What will it take to change our behavior?
Dear Reader, “See you in three weeks and one day!”
That was a restaurant patron’s loud farewell to his seven dining companions as he headed for the door Tuesday at a place in my hometown.
I sat six feet away, alone with my salad at a table for four, and pondered how likely it is that he’ll be right. Yes, the new social restrictions ordered until Dec. 8 by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services were going into effect in mere hours, and that included closing down indoor dining.
Coronavirus is a runaway train as fall turns to winter. Michigan is setting new records for positive cases almost daily, far exceeding what we saw in the spring. Public health and hospital officials are ringing every alarm bell they can find, and Thanksgiving gatherings are just around the corner.
But will the rules do the work for us, I wondered? After all, there were existing rules and recommendations being ignored everywhere I looked.
I was not asked to sign in with my name and phone number at the front door, a state health recommendation to facilitate contact tracing. That table of eight adults, who spent much of their meal loudly disparaging the public health orders? The current rules called for no more than six diners at a table. At the bar, people sat shoulder to shoulder; I’m guessing they were not all from the same household. Some patrons moved around the restaurant with no mask on.
And the state’s suggestion that patrons wear masks at tables when not eating or drinking? Right.
I’m not knocking the restaurant. I’m just trying to reconcile this raging pandemic with the realization that stricter rules – nor all the noisy politics around them – won’t end our collective nightmare. We already had rules, and our infection rates and hospitalization rates are soaring. America is the land of the free, and also leads the world in total COVID infections and deaths.
We need people to change their behavior. We need politicians to acknowledge not only the magnitude of the crisis, but to unify in a message about how to minimize transmission and to abide by best practices. Each of us needs to wear a mask, to social distance, to set aside our immediate desires for a long-term outcome.
This was best expressed by Taylor DesOrmeau, an MLive reporter who has been covering COVID’s spread through Michigan.
“There’s an old child psychology trial where you sit a kid down and you put five M&Ms in front of them and say, ‘You can have these five M&Ms right now, or you can wait an hour and if you don't touch them, then you can have this whole bag of M&Ms,’” DesOrmeau said.
“That's kind of where we're at right now, with public health experts saying … if we slow down some things, we can improve our public health and this will be over faster, and we'll be able to will give you that whole bag of M&Ms.”
Unfortunately, 2020 has shown that Americans are not great at delaying gratification, or making sacrifices for the greater good. Even if that good is for our extended family, let alone society at large.
Justin Hicks, an MLive reporter who also has been covering the public health aspects of COVID, noted that people might need to approach the Thanksgiving holiday with a different state of mind.
“It might need to be that … you go to visit a friend's house or go to visit your family, and you wear a mask in their house,” Hicks said. “And if you're eating there, you're eating in separate areas. And that's tough, because that's not something we're used to.”
We’re also not used to 7,500 new infections and up to 80 deaths PER DAY in Michigan. If that doesn’t change our behavior, what will?
We’ll see … in three weeks and a day.
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🎧 To hear DesOrmeau and Hicks discuss more about the latest surge in the coronavirus in Michigan, hospital systems’ ability to keep up with the spread, and how the latest health orders affect small businesses, click here. To hear all the stories behind the stories, click here and subscribe to our Behind the Headlines podcast.
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