The Right to Not Get Sick?

We were told, at the onset of the “lockdown” that it was necessary to imprison the populace in order to prevent the hospitals from being overwhelmed with the Corona’d. This never happened – even in New York, where the Javits Center – a massive indoor exposition facility used for major events like the annual (until this year) New York Auto Show – was converted into a massive urban field hospital, whose beds were never used, because they weren’t necessary.

The military hospital ship Comfort – also dispatched to deal with the overwhelmed overflow – was likewise never needed.

Of course, the answer given is that the “lockdown” prevented the overwhelming – which works like the medicine man taking credit for the sun reappearing after an eclipse. This is how the medicine man keeps the tribe in line.

It works so long as it’s not questioned.

Maybe people ought to do that.

Most states have experienced Corona fatalities – as distinct from “cases” – in the high hundreds. If that high. Out of populations in the millions. If millions of Americans weren’t innumerate, millions of Americans would be much less terrified of Corona.

Which is less of a threat to healthy adults than going for a drive.

Some 40,000 people are killed in motor vehicle accidents each year and your odds of being one of them don’t depend chiefly on your being over 80 or in poor health. Speaking of the latter. America has among the highest proportion of morbidly obese, hypertensive and diabetic people in the world.

Exactly the demographic most likely to get Corona’d by any virus. Because they’re already sick. 

Maybe these people should lose some weight, stop drinking liter bottles of fructose-sweetened soda.

In order to be less vulnerable to getting sick.

Instead, the new line – now that the “overwhelmed” line isn’t holding water – is that the “lockdowns” will remain necessary because people might get sick. In other words, a new right – enforced by the government – to be free of the threat of sickness.

In exchange, of course, for our freedom.

It’s a beautiful thing, too – because there is no way to eliminate the threat of sickness. But that possibility can be used to justify practically anything – very much (as this writer has been saying for decades) the same way that “getting dangerous drunks” off the road has been used to justify treating every driver as presumptively drunk – and every air traveler as a presumptive “terrorist.”

Principles matter. They become the basis for practices.

This newly minted “right” percolates to the surface as the logical, inevitable denouement of the idea that risk is intolerable. That “we” – defined by them – can’t be too saaaaaaaaaaafe!

People mustn’t drive a car without a seatbelt on or ride a motorcycle without a helmet; kids can’t be permitted to play outside without a parent supervising at all times; every new car must have a back-up camera and six air bags and technology that applies the brakes automatically – just in case the driver doesn’t.

Why not the inverted right to be free of the threat of getting sick? As distinct from the right to take steps to reduce your chances of getting sick, such as giving a wide berth to anyone who seems sniffly and – most of all – taking good care of your own self so as to make yourself healthier and so less likely to get sick, whether from this Corona or some other Corona?

Instead, this new – and more dangerous than unshielded plutonium – “right” to be free of any threat that you might get sick.

The “asymptomatic” – which is everyone who isn’t sick – must be presumed sick and forced to wear a surgical mask as if they were in fact highly contagious. Everyone must stand six feet apart from everyone else – because someone might have Corona, without any need to establish that in fact they do have it.

Sickness must be presumed – everywhere – and this will never end because there is no way to establish, for sure, that someone isn’t sick.

The idea enshrines pathology – germ-o-phobia not only normalized but institutionalized.

It’d be seen as crazy – if so many people weren’t.

. . .