Irrational Fear?

As a career-long project manager, my motto always was control what you can and mitigate the risk of what you can’t. After planning our long and winding road trip for the past seven or so years and after booking much of our planned summer travel already, risk and uncertainty and yes, fear, seems to be prevailing.

Sure, more than 80% of cases are mild. Sure, the fatality rate is only 2% (4 times that of the flu). Our government is not putting any restrictions on travel and are telling us all to go on and live our lives like normal but to prepare for “extreme disruption” to our daily lives.

Ok, we don’t want to be alarmist, but “extreme disruption to daily life”? Isn’t there something we should systematically be doing besides washing our hands, stocking up on hand sanitizer and wet wipes. Concern (for us anyway) is prevailing because of the seemingly complete unpreparedness of and mixed messages from the authorities (the WHO, HHS, CDC, FDA, TSA, Homeland Security, the President himself) is not even whatsoever reassuring (a media hoax? seriously?). I mean, leave people on a cruise ship for weeks? Everyone who has been on a cruise knows that they are Petri dishes for disease under normal situations. People coming back from so called “hot zones” like South Korea and Venice, Italy aren’t even being screened or quarantined and just returning back into society? Create a bottleneck where the CDC has to approve every test, why not deploy the functioning test kits to labs (who test for every other virus) weeks ago? These are common sense things. And let’s be honest, our people generally aren’t very good at putting the welfare of others before themselves. Having spent our careers in healthcare, we’ve spoken with actual doctors about our plans and they are discouraging travel in the near future and the spread seems nearly certain based on the complete lack of competence or coordination and proactiveness in containing this virus.

With any luck this tide will start to turn soon and hopefully this concern is all misplaced. I’d love it to be just a “hoax”. In the meantime, we hunker down (albeit in the Colorado mountains, so it could be worse) and wash our hands. What else can we do?

Politicians and world governments, please get your act together and work together. Your countries, people and world are relying upon you.