Letter: My thoughts on meeting

In response to the comments from a couple of citizens during the most recent City Council meeting, I have a few comments of my own:

Yes, Mr. Gitlin, the taxpayers may end up paying for mandatory testing programs. But who do you suppose is going to end up paying for days, weeks and/or months spent in the ICU for COVID-19 sufferers? Speaking as a taxpayer, I’d much rather end up covering the bills for testing to prevent COVID than the increased insurance and health care costs that will be the caused by the millions (possibly billions eventually?) of dollars spent to treat COVID patients. Remember that adage, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”?

Mr. Barnes, is it really true you consider it “lunacy” to mandate testing in an attempt to prevent COVID spread? Maybe you are old enough to remember rationing books during WWII? (During WWII ration books and tokens were issued to each family in the U.S. These dictated how much food, gasoline, tires, clothes and other items that one person could purchase.) Would you have been “astounded” and considered it “lunacy” to ask U.S. citizens to support the war effort by having their purchases limited? Fortunately, the majority of U.S. citizens willingly followed the directive of their president and accepted the sacrifice to benefit the war effort. BTW, in case you’ve lost count, COVID has already taken the lives of more U.S. citizens than WWII did.

Instead of continuing to fuel the great COVID divide in our county and our country, you might encourage your followers to at least give a try to the measures our elected representatives have adopted. It’s possible you’ll find that their mandates work at limiting the spread of this deadly and very costly virus.

Diane Weir

Crescent City