From July 3 Facebook post:
“With the recent spike in COVID-19 in our area, and in an effort to keep our staff and guests safe, Union Public House will be closing for now. We will continue to monitor the situation and will keep you all posted about our reopening plans. Stay safe, wear your masks, and wash your hands.”
Steve, my heart breaks for business owners and this terrible calamity that has been visited on them. Where you and I will probably disagree is that our failure to contain the virus will result in far worse economic impact down the road. When we needed to be focused on transitioning our economy where we can, immediately mandating proper measures so businesses *could* stay open more safely, and implementing stricter measures across our community so people were more aware of the danger of spread, we were instead penned in from three layers of government–federal, state, and County administration–which is instead focused on pretending that this pandemic isn’t a big deal. Time will tell whether its impact results in things getting so out of control that the businesses see even worse fallout than what came from the previous closure. My comments aren’t out of disregard for businesses and the economy. They come from very deep concern for it.
I don’t believe providing factual data about the situation qualifies someone as being an apologist. If you look at the overall numbers, it is clear that this virus is having a minimal negative impact on the health of our community. This includes positive cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
As for hospitals discouraging people from seeking care, local administrators have very recently reported they have no concerns about capacity and encouraged people to utilize their services for all medical issues.
Significant economic damage continues to be done to our community because of the unnecessary ongoing shutdowns and continuous fear mongering.
Thank you for your persistence, Rick.
The hospital administrators and other Florida covid apologists seem to have two arguments for why we shouldn’t be worried about covid. Perhaps I am understanding them wrong, and if so, they can certainly set the record straight here.
One argument is that we should focus on hospitalizations. And yet there are numerous anecdotal reports that hospitals are directing people who have tested positive for covid to stay home, quarantine, and whatever else happens, do *not* try to get admitted to the hospitals unless you have dire or severe respiratory distress.
Thus leaving the assessment of their conditions to–themselves. Quarantined and alone, and afraid to go to sleep at night wondering if they will wake up the next morning.
If I understand that properly (and who knows, as there is so much the hospital administers are not being clear on), if you have any symptoms whatsoever that you think require immediate care–slight breathing problems, chest or arm pain, cognitive impairment, loss of taste or smell, severe abdominal discomfort, loss of taste or smell, weakness or extreme fatigue, and the list goes on–report to your local ERs, and do not hesitate to do so.
But if you have been diagnosed with covid, the message from the hospitals, as I have heard anecdotally, seems to be: stay put unless your breathing gets so bad you feel you are in trouble.
This was born out by the 20’s young man who was on WEAR last night. Don’t come in unless you are in severe distress. And he asked, how would I know?
Their second argument seems to be, don’t worry about anything but deaths.
From where I sit, telling people that they should focus on either (1) deaths or (2) seriousness and numbers of hospitalizations is a violation of the Hippocratic oath.
Except, of course, the admins of the hospitals, business people focused on the bottom line, wouldn’t be bound by such an oath, as far as I understand.
Over the last 4 months, 2,809 of the county’s citizens have tested positive for the virus. That’s a whopping 0.8% of the total population of our county. And for this we are scaring businesses into shutting down and further damaging our economy.