Friends, family and strangers reading this blog today, tomorrow or in the future,
I’m writing this blog post to try and capture the mood of our local community in Santa Clara County, but also though out the world wide. To sum up the situation, all businesses that are deemed “non-essential” are closed to any in-personal interaction. This includes dine-in restaurants, schools, parks and anywhere a group of 10 or more people are likely to gather.
The Coronavirus (a.k.a. COVID-19) is a highly infectious virus that, as far as we know at the time of this blog post, originated somewhere in China and has spread across the globe infecting millions and killing tens-of-thousands thus far.
According to most experts, the ‘surge’ of cases for infection and death of Coronavirus is predicted to dramatically escalate over the next few weeks. Santa Clara County has been on a voluntary ‘shelter-in-place’ order by our local government since early March 2020. Since then the county has begun to enforce the order for places such as restaurants who continue to offer dine-in services or beauty salons who continue to serve their customers.
It’s really a tough situation right now because these small businesses cannot survive being without paying customers for even a short period of time so they push the limits of a public safety order. On the other hand, people’s lives are a top priority and some people question whether such drastic extremes as ‘shelter-in-place’, instead of just ‘social distancing common sense’ are really necessary.
Fortunately, there are now some federal government stimulus money being promised to small business owners, however they are already having major problems with implementing a simple approval process and/or approval workflow.
I, personally, just cringe at how ineffective our government is when it comes to offer services back to the very needy taxpayers because my business is all about work-process automation. These problems I see every day, plain as day, can be easily solved at a fraction of the budget; if you just remove the politics. So I won’t hold my breath.
As you can image, it’s an unreal situation trying to live your normal life with so many restrictions but if it’s for the greater sake of humanity then, from at least what I’ve observed, most people have been totally compliant which is absolutely heart-warming to me. It’s an unbelievable time that you need to have empathy, compassion and patience with others.
After being locked in the house for nearly 1 month solid I told Brandee I wanted to take a night-walk to the store just to experience the activity level on a Spring night, on the weekend in California. I can tell you what I experienced in my walk to the store was remarkable! There is little activity on a usually busy Saturday night. I walked down the middle of what typically is a busy road, with only one car encounter. Also, there was only one airplane that I noticed taking-off from the San Jose International Airport and there was general no sign of life in the outside world.
I’m proud of my fellow community to observe the shelter-in-place order to help slow the spread of the virus. However, at some point we have to balance the risk versus the negative impact to society for social isolation. As I walked to the store this evening in the silence of the night all I could think of was this song remake from the band Distributed entitled “The Sound of Silence”.
Stay safe, stay healthy and stay positive everyone!
Sincerely,
Kevin