Lockdown: Everybody knows it’s right, nobody cares
Here is what car traffic looks like during the third wave of the most devastating (numbers-wise) global pandemic ever. This is from my admittedly limited point of view. Mornings are the best, in that there is little traffic. A huge chunk of society is either not working or working from home. This means no need to get up at oh-dark-thirty and hit the road, so most folks don’t. For those of us who want or need to be out and about early, this is good news.
The news changes somewhere between 10 and 11 in the morning, though, as folks finally start to roll out of the rack and take to the streets. Traffic escalates to about what I would consider pre-pandemic levels at midday.
By 4 in the afternoon, the streets and highways are choked. People are largely done with whatever they were doing at home, and now they’ve got cabin fever. So they hop in the car and go, in numbers that make me pine for the traffic jams of 2019. Where is everyone going? I suppose there is a percentage who are doing “essential” tasks such as: shopping for groceries or other essential items, health care appointments, and car maintenance/repair. But I would bet a very large sum of money these essential tasks do not account for nearly half of the traffic. Weekends are pretty much a repeat of this afternoon traffic, but on steroids.
So the next question would be: why? Why are people needlessly tooling around town when they know there is a pandemic ramping up yet again? I think there are probably some complicated answers that eggheads at our institutes of higher learning could formulate, but it boils down to people just don’t care.
As far as the next question of why don’t people care, when they certainly have got to have at least a few family members and friends who are vulnerable to COVID-19, and if nothing else self-preservation should kick in: I don’t have an answer. Maybe our need to have what we think is a “good time” is the strongest need of all. Maybe in this simulation the variables are tweaked in favor of the virus. Maybe it’s FOMO, or maybe it’s something completely unrelated. Whatever it is, it’s happening and it will ensure we won’t be done with COVID anytime soon.
Bike Newbie 