Over the weekend, places like Myrtle Beach reopened its door for guests after South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster announced that he would be lifting the state’s mandatory stay-at-home order due to the COVID-19, or the novel coronavirus, pandemic on Monday. Georgia also announced that businesses would also be able to slowly start reopening. Despite the green light from their state governments, many Americans feel that political leaders are lifting the ban too soon.
A recent poll conducted by Piplsay showed that 64% of Americans do not think that country is ready to lift the ban in May and want social distancing to remain in place for some time. Forty-five percent disapprove of President Trump promoting clinical treatments that have not been fully proven to work by the CDC.
Many experts have come forward to give their predictions of when the viral outbreak will end and many have grim outlooks stating it would be several months before the country would be ready to lift the ban. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes, Laurie Garrett, gave her advice about the current pandemic. Her 1994 best-seller, The Coming Plague, predicted many scenarios as a result of the coronavirus outbreak
“I’m quite certain that this is going to go in waves,” she added. “It won’t be a tsunami that comes across America all at once and then retreats all at once,” said Garrett to the New York Times. “It will be micro-waves that shoot up in Des Moines and then in New Orleans and then in Houston and so on, and it’s going to affect how people think about all kinds of things.”
Garrett warns that Americans need to be ready for a new world as a result of the outbreak, stating people should let go of the idea of things going back to “normal.” “They’ll re-evaluate the importance of travel,” she continued. “They’ll reassess their use of mass transit. They’ll revisit the need for face-to-face business meetings. They’ll reappraise having their kids go to college out of state.”