The Corona Confederacy

Some of the states from the old Southern Confederacy are to be among the first to reopen in the wake of the COVID-19 plague. South Carolina, Georgia, my home state of Tennessee, and super-state Texas are starting to emerge from shutdown. Though some may characterize us as ignorant and our action to awaken our economy as premature, governors of these states are taking measured steps to ensure deaths from an economic depression do not exceed anything the Novel Coronavirus could throw at us. We balance risk every day. Some in these states will be sickened and even die from COVID, but people are dying from the virus during the shutdown as well. I pray effective treatments and a vaccine rapidly become available, but we can not fall into an unrecoverable economic depression because that will kill people in great numbers as well.