“Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Letus

5 min readDec 5, 2020

Kelly Corrigan is the author of four New York Times bestsellers, a host of shows on PBS, KQED and WHYY, and a podcaster who believes knowing more and feeling more will make us do more and be better.

While the intention of these tepid curfews is laudable, they represent a zero-sum game when adopted with lackluster enforcement and rules around them. For curfews to work in the way they’re intended — to bend the positivity-rate curve and caseload downward — they require strict mandates, enforcement, and no ambiguity.

The purpose of Covid-19-related curfews is supposedly to thwart the collective mobility of people in highly infectious urban areas. After all, you can’t contract the virus in a room… alone… bingeing Netflix.

Kelly Corrigan is the author of four New York Times bestsellers, a host of shows on PBS, KQED and WHYY, and a podcaster who believes knowing more and feeling more will make us do more and be better.

“When health authorities present one rule after another without clear, science-based substantiation, their advice ends up seeming arbitrary and capricious,” science journalist Roxanne Khamsi wrote in Wired. “Experts know what has to be done to keep people safe, but confusing policies and tangled messages from some of the country’s most celebrated local leaders are setting people up to die.”

“People aren’t sheep,” says Tara Kirk Sell, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told the publication’s Amanda Mull. “People act rationally with the facts that they have, but you have to provide an understanding of why these decisions are being made, and what kind of factors are being considered.”

As you go through your day, focus your energy on the things you can control — your actions, your thoughts, your judgements. And let go of all resistance to the things you don’t have control over — the traffic, your colleagues’ actions, the neighbour’s loud music.

“Curfews like these are really like putting a Band-Aid on a machete wound,” Gregg Gonsalves, PhD, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health — who previously called curfews a “crude, inelegant instrument” — told the New York Times.

It’s been nearly a month since Election Day and I’m still thinking about it — about how wrong the polls were, how close it was in so many states and counties and particularly, how many groups didn’t vote as expected. That’s the part I want to dig in to. Working with my Facebook friends, I collected dozens of statements to remind us, once and for all, to stop lumping people together based on a single variable.

With California’s ICU bed capacity looking to tip in the coming month — in some cases, less than two weeks for some regions — the “red flags are flying,” Newsom said in a Monday afternoon press briefing.

These seemingly random, unsubstantiated curfews, too, purport the idea that we’re not given all the information available on Covid-19 to understand why something is happening or being taken away.

Web design is the process of designing the visual look and feel of a website. As a web designer, you focus on planning the user experience of the website, wireframe layouts, organize content and images in a way that tells a story, and design the final UI.

This will help you to do things well. If you approach each task as if it were your last, because it very well could be, you are likely to do it well and with your whole heart. This related to the important Stoic concept of arete — essentially, excellence.

Right now, we need a shutdown — one that is substantiated and presented to the public with clear facts, figures, and goals. Doing so would at least give us a tourniquet to stop our hospitals and health centers from bleeding out entirely.

Seems like at least one lesson from the election of 2020 is: embrace the complexity. The time has come to stop talking about women and Latinos and non-college-educated whites and rural Americans as if every last person in any of those groups agree on every last thing. Stop talking about coastal elites and gun owners as if they are unified on every conceivable issue. Stop talking about freedom-lovers and socialists.

At this point, it seems the only logical point going forward in lieu of a vaccine (which is, reportedly, on its way to California in the form of over 327,000 units) is to stay home for at least a few weeks and ride this surge out — for not only our state’s health care system but for our friends and loved ones who might need those ICU beds for unrelated Covid-19 ailments.
Blanket curfews, given the sparse data that support them, can erode our trust in government and enforce the Orwellian Big Brother energy that continues to generate widespread paranoia. Given that California has already imposed historically tight public restrictions, issuing this arbitrary curfew may, in a roundabout way, discredit the more sensible measure.
Right now, we need a shutdown — one that is substantiated and presented to the public with clear facts, figures, and goals. Doing so would at least give us a tourniquet to stop our hospitals and health centers from bleeding out entirely.

“Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Letus

Written by Bizyutsu Sempa