Life during this pandemic has taken on a negative pattern. I
wake up, I work 12+ hours at home, I have dinner, put the kids to bed, watch an
hour of TV (usually Ozark now), and then go to bed. I’m too tired and
demoralized to do much productive, and maybe that’s OK right now. My goal is to
get through the pandemic without me or any of my family getting sick and remain
gainfully employed during the biggest economic downturn since the Great
Depression.
On a weekly family Zoom
call, we were going around discussing the extremely negative state of
affairs in the world, when one of my cousins interjected, requesting that we
share at least one piece of good news.
Good news is:
I have a job. I know too
many people out of work to complain about my job. I’m gainfully employed,
and layoffs are not on the horizon for me any time soon. And sometimes you must
remember that any night you can go to bed with a roof over your head and food
in your stomach, you are ahead of the game.
My family is healthy. Every sniffle and sneeze make me
fearful that we may be stricken with the Coronavirus, and right now one of my
daughters has a fever and I am terrified, but we’ve been doing everything
right. We have been disinfecting, washing our hands, and staying inside.
There is still plenty of food. While the lack of cleaning
products in the stores is alarming, there is still plenty of food despite
panic-buying that has set in. Food
distribution is being disrupted by the outbreak, and that is
getting worse in some cases, but there is no reason for anyone in the U.S. to
go hungry, there never is.
This causes us to think. I was on a call with people at work
and one of the participants mentioned that he had had dinner with his family every
night for three weeks and remarked at how rare and unusual this is. He didn’t
seem to realize how seriously wrong this painted the previous status-quo. The
Coronavirus pandemic has pulled back the curtain on just
how unacceptable “normal” had become.
This will end. We’ll look back on this time and be glad we
got through it. This won’t be forever, though hopefully some lessons from it
will be.
Fear of a second wave
We are better off staying indoors on lockdown weeks longer
than we need rather than risk opening up too early. There is a quest to “go
back to normal” because of the economic and psychological impact of this
isolation. But reopening things too early without enough available tests and
before we’ve gotten through the pandemic means risking a dangerous second wave
of the pandemic, which would make things worse.
The closest historical guide we have to what we are
experiencing with COVID-19 is the Spanish Flu of more than 100 years ago. The
deadliest time of that flu was the second
wave of the pandemic in the fall of 1918.
Small protests to reopen in the midst of this crisis earned
rightful derision, especially as some protests appeared to circle and block
hospitals. The image of medical
professionals counter-protesting in traffic in Denver will be a lasting
one to remind us that even as much of the world has come together, there were a
small minority of pandemic flat-Earthers who pathetically strutted around with
weapons and exposed themselves and others to disease.
Too many people are not taking this crisis seriously. The Spanish
Flu of 1918 had its naysayers as well, and they felt morally justified
in endangering public health. History consistently condemns people who think
they know better than the leading scientists of their day; you can’t eliminate
these people because hubris and stupidity cannot be killed.
I plan to live long enough to remind my grandchildren how we
had such fools in these times too, and how we survived and thrived.
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