From South Orange Village President Sheena Collum via Facebook on May 2, 2020:
I just need to get this off my chest. It really worried me when the Governor opened “golf”. It’s not essential, not even a tiny little bit. And if you’re anything like me, you hear “golf is open” and it takes your brain to “well if GOLF is ok, then x, y, and z should be perfectly fine as well, right?” I can’t tell you how many people contacted me immediately after and started asking about “tennis” and “basketball” and “fields” and all this other non-essential stuff.
I understand that on a state-level, there will be an “easing” of restrictions gradually but we are in the hot zone and not all regions are the same. We are in the NYC metropolitan region, the epicenter worldwide, and the heat map of northern NJ is still crappy to be honest. In fact, 2 out of 4 deaths in our OWN town occurred yesterday and now today. Essex County has roughly 250 NEW positives, and 25 deaths TODAY.
If you want to know what’s happening in this brain of mine, I’m continuously hoping for bad weather – the kind that makes nobody want to go out. A nice downpour for the next two weeks would make me slightly happy.
If you have the luxury of not being an essential worker, please consider giving it a little more time before you start feeling that we’re in some kind of comfort zone.
I’ve received over 50 emails/tags/texts/calls today of sightings of people not social distancing or not wearing masks or having rather large backyard functions…
You’ve all done really well for the past six weeks. This is about choices and mitigating risks. If you were able to do several weeks so successfully, please just do a couple more until there is more data.
I worry about all of you, I love you a lot – please don’t let your guard down, not yet. Thanks for reading.
