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Showing posts from February, 2020

Fear of the Unknown

Around the world, governments have responded to the recent coronavirus concerns by instituting more and more stringent controls over who gets to enter their communities, and how people in those communities interact with each other. A cruise ship has been turned away by five countries. Tourists have been stopped at borders and turned away, or sent to quarantines at military bases. Police in China now use cell phone records to track patients down, often in their homes, and bring them to contaminated quarantine sites. And an entire nation of people have been banned from at least half a dozen countries. I’m no public health expert, so I can only imagine the difficulty of making these decisions. These governments hold in tension the danger of widespread outbreak, and the freedom of movement many of us have taken for granted. We elect them (well, at least most of them) to make hard decisions, and trust them to protect our communities.  But it’s also times like these that...