New virus name?
Would it be possible to change the name COVID-19 to CURTAIL-19?
That’s what it seems to be doing.
Steven Hurt
Keaau
Honua Ola needed
I agree with Derek Kurisu (“Hawaii Island needs Honua Ola Bioenergy’s power now,” Star-Advertiser, June 22) that state agencies should be doing everything possible to encourage job-creating projects.
My parents and six siblings grew up in the same sugar plantation where the Honua Ola Bioenergy plant is located. The government workers should be helping people create visions for the future. Where there is no vision, the people perish. If one does not work, how does one feed the family?
Many have opined that the Hawaii economy needs to be diversified. Many of us remember the closing of the sugar plantations. The state Public Utilities Commission should act justly and remember that we are in this together, and together we can overcome the economic problems.
Big Islanders are looking for an opportunity to gain self-respect and improve society as a whole.
Earl Nakasato
Kurtistown
‘People must die’
One wonders at President Donald Trump and the Republican governors who support him in their resistance to implementing the most basic defense against the spread of the COVID virus: wearing masks and maintaining social distance. They claim letting down COVID-19 restrictions is necessary to prevent the economy from tanking.
We see the result of this in the United States as the infection rate rises, and with a lag time of a few weeks, the death rate is starting to climb.
This is a Stalinist approach to governance. As in a war, many, many people must die for the “collective good” of the economy.
In the early 1930s, Joseph Stalin appropriated all the grain production of the Ukraine to fund industrialization of the Soviet Union, thereby subjecting the Ukrainian people to mass death by starvation.
In the modern United States, the idea is that as the COVID-19 death rate rises, your friends, neighbors, relatives and maybe you must die in order to provide the “collective good” of economic stability.
The alternative is that if most everyone wore masks and kept social distance for eight to 10 weeks, the COVID-19 virus would die out for lack of sufficient human hosts. Then we could most all survive awaiting the arrival of an effective vaccine.
William Mautz
Kurtistown