When we last left off this column, the election was ending and the transition into what comes next was slowly beginning. However, it feels like the primary story now isn’t anything new. Rather, it’s the thing that’s engulfed all of our lives over the last nine months or so: the COVID-19 pandemic, and how America as a society deals with it in particular.
During my travels, I have met people on one extreme of this discussion who believe that America should follow the lead of some other countries and lock everyone in their homes and allow the government to bring them food and supplies until the crisis ends. I’ve also met people on the other extreme who somehow do not believe that COVID-19 even exists, in spite of the over 200,000 people in the U.S. alone who have died. Suffice it to say, the beliefs of the former are impractical in this country at the very minimum and the beliefs of the latter are ludicrous at best.
In between these two extremes, most people seem to agree on two general principles: staying safe from COVID-19 is important and getting things back to normal is also important. The difference among that wide swath of people in the middle of the spectrum comes in whether they place safety first or getting things back to normal first.
People in the safety camp believe that defeating the pandemic is the only way that things can truly get back to normal and that should be the focus of everyday life given the consequences of the alternative. People in the back to normal camp accept basic safety measures, but believe the importance of everyday life is something that cannot be fully cancelled regardless of the inherent dangers of the pandemic.
In the end, the borders between these two camps seem to be fluid as the country tries to adapt in a way that achieves safety while maintaining normality until all of this ends. Therein lies the problem: there seems to be no clear consensus regarding the balance of those two desires.
A cynical view of the situation may posit that it could be impossible for any consensus to ever emerge given the complexity of the pandemic, conveying that complexity in a simple and consistent way that fits an increasingly overloaded clamor for an average person’s attention and the difficulty in finding a universal consensus on anything given how divided our society has become.
During the discussion a few weeks back regarding a mask mandate in Manchester, Ward 9 Alderman Barbara Shaw said a mandate was not needed because 90 percent of people in the city already wear masks, and I was curious if that was true.
Around 5 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 14, I walked up and down Elm Street from Lowell Street to Merrimack Street and back and took a video on my phone to see how many people were wearing masks and how many weren’t. From my count, nine people wore masks, three people had masks on their chins but not over their nose and mouth, 19 people had no mask on and I couldn’t tell with three people because parts of Elm Street are much darker than you’d think the most walked street in New Hampshire’s largest city would be. Near the end, a guy asked me what I was doing and I told him about the meeting. Honestly, I was surprised that I walked up and down Elm Street holding a camera horizontally while walking and nobody said anything up until that point.
At some point, I’d like to try this experiment again with better video equipment and perhaps more people out on Elm Street in a full story, even if it can’t fully prove or disprove Shaw’s hypothesis since maybe some of those people are wearing masks indoors or when they expected to be within six feet of people or in situations where they are asked to or maybe they normally wear masks and occasionally they just forget.
On Monday, the next flashpoint in balance between safety and normalcy will be coming at the Board of School Committee as they decide whether or not to make almost all education in the city’s public schools into remote learning from Nov. 30 to Jan. 17.
Like society at large, the Board of School Committee and the Manchester School District’s administration has noted the two camps and their context regarding learning; the safety of students and school staff is paramount and in-person learning is superior to remote learning. Those two facts have not been disputed by anyone in past meetings, the only question is whether in-person learning can be adapted in a way to ensure a safe environment in Manchester’s schools.
Monday’s decision may become academic in regard to the school district’s short-term response as classes will automatically become remote if there are 14 straight days with a rolling average of 10 or more new cases of COVID-19 per 100,000 people over the prior 14 days in the city. As of Nov. 13, 10 of 14 days were above that threshold and the figure almost double from a week earlier. But Monday’s decision in addressing a balance between safety and normalcy has already happened countless times at every level of society since the pandemic began and unfortunately it is a question that cannot be avoided until the pandemic ends.
