Curfew needed
Dear Mayor Kim: I am a Hilo homeowner, pay my taxes and abide by the laws.
My daughter is an ER nurse at Hilo Medical Center, and her husband is a pediatrician in private practice in Hilo. They have two beautiful little girls.
I am writing to urge you to impose an islandwide stay-at-home order with a 9 p.m.-5 a.m. curfew and road blocks similar to those Mayor Derek Kawakami implemented on my island home, Kauai.
This is necessary because too many people are not taking this pandemic seriously. Your failure to impose necessary restraints is placing the lives of our health care professionals, such as my daughter and son-in-law, at risk.
Why are you risking their lives for individual freedoms that, if restricted during the coming month, could not only save the lives of our doctors and nurses when this pandemic really hits the islands (projected to peak in mid to late April), but save their patients’ lives?
You should be putting the safety of our health care professionals FIRST. That should be your foremost concern. They are the frontline soldiers in this war. We should be doing everything we can to support them, even if it means restricting our personal freedoms.
If you were a general, would you risk the lives of your frontline soldiers by letting the reinforcements leave the battlefield? No, of course not. All eyes must be on the battlefield.
Whether we are doing the fighting or not, we must all support the war.
Those of us who are not health care professionals can provide support and reinforcement by doing our part to shelter in place, accept curfews and roadblocks and stay within our communities.
As we know, the virus doesn’t move. We move. So if we all stay in place, we can win this war.
Teresa Tico
Hanalei, Kauai
Bailout for renters?
So it’s April 1, and rent is due.
I heard on NPR yesterday that U.S. renters pay $40 billion per month for their rental homes.
Imagine if that were all paid for six months, a total of $240 billion, by a renter bailout.
Renters would be safe in their homes, landlords could pay their mortgages, pay their plumbers, electricians, insurance, trash, bookkeepers, etc., and all of them could then pay their bills.
Such a “bailout” would only be one-quarter of the $2 trillion already designated by Congress during this incredible time, and less than half that already designated for corporations.
I hope during this crisis that our nation realizes that the “Golden Goose” of our fabulous economy is not the banks, the hedge funds, the mortgage markets, the insurance companies. The real “Golden Goose” is all the consumer-workers who keep all those “too-big-to-fail institutions” going.
Andrea Rosanoff
Pahoa