County Commissioner John Jessup spoke for a lot of people when he declared in a social media post last week that he was frustrated with COVID-19 restrictions.
Everybody is weary of the stress of worrying about infection spikes and maintaining social distancing. School officials are tying themselves in knots trying to figure out how to safely reopen their buildings starting later this month. 4-H fair organizers are trying to make sure 4-H’ers have a meaningful fair experience starting later this week.
And of course, restrictions continue to drastically alter almost every aspect of our daily lives.
Jessup, however, wasn’t speaking for policymakers, health-care professionals and anybody at high risk for COVID-19 when he wrote, “I can no longer support continuing restrictions for the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Coming from someone who has otherwise sensibly helped shape the county’s response so far to the pandemic, his remarks – made after Gov. Eric Holcomb pulled the state back from the final stage of reopening activities — were unwise at best. At worst, they were reckless.
To his credit, Jessup later pulled back from them, but in doing so he missed a couple of crucial points:
–Hancock County, as he notes, continues to post a fairly low daily case count. For much of June, for example, we averaged fewer than three new cases a day. Fatalities also have largely been limited to long-term care facilities and the elderly. But those aren’t reasons to pull back from social distancing, mask-wearing and other inconvenient restrictions, as Jessup seemed to suggest. If anything, they’re proof the strategy is working.
–We follow the restrictions because we ostensibly care about our neighbors. Those of us who are wearing masks are doing so because we don’t want to unwittingly infect our co-workers, our family members or the person in front of us in line at the grocery. You could be harboring the coronavirus this minute and not know it. We have a lot of vulnerable people in our community, and we have seen, tragically, how fast and unchecked COVID-19 can spread. To throw open the gates on the old “normal,” as Jessup suggested, ignores the realities of this contagion.
The county commissioners immediately shut down the courthouse annex last week when two employees tested positive for the coronavirus. So their actions have spoken louder than Jessup’s words. That’s the kind of leadership the county needs if residents are going to continue to be relatively safe. We trust that — ill-advised comments aside — we’ll still be able to count on that.
