For the past three years, from June thru August, my community’s public school system has offered their students the opportunity to enroll in an outdoor, summer fitness program. Their coach supervised activity, for the most part, involves jogging, citywide, upon the vast network of public sidewalks (inclusive of the walkways that run through my neighborhood).
For the past three weeks, I’ve been noticing the increasing number of non socially distancing, mask-less kids… the bulk of them running in tight, side-by-side formation.
The irony, here… be the basic, pandemic, safety protocols needed or not… the vast outdoors, by its very nature, affords everyone the perfect opportunity for social distancing. With minimal effort it’d be easy for everyone to maintain that recommended safety bubble of 2 meters / 6 feet… or more.
Granted, if we can even believe all that our oft, far from truthful leaders have been telling us, out-of-doors transmission of COVID-19 is supposed to be rare. The operative words being “supposed to be”.
However, the full name of that godforsaken pathogen… namely… Novel Coronavirus is what inculcates a healthy dose of awe / respect. Novel means new… so new that the medical community is still discovering the full range of its “talents”. Stated conversely and more realistically, there’s still too damned much that they (and we) don’t know about it.
Let’s say that (as I’m typing this / as you’re reading this) Novel Coronavirus is “flexing” its mutation muscles. What if that means that outdoor transmission has… all the sudden… become easier?
Seeing how jogging does increase both respiration’s rate and intensity, how might that negatively impact joggers who are “flying in formation” for at least an hour?
Let’s say that “only one” asymptomatic, COVID infected, deeply breathing, running kid, somehow, manages to infect another deeply breathing, running kid and, in turn, that kid runs home and infects one of her/his elders… oh… say… a grandparent with a compromised immune system?
Lest we forget, both a pandemics’ first and second wave needs to start somewhere.
And all it would take to fire off a runaway pandemic’s starting gun is “only one” representative of the human race!