AS I SEE IT
By Neal A. Shipman
Farmer Editor
The world and the United States have come a long way since the first part of 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic began. The world has lived through a myriad of health-related mandates and protocols ranging from closing businesses, cancelling community events, forcing schools to go to online education, enacting mandatory mask requirements and requiring vaccinations for certain professions all in an attempt to curtail the spread of the virus.
As the world and the United States finally appears to be moving out of the pandemic and accepting the reality that the virus is just going to be something that everyone is going to have to live with, the question that many people ask is, “was it necessary for the government to impose all of those mandates?”
The short answer is probably yes. The word, probably, being the key adjective. COVID-19 was no doubt extremely contagious and resulted in 5.98 million deaths worldwide and 955,000 in the United States. Even though North Dakota is a remote and sparsely populated state, it was not immune from the impacts of the virus as 2,205 state residents and 25 McKenzie County residents died from the coronavirus.