A very, very small number indeed!

"We understand the starfish story, we understand the John Donne quote - but we also understand reality. We can't go on this way. If we do, it will be the end of so many things we hold dear." 

There is an old story about a young boy on a beach. After the tide had gone out, thousands of starfish were trapped on the beach. Before the tide would back in, the starfish would surely die. So the boy started picking them up, one by one, and throwing them back into the ocean.

An older gentleman, who was out for a walk on the beach, saw the boy doing this. He came up to the boy and said, "Why are you doing this? You can never save them all. Do you think you will make a difference by doing this". The young boy, holding a starfish in his hand, looked up at the man and said, "You are right sir. I can't save them all. But I can save this one."

Why recite this old story? Numbers. I am going to again address numbers, as they relate to COVID. But first I will quote the President. "One American death from this disease, is one too many." We can talk about how low our numbers are in the scheme of things, but each person who dies is a father, or mother, or son, or daughter, or something in someone's life.
As John Donne said many years ago, "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind..."

And now the numbers. The local media has reported that of the 301 COVID deaths in Minnesota so far, 78% have resulted from allowing this virus to get into our long term care facilities. If we could have avoided that intrusion, our death toll to date would be less than 100 in Minnesota alone. That would mean the chance of dying from this disease would be 
100 divided by a population of 5,700,000. You know the math. The resulting number is so small, it borders on insignificant.

Albert Einstein is quoted to have said, "We still don't know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us." Is that a correct number? No. It was for illustration. Einstein's purpose of using this number was to come up with a very, very small number. The same is true for the statistics of COVID - 19. The chances of catching this disease, the chances of ending up in the hospital, the chances of going into ICU, and the chance of dying from COVID - 19, are very, very small numbers.

Coming home from Sam's Club yesterday, we drove through Riverdale Shopping Center in Coon Rapids. Every time we have driven though Riverdale since this COVID thing started, I am amazed on how desolate this once busy shopping center has become. Much of it looks like a ghost town. Some of these shops will not survive. And why have we done this? Why are we killing our economy?Because of a very, very small number. For that number, our Governor, as well as many other leaders in the world - flinched.

For the sake of the citizens of the world, for the sake of our sanity, for the sake of our lost normalcy - I am proclaiming May 4th as OPEN IT BACK UP DAY! We are done playing duck and cover with this very, very small number. We understand the starfish story, we understand the John Donne quote - but we also understand reality. We can't go on this way. If we do, it will be the end of so many things we hold dear.