The Protest Against Covid19

It’s been about a month or so since America has faced it’s sudden shutdown due to the Coronavirus. Since then, there have been approximately about 26.5 million people that have applied for unemployment since then and it continues to grow by the day. This has left many people uncertain and scared about their income, homes, families, etc. and wondering when they will ever be able to go back to work and maintain their income again. In retaliation for the lay-off and on-hold positions of many jobs, Americans all across the country have decided to protest the pausing of these jobs.

These protests have been popping up in many states such as Colorado, New York, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania to name a few. One of the prime examples can be seen in the recent protests within the state of Michigan for the “Michiganders Against Excessive Quarantine” in Lansing, the capital of the state last week on April 15th. The general consensus of the people protesting on the streets, is as the title of the protests say, is the lengthening of the social distancing and quarantine rules by the government. As most people would know by now, many businesses and workplaces have closed down since the start of the coronavirus spread in America, this had resulted in the 26.5 million filled unemployments mentioned earlier. Many people didn’t mind too much of this order until they realized that everything would last longer than a couple of good weeks, and people wouldn’t be able to sustain themselves. Some people marched to the capitol to stop the run-on quarantine and by doing that they either stayed in their car to respect the social distancing rules or went onto the streets with no masks about 1 foot away from each other. This garnered the attention of the media and government officials, as people are very critical with the way that the protesters are handling the situation of a shutdown and possibly putting other people in danger (or making the officials obliged to extend the shutdown ever more).

Now look, I personally understand where this is coming from. People are scared and uncertain about the future, their jobs, their families, and many other aspects of peoples’ lives are being put on hold at the moment. But I want to look at the bigger picture right now. Many other countries are starting to lower their case numbers, and somehow we can’t get a handle on things over here. Right now the U.S. is currently the country in the world with the biggest number of cases in terms of the coronavirus and we are also very undersupplied at the moment to take care of this issue in a proper way. And I feel like collectively we aren’t in a position right now to rush the quarantine that’s going on right now, when we don’t even have ways to prevent waves of new cases from popping out all over. Then at that point we would need to be in quarantine for even longer than we are right at this moment. I think patience and holding out is key here for everyone on all fronts and just trying to do our best to cooperate enough to be okay to walk around and try to open up our shops again. Now, I’m not saying they shouldn’t protest, because obviously they have every right to do so, but the way they went about it isn’t something that should be happening at the moment. So I hope that people know where some officials are coming from and try their best not to be irrational and do their best to flatten the curve in the best way possible.