I haven't addressed this because most people reading my blog work from home, but the quarantines they are currently enacting to shut down the United States, state-by-state, are illegal, disproportionately affect the poor, and will increase infection rates as they expose healthy people to sick ones in confined areas. Research shows mass quarantines have not stopped the spread of any pandemic in the past 700 years. Even at the end of the Spanish Flu, it was determined that the mass quarantines enacted did not help nor did they prevent the spread.
This is confirmed by what we are seeing today. Currently, the three countries that have the highest number of cases are those who have enacted quarantine more than 14 days ago : Italy, France, and Spain. Since 97% of all Covid-19 cases show symptoms before 11.5 days after exposure, these countries should be decreasing in rates by this point, but their rates continue to jump upward. As more countries begin lock down, their numbers are also jumping higher. Mass quarantines hurt the economies of countries, disproportionately hurt the poor, and hurt healthcare efforts. But our nations are enacting them because they "worked" in China, without keeping in mind that China bore the brunt of the disease in a time when they did not even know what it was.
The mortality rate from Covid-19 is much lower than the mortality rate for the 2017-2018 flu. As we give up our rights, our jobs, and our other freedoms, are we doing it for a just cause or are we doing it because the media has managed to provide us with so much scary and false information that we are not thinking straight?
As writers, this affects us on multiple levels. We should be on the front-lines when it comes to protecting our freedom of speech. We will lose our jobs at the whims of other less scrupulous writers and the government; we will be confined and forced into situations that will render us more susceptible to the disease, and we will be pressured to write misleading copy.
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