It’s Wednesday and we’re in week eight of the CoronaCareᵀᴹ crackdown. A friend of mine posts daily reflections on Facebook about his isolation and he’s on day 52. I think he’s only off by about eleventy-thousand.

Everyone is beginning to feel a bit stir-crazy over the amount of time we’ve been under house arrest “safer-at-home.” At first, we all agreed to social distancing and staying at home so that we could “flatten the curve.” The experts told us that doing so would prevent our health care facilities from being overwhelmed with patients. Remember?

“Sure,” we said, “happy to help.” Whether due to our efforts or not, the dreaded scenarios never arrived. We had ventilators to spare and the ships and tent-cities we set up weren’t, in the end, really needed.

And now those “temporary” measures have morphed into a “wait-and-see” state of suspension. The fear is that in some places the curve hasn’t been flattened and that a premature lifting of the restrictions will lead to a resurgence of the virus.

But even where there’s a plan for “reopening,” like in Illinois, it’s being done in phases based on markers that have no dates attached to them. For instance, to move from Phase 2 to Phase 3 in Illinois requires that new cases of the WuFlu to be “At or under 20% positivity rate and increasing no more than 10 percentage points over 14 days.”

It also requires “No overall increase in hospital admissions for 28 days. At least 14% of ICU beds, surgical beds and ventilators to handle surge.” Those sound flat, like they should be.

High scores for being SMART goals, but they do nothing to tell us citizens when we should expect these goals to be reached. We know, at a minimum, that it will take a month to transition from Phase 2 to Phase 3 because the second goal above says “28 days.” But we don’t know when that will start. And don’t forget that there are two more phases to go after we get to Phase 3.

The strategy taken by the country and many individual states is wrecking the economy and people have had enough. We’re beginning to see some businesses defy government restrictions, like salon owner Shelley Luther in Texas and Tesla car maker Elon Musk in California.

Churches in California have also begun to assert themselves. Thousands of church leaders say they will reopen by May 31 no matter what the state says. As I wrote a few days ago in an expanded opinion, there comes a point where not only is the state interfering with our Constitutional right to the “free exercise” of religion, but in the life of the Church as laid out in Scripture.

The question is, when has that line been crossed? I think a good case can be made that it is crossed when a combination of 1) cooperation with mitigation tactics has yielded the desired result, 2) when the government has reached the limits of its authority (e.g. they can declare a state of emergency for 30 days), and 3) when the imposition of restrictions is left open-ended.

After that, the people need to take responsibility for themselves. If there is still fear that some people with comorbidity will be put at risk, the answer may be that they need to stay in quarantine and away from the larger society for a time. We’re sympathetic to those who are more at risk, but those at greater risk should also be supportive of those who need to work and provide for themselves and their families.

The state needs to get back in its lane and let the people get back to theirs.