I was never against anything that can easily be done with social distancing like fishing, hiking, or even golf. There were plenty of shutdown procedures instituted in other countries that we could have adopted as well though. You can shutdown and still allow limited access to essentials, and make getting those essentials as safe as possible. My local liquor store and grocery store were packed nearly every day during our shutdown. Packed with plenty of people not wearing masks. Traffic was honestly not much different than normal. Just read about other countries and how they approached this. Our approach was pretty obviously less serious, and it seems now we have given up completely. We are ready to open major theme parks while numbers are setting records. We probably never should have shut down if that was the best effort we were going to give.
I didn't visit a liquor store, but the local grocery stores were limiting occupancy.
I have been working from home mostly since mid-March, but I have gone to my office some. In early May, after "re-opening" in Georgia, I drove on I-20 and entered the connector during what would have been rush hour three days in a row. There was no slowdown on I-20 into the city. There was no slowdown on the ramp to the connector. There was no slowdown on the connector. Pre-shutdown all of those areas would have had slow downs, and the ramp to the connector would have been stop and go. Where did you drive in late March and April that the traffic congestion was "not much different than normal"?
I went to Universal Studios a week and a half ago, so I have attended a major theme park already. They conducted daily temperature checks. They required masks to be worn, even though the temperature was in the high 80s lower 90s with high humidity. That wasn't exactly comfortable, but it was tolerable. It is now 11 days since I left Universal and I don't have any symptoms yet.
As I stated before, immediately after the shutdown officials should have looked for things that could have been relaxed without spreading the virus. Instead things were added, such as Michigan prohibiting a person from driving to a second home even to check for basement flooding after rain. Officials and businesses should have been looking at ways to operate more businesses with precautions. Instead we got extremes of: Nothing at all can reopen under any circumstances whatsoever to I have the "freedom" to go into a privately owned business without a mask even if the owner makes it a requirement to enter their property. There were many things that could have been reasonable relaxed, but I guess discussing such things reasonably is too difficult for people who either say "no" to everything or "you can't stop me" to everything.
I think the big problem now is that people have completely stopped listening. Political leaders in both parties have been polarizing. The media has been exploitative and polarizing. When all of the public discussion is basically people taking extreme positions and yelling at each other, why should people listen?
