75 Days
I think that maybe I could have accomplished more in 75 days, but then. I could have accomplished more in 61 years and a bunch of months. At some point in this process, regret becomes magical thinking and I have enough of that, thanks. I can't change the past or work up enough energy to try.
One of the most interesting, curious, and puzzling (all three!) aspects of this pandemic is the way some currents of thinking have evolved around the idea that this discomfort and misery we're all experiencing is only the product of external forces. That is, we can't do what we used to do, and liked to do, become somebody won't let us.
The streets were already empty, you know. Two weeks before the closures were universal, traffic disappeared and no one was out. Most of us know how to read, and at least have some minimal skills at understanding information we've been given by people who should know.
My wife's employer, a private Christian university with a fairly strict code of personal conduct and a generally conservative outlook, hardly a likely candidate for overreaction to some sort of social engineering (I don't really know what people are thinking), sent everyone home on March 6, well before any official lockdown orders began to trickle down. Everybody knew.
And they still know. Across the board, poll after poll, searching for some sort of consensus, it comes back that around 80% of us aren't that interested in going back to the way it was, not yet. Open your beaches and nail salons – we're going to skip that, sorry.
The people who are out, who are working in healthcare or in stores, don't appear to be bucking any trends, either. I see their terrified eyes peeking out from behind their masks and plexiglass protection. I assume my eyes look pretty terrified, too, as I watch the crazy people, unmasked and literally shouting in the aisles, wondering loudly where the toothpaste is.
It's not that I'm worried about the droplets spewing out from cuckooland into the ventilation system and subsequently up my nose. It's the cumulative effect that concerns me. Obviously. Go into enough stores with enough clowns in the aisles, and odds start to stack up in a bad way.
And we know, as I said. Or as much as we can tell, overloaded with information. There's interesting information out there, too.
People are the carriers, we know. The virus shedders, the ones to avoid. Surfaces? Not so much. Keep them clean, sure, but that's not the danger. Food isn't the danger. Amazon packages on the front step are not the danger.
Masks are not the solution, but they're part of it. Study Tokyo and New York, see the differences, see the similar deficiencies in testing and tracing, then look at the numbers. SARS did a number on East Asia, and Asians remember. Some healthcare workers routinely wear masks every day. I can wear one to the mall. You can, too.
The fatality rate from this viral disease is unknown still, but now it appears to be only one metric. It's never just been about life and death, but now we're finding out that the misery lives on. Children are having mysterious and serious inflammatory reactions, weeks after assumed infection. Healthy adults are hobbled with respiratory and circulatory issues, including organ damage. It might kill you, but it most certainly will harm you, possibly permanently.
Ugh. I don't want to get into this, start thinking about what others are thinking. I understand everybody's frustration. I know we'll look back years from now on stuff we did, and realize how pointless or silly or ill-advised it was. Maybe the masks will prove to have been useless, but the six-feet distancing thing was important. Or maybe vitamin C is the answer. I welcome our future informed selves. I wish to learn from them, and do better.
For now, though, I'm sort of gratified to see that so many of us are on the same page. We miss the old ways and want them back. We're not ready to throw caution to the wind, not quite yet. And we know, or a lot of us at least assume, that the old ways won't be coming back despite our wishes, and that some of them probably shouldn't.
