Is COVID-19 bringing NJ together or tearing us apart? (Opinion)

If you left your house on Sunday to go to the supermarket, pharmacy or any other "essential" business, you saw how eerily quiet it was.

Some people got freaked out and depressed by the whole thing. Many people are concerned how our mental and emotional stability will hold up through this shutdown. People I've talked to are less concerned about getting COVID-19 and more concerned with all the things this shutdown will bring: loss of income, total loss of businesses, accrued debt, social disruption from not seeing elderly loved ones to just not being able to socialize at all.

People are judging you if you're out, or judging you for where you're going out to. If you have a guaranteed public sector job, the people in the private sector see you as having nothing to worry about, unless you're still working. The rest have been sidelined but will still get paid. There's resentment there. I have a family member who went into a drug store to get a sports drink after golf on Saturday. He heard the woman behind the counter tell another employee, "Yeah that was really necessary to come in here for one drink!"

Nerves are frayed and it's only going to get harder to keep your cool the longer this shutdown lasts.

The approach we've taken is absolutely the wrong one in my opinion. To turn everyone's life upside down for something that we can defeat in other ways is insanity. Focus on protecting and limiting the vulnerable and let everyone else develop immunities on their own.

We're told by our State Health Commissioner we're all going to get it and the majority of people will have a mild case or be asymptomatic. Why don't we brace for the impact by protecting those in most danger and put public money into scarce medical resources to treat this?

So far this year, we've had 27 fatalities from this, and our hearts go out to the families of those we've lost. Our hearts also go out to the 104 people we've lost in car accidents this year. Did the governor close all the roads this weekend too? I may have missed it if he did. I was busy looking up all the statistics on all of the much more lethal things that kill us every year.

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