulnerable.  And it is time to begin an aggressive return to life as we knew it before COVID-19 became a cultural byword for microbial horror.  This isn't the Spanish influenza.  This isn't even polio.  But it has been a pandemic and we can be proud of ourselves for staving it off before it became something far worse... and for the very first time in history.  Western medicine has prevailed magnificently in this regard.

And now is the time to declare victory.  Let there be jubilation in the streets and the bars and the barber shops and the churches!  Let's see some real leadership - in North Carolina and across America - boldly proclaim that we've beaten this thing.

Otherwise, the cure will go down in history as worse than the disease.  It's already well on track for that.  Time to let real healing begin, throughout our country.

Categories: biology, Coronavirus, north carolina, personal reflection, science, united states, viruses