Stay at home

Riley Cornelius, Opinion Writer

When you have the right friends by your side you can accomplish anything. But what happens when you are not allowed to be by each other’s sides physically?

I get people want to see their friends and it’s hard to stay in the house for weeks on end. Trust me, I want to get out as much as the next person does. But please, take a minute and be thankful for the people you do have at home like your siblings, and possibly even your parents. I have no siblings to be with during this pandemic and my parents are both working in the hospitals.

It’s not even just my parents who are doing this, it’s my aunt, my old babysitter, family friends and so many other people. But it’s not just me. Everyone is connected to a healthcare worker. They are not just these amazing heroes in the media, they are someone’s family.

I try not to think about my parents getting sick but it’s scary thinking about how my parents are getting exposed constantly. I have read stories about families who have lost multiple members to the coronavirus. I don’t know what I would do if I lost my parents because they were helping someone who decided going out was better than being safe at home.

A lot of people are pushing for a stay at home order to be issued by Governor Kim Reynolds because people are still going out and seeing their friends and families. Issuing a stay at home order, however, would not be beneficial to Iowa, nor is that the answer. Iowa has already implemented more restrictions than most other states.

States that have stay at home orders have fairly very lenient orders. In Arizona, beauty salons and barber shops are allowed to remain open. In Iowa, beauty salons have been closed for weeks. Other states allow malls, bowling lanes and other places that most would consider non-essential to remain open.

But what about the people going out and hanging out with their friends? The people who are going out right now would probably go out anyway, even if there was a stay at home order. Those people will continue to go out until they are caught by law enforcement. Those are the people who think “I’m young, I’ll never get sick.” Maybe they are right, maybe they won’t get sick. They might just be carriers who then go on to spread COVID-19 to others. These people think that because they are only going out and seeing one person they cannot get sick. Except it only takes one person to infect a whole community.

The next time you want to go out, think about who you could potentially be infecting. Instead, find other methods to stay connected like FaceTime or Zoom. Is seeing your best friend physically at least once a week really worth the damage and pain it could bring to someone’s family?