Dear editor,
The current (COVID-19) situation we鈥檙e in has been called 鈥榰nprecedented.鈥� It sure is! The amount of global co-operation by politicians and people certainly is. The scientists are giving advice, and the politicians and people are acting on it. Wow!
Let us place the blame on COVID-19 becoming a pandemic squarely where it belongs. Travellers. People who like to travel by air and cruise ships here there and everywhere, bringing home with them not just interesting spices, but also interesting, novel diseases. The virus did not come to our shores on a product made in China. It came in a traveller鈥檚 lungs. Do not blame the people who live in the region where the pandemic started.
I wonder if our government will be brave enough to not allow people to travel to areas where pandemics are known to form? As long as people freely travel around the globe, pandemics will occur again and again. The next one might be deadly to younger, healthy people.
It is a tragedy that we cannot also listen to another group of scientists: climate scientists. People have died, and will continue to die in unprecedented heat waves, new diseases spreading into new areas, fighting forest fires, drowning in 鈥榦nce in a century鈥� floods (that have been happening all too frequently - even in Fort McMurray) and other extreme, normally rare, weather events. Those lives don鈥檛 matter?
So, while you bang your pots and honk your horns giving thanks to those you think are saving people, please also do your part to decrease your contribution to climate change to avert another global disaster for which there will not be any pharmaceutical remedy: catastrophic climate change. Don鈥檛 fly to exotic locations (don鈥檛 fly anywhere), don鈥檛 go on a cruise, drive only when needed, not because you want to. Can you do that? Do you care to do that?
Crayg Liszt,
Comox
