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Here's the thing about social distancing, what we were all asked to do back in March or start doing back in March.

Here's the thing about telling people to stay home and close down their businesses and stop seeing friends and family.

It was supposed to be temporary. It wasn't supposed to be

something we would be doing until a vaccine came along in a year or two or three or four. It was

something we were asked to do. It was something we needed to do, something many of us were

required to do, something all of us should have been required to do while public health systems were

created that would allow us to leave the house again and go back to work and see friends and

maybe even get laid. And it was a very difficult thing that we were asked to do. And while we did

our part, while we sheltered at home, while we canceled weddings, while we let loved ones die alone and then

zoomed in for their funerals. The government was supposed to be doing its part. It was supposed to

make tests widely available and create a system of contact tracing and require people who had

COVID-19 or had been exposed to people who had COVID-19 to stay home, to quarantine themselves.

The government was supposed to create protocols that would protect the most vulnerable

while allowing the rest of us to return to some semblance of normal life, or the rest of you,

I should say, as I count myself among the vulnerable.

And that wasn't an irrational expectation.

It's literally what governments did in Europe and China and South Korea and Canada and Rwanda. And it worked. You've doubtless seen the graphs that are zooming around online. Graffs that show our cases of COVID-19 rising at pretty much the same pace as other countries. Then everyone takes a dip when lockdowns are instituted all over the world, us included.

But our trend lines quickly begin to rise while the trend lines in other countries all over the world fall.

Those were the countries that made tests widely available and required the sick or the exposed to quarantine themselves.

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