Around a month ago....walking around the shopping district of Wiesbaden....I sat on a bench and ate an ice cream.
Around this fifteen minute period, I sat and viewed the landscape. I came to this view of some the past eighteen months of Covid, the stress upon society, the ban-rules, the curfew business, and the expectation that came with zero risk.
As a kid growing up on a farm, you came to realize risk, the many potential ways that you can screw up thus triggering enormous risk, or take one simple action to cut the majority of risk.
There are people around today, both in the US and Germany....who believe there is a level of zero-risk in everything we do. The truth is....nothing holds zero-risk. Risk kinda starts at 'one' and goes up to 'one-hundred'. Nothing is zero.
The assignment of masks being required? The idea is that masks lessen risk. Getting a number to say for a no-mask situation versus a mask-situation? Most nurses will say your risks are lessen but they don't go and hype up a zero-risk return on the mask deal.
The assignment of mandating speed-limits (getting autobahn speeds assigned)? The suggestion is that risks are lessen, but they don't go to hype up a zero-risk situation (not unless you said top speed was 1 kph).
So people persist with the imagination and dream that you can reach some level of zero-risk. I guess some folks will take this onto the level of trying extra-hard to avoid public toilets where some moment of weakness exposes you to a virus situation. The same is true for people wearing rubber gloves of some type as they pick up a shopping cart to use in the grocery. The heart rate increase now for people riding a city bus for nine minutes to reach some doctor's office and constant worry over a person's cough or the sweat on their forehead.
It's silly in some ways, but we are a different society than we were three years ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment