Don Pesci: Things should have been opened three months ago with current rules
A waitress at a local eatery, closed for four months by Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont’s ever changing executive orders, pops the question.
Her eatery is partially opened, but forbidden to serve more than half its regular clientele, many of whom will disappear if the eatery is not permitted to make a sustainable profit to pay the business’s overhead and its dwindling staff.
“If this place can be opened now, why couldn’t it have been opened” under the same severe regimen “three months ago?” the befuddled waitress asks.
Good question, but the common sense answer to the waitress's question will not be forthcoming from Governor Lamont or its waylaid legislative leaders, all Democrats, in the state’s seriously suspended General Assembly. The common sense answer to the question is simple and unambiguous. There is no reason why restaurants in the state should not have remained open during the pandemic four months ago. If social distancing, face masks, frequent disinfections of eating areas, and reducing by 50 percent a restaurant’s usual clientele, work now to prevent the spread of Coronavirus, the same measures would have produced the same result four months earlier.
An elementary school teacher asks this question: Why were elementary schools closed during the politically caused crisis?
Good question. We know – and have always known – that lethality among school children 14 years old and younger infected with Coronavirus has been hovering near zero. Why then were elementary schools in Connecticut shut down? The most frequent answer to this question is highly problematic. Children who are asymptomatic and who very likely had developed herd immunity, the historic prophylactic in viral contagions, can infect older adults. And these older adults are much more likely to die from the infestation than young children. Elementary-school closures are, in fact, a “save the elders” project.
Very good, how has Connecticut gone about saving the elders? In Connecticut and New York about 60 percent of those who died with – not of – Coronavirus were sequestered in nursing homes. We were protecting these elders by forbidding their relatives from eyeballing their care while, at the same time, failing to provide protective gear to the staff, heroes all, of nursing homes. And politicians in Connecticut knew – right from the beginning of the Wuhan infestation – that elders of a certain age, many of whom had medical preconditions that lethalized Coronavirus, were most susceptible to the Coronavirus grim reaper.
Well now, there is a bill before the gubernatorially suspended General Assembly right now that removes partial immunity from police officers across the state, all of whom will be susceptible to asset-swallowing suits filed by “defund the police” political agitators. Will partial immunity be removed from those politicians who are principally responsible for the carnage in Connecticut's nursing homes?
Never mind the oversight, we are told, the problem has now been corrected by Lamont, his political cohorts, and Dr. Close-The-Barn-Door-After-The-Horse-Has-Left. Not to worry; elder habitués of nursing homes who survived the political inattention of preening politicians are now, at long last, safe.
People wonder why the death count in Connecticut and New York are down, a cousin unable to attend the funeral of his uncle remarks – they removed the deadwood and are now taking their bows for having solved problems they themselves had created. They’re like the firefighter-arsonist who sets fires so that he can put them out and read about his courageous exploits in the morning paper.
It is perhaps unpragmatic at this point to hope that businessman Lamont and the Democrat leaders in the General Assembly will realize that Connecticut’s economy, artificially sustained by President Trump’s military- hardware acquisitions and the Wall Street casino, is weak at it core and will be further weakened by unnecessary shutdowns. Businesses lost to the Lamont shutdowns are irrecoverable, and there is yet another ten year recession grinning evilly at the state from the political wings.
Connecticut, now a beggar state, will attempt to squeeze money from the Washington, D.C., larder. Even now, Sen. Richard Blumenthal is hoping to wrest billions of dollars from the impeachable Trump administration, and there is not a journalist in sight who will summon up courage enough to ask him whether he would favor yet another Connecticut tax bump so that Democrats in the General Assembly will be spared the indignity of cutting union-labor costs.
When Connecticut –which has much more in common with dispensable nursing home patients than the state’s sleepy media realizes – finally disappears beneath the waves, who will be permitted to attend its funeral?
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.