Our shared experiences can bring us together

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a huge impact on everyone’s day-to-day life worldwide, creating increasingly higher levels of alarm. But there could very well be a bright side waiting behind the darkening clouds.

Such a global event can’t help but to leave lasting changes once it begins to subside. Perhaps priorities might be altered, empathy toward others enhanced and the concept of cooperation revisited. Just about everyone on this planet is experiencing similar inconveniences, anxiety and fear, so in that regard we are all going through this experience together. That can be a unifying force.

It is more than a little ironic that what forces us to separate might in the long run bring us together.

Kurt Lemon

Kailua

Disbanding pandemic response group wrong

After taking office, President Donald Trump disbanded the National Security Agency’s pandemic response group. Public health experts had criticized the 2018 decision and said that Trump did not see pandemics as a threat to the nation.

Experts said that eliminating the group had detrimentally delayed any coordinated response to the COVID-19 outbreak.

When asked about the closure, he said that he did not know anything about it and that they are responding quickly and saving countless lives.

Joshua Lederberg, the late Nobel Prize-winning biologist, said, “The single biggest threat to man’s continued dominance on this planet is the virus.”

SARS and MERS should have brought pandemic responses to the forefront. With modern transportation being able to carry people anywhere in the world in a matter of hours, a pandemic can be spread globally in a matter of days.

Now we are in a catch-up mode. We will never know how many lives could have been saved if Trump heeded the experts.

Jon Shimamoto

Mililani

Democrats, media smear Trump with ‘hoax’ charge

It is not surprising that Democrats and their media allies (see the Star-Advertiser editorial cartoon on March 17) have invented a new hoax intended to smear President Donald Trump.

They hypocritically began to use the COVID-19 virus pandemic to blame Trump for his allegedly inadequate response to the outbreak.

Trump responded to these allegations during a rally in South Carolina, calling their politicization of the coronavirus “the new hoax.”

The media and Democrats then alleged that Trump had called the virus a hoax. After Politico’s story repeating the false claim, they were flagged by Facebook fact-checkers as fake news.

The president stated at the South Carolina rally: “They tried the impeachment hoax … They tried anything. They tried it over and over … They lost … And this is their new hoax.”

Carol R. White

Makiki

Store should prevent hoarding by shoppers

I am completely dismayed with the management attitude regarding the hoarding by shoppers at the Safeway stores I shop at in Ewa Beach and Kapolei. I watched in shock as people literally used their arms to clear canned goods from a shelf, leaving nothing for other people in the aisle. I saw carts full of laundry detergent, and more paper napkins and plates than at a 1,000-person wedding reception. Absolutely ridiculous.

When I complained to management, the response was, What can we do? This passive lack of respect for all of their customers is unacceptable. They can limit this.

Steve Kelsey

Ewa Beach

Low air fares bring tourists to Hawaii

I am a kamaaina who thinks that the air fares of $197 round-trip from San Francisco are encouraging people to visit the islands. Ordinarily that would be a good thing, but not now. They may bring with them disease, get sick and become our problem. They will take resources away from local people.

Our airports should be “transit only” unless travelers can prove they live in Hawaii.

“May you live in interesting times,” as the old Chinese proverb says.

We do indeed.

Judi Moore

Waialae Nui Ridge

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