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WotD: Half-measures
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
If you are going to do something, do it right the first time. Don’t play around with half-measures.
Half measures are actions or plans that only achieve part of what you intended to achieve.
In my personal opinion, in Western countries, the coronavirus pandemic has been as bad as it has been due to half measures taken by governments.
Lockdowns began late and ended too early.
Quarantine policies were also lax and shoddily imposed.
Look at Japan and the Diamond Princess.
A quarantine was never strictly enforced.
Infected Japanese were allowed to walk off the ship and take public transportation home.
After arriving home, they were asked to stay there for two weeks.
Most recently, how about the quasi-state of emergency measures enacted in some places?
Heck, by definition, mambo-what-ever-it-is is half measures.
Many Japanese can’t even pronounce its name, for cripes’ sake.
A state of emergency here is simply a request to avoid the three Cs of closed spaces, crowded places, and close-contact settings.
If you live in a city, that is impossible.
I’m not sure about how you feel, but I am flabbergasted, and the blatant half measures the government tries to sell as ‘doing all it can.’
Yes, I am doing a little Japan-bashing here, but I live here, so the half-measures affect my life directly.
Of course, the United States takes the cake for tragic half-measures.
It took them months to decide on the benefits of wearing surgical masks.
The UK’s Boris Johnson denied the severity of the pandemic until he was rushed to hospital.
After recovering, he quickly changed his tune.
England has recently emerged from a 3-month total shutdown.
Half measures are ineffective and sometimes dangerous.
If you’re going to do something, do it right the first time.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 66.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.