COVID-19: a plea

Full disclosure: weekends aren't good for me right now.

Please stop sharing hopeful but unfounded information. As it stands today, I've seen no evidence that kids will go back to school in September. We certainly won't be gathering this summer. I'd be happy to be proven wrong -- before copying and pasting, include your sources.

All you are doing is giving the hordes of uneducated, selfish people out there a reason to give us the collective middle finger somewhere down the road and refuse to quarantine, since we just keep moving the goalposts.

Don't be part of this problem. Please.

UPDATE:

And just in case you're reading this, thinking, "Boy, he needs some perspective," I assure you, I have it.

I am not worried about my family; not too much, anyway. I'm lucky -- well, in many ways -- that my children were born without complications, and probably have close as good a chance as I do of beating COVID-19, should they contract it.

No, it's the vulnerable people in my community that I'm very worried for. Thanks to the organic nature of my volunteering, a few years back, I can now bring a dozen lovely faces to mind in the blink of an eye who are very vulnerable indeed; either because they're much older, have been diagnosed with COPD or similar, or are severely disabled and vulnerable to even the common varieties of respiratory illnesses, let alone COVID.

Unfortunately, some of those faces I've just brought to mind won't make it to the end of this year. I know this. It's simple maths: they will contract COVID, and they will succumb. I'm trying to prepare myself for this as best I can. What is completely avoidable, and would be horrifically tragic, is if they all died. This year. And that too is a very real possibility. If the curve doesn't flatten and stay there, we'll eventually get to herd immunity numbers, and that will mean, barring a miracle, that every single one of those faces I can bring to mind will contract COVID-19, with a sadly predictable outcome.

That is what I'm trying to avoid, with what little power my voice and this platform provide. And, believe me, it is based in pragmatism, and the horrible knowledge of just how little some people will change their behaviour, even were I to say all this from knees, in front of them.