This edition of “Our Voices” comes from Kerry Goosby, an Air Force veteran, photographer and lifelong Redskins fan. 

I’ll begin my opinion piece by rating the Trump administration and the CDC task force response to the COVID-19 virus as a B+. I give them this rating mainly because of messaging to the American public.

They did their best professional efforts to curb the spread of the virus nationwide and their attempt to develop a cure/vaccination to help the severely affected victims or save them from a fatal conclusion due to this epidemic. It is without a doubt where the origins of this COVID-19 virus began and many believe the always seclusive Chinese government failed the entire world by withholding complete information about the severity of the virus until many people had begun being diagnosed with the virus outside of their borders. Once the Trump administration had learned of this COVID-19 virus affecting some of our fellow Americans and those attempting to enter our country, the President made the critical, and to some of his critics, controversial decision to block all travelers from countries potentially infected by the virus in huge quantities of their people from entering the United States.

I have watched nearly every daily press conference that President Trump and his COVID-19 task force have conducted. It seems that other than some obvious attempts by the media to draw out information from the medical experts that would appear to contradict just about every word that the President speaks, it seems that the most common sense answers and guideline steps have been put into place by this group of people. Their goal is to try to safeguard the country as a whole form this virus, while at the same time creating limited ways that ensure their ideas of “social distancing” still allows critical businesses to remain open like grocery stores for food, gas stations that are needed for essential travel and some restaurants that have gone into “order-to-go” mode. I find the President’s ambitious goal to begin re-opening portions of the country to get back to normalcy by this upcoming Easter weekend, depending on assessments of virus level infections in those areas by the CDC and other medical professionals, is a positive aspiration for many in this country. The deadline may not be achieved, depending on how much the virus hits an upward or downward curve at that time. However for many who have their varying opinions on what this virus has done to their personal livelihood, how it’s affected their children’s education from this disruption, and the stress that many feel is a great responsibility of losing their jobs or the companies they work for going out of business, working towards reopening this country to normal as soon as possible is the right thing to do.