Our community’s economy was booming, new businesses were opening and thriving, people were moving into the area, and our unemployment rate was incredibly low. Social distancing was enforced making businesses and public places limit their occupancy eventually leading them to temporarily close their doors. Soon after Colorado’s stay-at-home order was enforced, making all non-essential businesses close. Hair salons, barbershops, clothing stores, gyms, pet groomers, and malls were completely closed. Our community was told to stay home and only leave for essential purposes such as grocery shopping and emergency medical care visits.

One of the biggest things from this pandemic and response that has affected me the most besides staying at home was the constricted hospital rules. My sister was pregnant with her firstchild kid, which would be my parent’s first grandchild and my first nephew. As her due date was set on May 3rd, we hoped that the pandemic’s effect on the hospital regulations had lessened a little and that we would have the opportunity to be present at the hospital for the birth of my nephew, but due to complications with my sister’s pregnancy, he was born 3 weeks early on April 14th. With the new regulations at hospitals worldwide, the only person that could be present for the birth/ visit was my brother-in-law. I wish that we could’ve had the opportunity to be there, but meeting him when they got to come home was just as special.   

    Yes, I think that social distancing has been a key part of slowing the spread of COVID-19 and the stay-at-home order was effective, but we have been under this shut-down planet for over 5 weeks and enough is enough. Yes, when our community opens, I think that social distancing will be effective for keeping our cases of COVID-19 under control, but we need to get back to our lives.

Our community has been greatly impacted by this elongated order in many ways. For example, many of my friends and I were laid off due to so many businesses closing, people are working fewer hours than normal so more people can stay employed, and many people are being completely let go after working somewhere for decades. How long are we going to let this extended order ruin our economy and our community? 

I completely understand if you have an underlying health condition or if you are a part of the elderly population and want to self-quarantine and social distance, but for those of us that are not included in those criteria, we should now be able to go back into public, work, go back to school, go shopping, and get back into our daily routines. Our county has capped at 34 cases of COVID-19  a couple of weeks ago and nowhere near half were hospitalized or in critical condition. We should now have the chance to find somewhat of normalcy in our community and hopefully recover from this event.

Although all of our lives have been put on pause for these long 5 weeks, hopefully, everyone impacted has the opportunity to recover and our community can begin booming again and continues to grow.