The question you need to be asking right now, regardless of your politics, is: how can I stop the spread of COVID-19 in my community? Not just for yourself, but for everyone you interact with, know, and love. 2/
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It is not sufficient to simply know that you were right in calling how bad this would be before it happened; you need to help stop it now that it's here. 3/
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When I realized on Friday that the St Patrick's Day Parade was not getting cancelled, it became immediately clear to me that it needed to be stopped, and that I could help take action on stopping it. I didn't know how though. 4/
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I reached out to a friend of mine who is a skilled activist because I had no experience. She recommended I make a petition on change dot org, which honestly sounded like a betrayal of my commitment to an apolitical stance. But I sucked it up because it needed to be done. 5/
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I then spread it on every channel I could think of and brainstormed who would be the most effective person to reach out to for this purpose- landed on Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch , who did the very studies that had convinced me this was a problem in the first place 6/
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I couldn't get his attention directly (since he is flooded with emails + tweets right now), so I found someone at Harvard to email him, hoping that it would get through. It did- he then went on to spread the word on Twitter and through the Boston Globe 7/
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By Monday the petition had over 400 signatures, and by the end of the day the Mayor's office said it was getting flooded with calls. They cancelled the parade Monday evening 8/
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WE DID IT!!!!! twitter.com/Fxhedgers/stat…
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Can I take credit for this? There's an argument to be made that since Dublin had already cancelled its parade and the MA cases were getting worse, that Walsh would have cancelled on his own. This is pretty likely. 9/
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But even if all we did was push the cancellation up by one day, that makes a difference. One cancellation makes it easier to do the next, and with an exponentially growing pandemic, every day counts. 10/
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Replying to
Both are true. It would happened anyway, but somebody would still have had to help trigger it, and it happened to be you. Nice work.
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