There’s been a lot of controversy over Oregon’s response to the coronavirus pandemic – the forced closures of businesses, the fines for businesses who violate the governor’s dictates during the six months we’ve lived under this state of emergency, and even the 6-foot distancing and mask wearing we all know.
As we’ve mentioned before in previous editions of this page, the costs of fighting COVID-19 have been tremendous. They’re costs we and our descendents will be paying for generations.
Not the least of these is the social cost of, basically, interacting much of the time in an atmosphere of wariness, if not fear. Go to the grocery store and you see people eyeing you over the tops of their masks, as you eye them back. Even when we meet acquaintances, there can be a touch of chill in the air, maybe even a little self-righteous exhortation.
Frankly, the entire COVID experience has been confusing, disconcerting, frustrating, divisive.
Reports from state and county health officials early on were not helpful because they were so generalized that it was almost impossible to get a sense of what the situation was here in Lebanon – or any other local community in Linn County and across Oregon.
Thankfully, state officials decided earlier this summer to localize the reports by ZIP code, which gives us some sense of where we are right here at home.
More recently, we’ve become engrossed in Linn County’s total numbers, now key to getting our local kids back into school.
The question of how all this fear and suspicion and isolation is impacting the younger members of our community, our children, has already been raised by many.
Certainly, a lot of this has not been good for kids. We don’t have to be child psychologists or have a Ph.D in familial sociology to figure that out. All we have to do is look around, gaze into our kids’ eyes.
And that’s why it’s good news to hear that the COVID numbers are dropping. As Supt. Bo Yates noted at this month’s School Board meeeting, after a surge in August that effectively shut local school buildings to students, even young ones, the numbers of new cases in the county have fallen.
That’s important, and that’s where all the precautions that annoy many of us may actually be making a difference.
We’ve all heard the comments about illness in general being wiped out by the preoccupation with sterilization that we’ve taken on in the past six months. But not only are few of us getting other flus or colds, we aren’t getting the coronavirus either, and that’s good for our kids.
That’s why, aggravating though it may be, it’s worth it to wear a mask and avoid touching other people and maintaining that 6-foot-in-diameter bubble around us.
If this is what it takes to get kids that need to be in school back into the classroom, is that really too heavy a price to pay?
Sure, there are plenty of COVID issues that will be debated not just up to the upcoming election, but likely well beyond that.
In the meantime, though, we should do what it takes to give our kids some relief from the effects of this coronavirus.
Lebanon, OR's Local Newspaper Since 2016.