Why Bother?
On March 6, my birthday last year, I was up in Vermont with my family. At the time my son was working for a big biotech firm. About five days earlier, that firm had had a meeting of all of their big players in big hotel meeting room in Boston. It seemed that some of them got sick. But they didn’t want anyone to panic, so they kept it quiet for a few days.
Meanwhile, all of my family gathered for my birthday. We had a short discussion about how much risk was involved in our being together due to my son’s proximity to some of the people who were at the meeting. But he had been told not to worry. So we didn’t worry. We got together.
I turned out that we should have worried, but it really turned out we didn’t have to worry because no one in our family got sick. Over a hundred thousand people did get sick due to people who were at that meeting. Many people left the meeting and went home to all parts of the country. They met with their family and friends, and those people met with their family and friends, and that helped COVID-19 to spread all around the country.
At that time, although the virus had actually been in the country for over a month, probably longer, no one really knew how contagious it was. No one knew how deadly it could get. No one knew how it spread, or what we should do to protect ourselves.
