Virus has been a familiar word for a long time. Since the internet came on the scene, people have been finding ways to ruin computer systems by sending programs that can cause mayhem in one form or another.
Antivirus programs have spawned a whole industry as companies try to keep ahead of hackers. My computer system is from Microsoft, and free updates are sent out almost weekly to help solve the virus dilemma. Hackers and internet providers recognize the importance of the issue. The internet has become a necessary tool regardless of whether it’s used for communication or for selling products or services. Imagine if the internet disappeared, and everyone was relegated to sending snail mail again.
Worrying about computer viruses almost has been lost in 2020 as COVID-19 entered the picture. Over the course of 10 months, the COVID-19 threat has risen and fallen depending on the month. What once looked like a manageable event now seems to have no real end in sight.
Management of COVID-19 varies state by state. Our offices are in Illinois. Daily briefings from the Illinois governor in the spring explained the dangers involved. Illinois residents were told to remain quarantined, wear face masks and maintain safe distancing.
Milwaukee is only 70 miles north of Chicago. Random choices of 100 people from Milwaukee and Chicago would show the same homogeneous mixture of races, ages and gender. In early summer, a newspaper picture showed a tavern full of smiling people in Janesville, Wisconsin, hoisting their beer mugs into the air. Just a few miles away in Illinois, we were still in quarantine.
As a second wave of people who have COVID-19 problems appeared, the governor of Wisconsin suddenly issued an order to set limits on how many people could meet together. I call this a top-down approach. You are asking millions of people to forget what they learned before and take on new rules. Naturally there’s some resistance.
Results speak for themselves. In the latest findings, daily tests in Wisconsin show an average of 26 percent testing positive for COVID-19. Daily tests in Illinois show an average of 5 percent testing positive. No positive-test findings are acceptable, but the bottom-up approach of immediately training people as to what’s happening is much better than waiting and trying to retrain people at a later date.
Our locksmith business is fortunate because most jobs involve one customer, not a whole group. If you’re wearing a mask and maintaining a six-foot distance, this is the best you can do to avoid the virus. If your customer refuses to wear a mask, I would recommend not doing the job. After you catch COVID-19, there’s no turning back.
