I’m sure everyone has heard of “Beer Goggles”. It’s the idea that the more beer you drink, the better people look, and sometimes you end up spending the night with someone who doesn’t look quite as attractive when you wake up in the morning.
When you drink a lot of beer, it’s not that your standards decrease, it’s that you start to believe things are different than they really are.
We all should know by now that the elderly and infirm are more susceptible to being killed by COVID-19. Nursing homes and other long-term care facilities have been hit especially hard because many of the patients in those facilities are already circling the drain. Even the CDC admits that 94% of the people who are counted as having died with COVID-19 as a cause were already dying from something else.
I think there’s a similar concept I call “COVID Goggles”. The concept behind COVID Goggles is that the more you drink the COVID Kool-Aid, the more you forget that COVID-19 generally only kills people who were already close to death.
One of the favorite arguments used is that, if you don’t follow the rules, you’re going to “kill grandma”. When you think of the grandma that we’re saving by following such severe lockdowns, what type of person do you imagine? Do you imagine a grandma that bakes cookies for you or do you imagine a grandma that is in the final stages of Alzheimer’s? How about a grandma that has slipped into a coma and will never again wake before dying in a few days?
Because of COVID goggles, people believe that the grandma that they’re saving is one that is currently alive and well and brings the pumpkin pie to all the family celebrations. You know, the kind that likes to wear velour track suits, knits mittens for grandkids and kicks your ass at Scrabble.
But, you don’t get to choose which grandma you save.
So, the lockdowns may give the coma grandma an extra week or two of “life” and at the same time destroy the business of a young couple with a kid on the way. While the grandma with Alzheimer’s might spend a few more weeks living in whatever hell that disease brings, a single mom has lost her restaurant job. A grandma with terminal cancer spends her final days alone and whacked out on morphine because the pain is simply unbearable, and another family ends up on welfare.
We need to consider the quality of the lives saved and contrast that to the potential lost by continuing the lockdowns.
Now, consider a grandma that can no longer live at home but treasures the weekly visits by her grandkids. But, she’s not allowed to have visitors. No more hugs from family and no more day trips to visit them. She has yet to hold her first great-granddaughter. She might never do so. She’s forced to stay in her room and can’t socialize with her friends. This grandma’s quality of life has been reduced to a point where she’s no longer living, she’s surviving.
COVID Goggles force you to see things in black and white. They make you focus solely on extending lives and not consider the quality of those lives. They blind you to the damage being done and future potential lost. COVID Goggles hide the fact that when you take away from them the things that make life worth living, you end up with people simply waiting to die.
