Isolation Report, Week #1

Well, it’s week 1 of being isolated due to COVID-19.  In case you’re reading this from some far future timeline and you’ve forgotten (or never knew—lucky you) what that is, back here in 2020 a new strain of virus (specifically, a “coronavirus,” which basically means “head cold”) which is, unusually for these types of virus, occasionally fatal.  Other coronavirus disease scares in the past (notably SARS) were also scary in this way, but none of those previous diseases lived up to the hype about how fast it would spread and how many people might die from it.  This one, on the other hand, has.  Numbers are flying around right now, and you don’t always know whether you can trust them, but by some estimates as many of 70% of the entire population (worldwide) will get it, and of those who contract it maybe 20% will have severe reactions and perhaps 2% will die.

Here in the U.S., after a fairly poor showing of taking it seriously when it first appeared, we’ve now swung in entirely the other direction, with conferences, concerts, sports events, parades, and so forth being cancelled (including, ironically, at least one coronavirus conference), public institutions such as libraries and museums being closed, and huge swaths of the workforce being told to work from home.  I made it into the office one day this past week, and it looks like that was it for the foreseeable future: my office sent everyone home on Thursday (before I even managed to get in) and told us not to come back.  Trying to go grocery shopping has been ... challenging.  Happily, I went on Wednesday (my normal shopping day) before things got particularly crazy, and I just did fairly normal shopping, not really trying to hoard anything.  We went back out again on Friday for a few things just so we could cook at home, and it’s a good thing we didn’t need any eggs, or milk, or bread, or potatoes ... those were all gone.  No clue what it’ll look like next week.  But even on Monday when Christy tried to go to Costco, the toilet paper was all gone.  At this point we won’t even go out there any more: you have to wait in line to get in, apparently.  You can order online and have it delivered, but they’re not currently offering toilet paper via that method.  Amazon had to take down all the third-party sellers offering toilet paper to stop price-gouging.  I mean, judging from the state of things, you’d think it was an apocalypse.

Now, on the one hand, I find this somewhat silly.  It’s a cold, people.  Yes, it can be quite serious for some—mainly the elderly, those with compromised immune systems, etc.  I have a kid with a heart condition, so I’m not callous to that side of it.  But the chance of disease is always out there.  The flu (which is caused by a slightly different class of virus) can be fatal as well, and we have that every year.

On the other hand, I do understand what the health care people are saying.  There are basically two scenarios here:  In the first one, everyone gets the virus all at once, the number of serious cases spikes insanely, and the health care system is overwhelmed.  With insufficient resources, some people could die not because the virus killed them, but because they couldn’t get the care they needed to weather the sickness.  In the second scenario, the virus spreads more slowly; the number of total cases of serious sickness doesn’t change, but it’s way more spread out, and the health care system has adequate resources to care for everyone, and only the absolute worst cases are lost.  That makes perfect sense to me.  We’re not hiding in our homes so that we won’t get the disease—we’re probably all going to get, and there’s nothing to be done about that.  But the more we avoid large groups of people, the slower it’ll spread ... we’re hiding so we don’t get the disease too fast.  This is all very sensible, and I’m glad to see we’re taking scientific advice seriously (for a change).

Still ...

I’m struck by what Trevor Noah said on The Daily Show one night this past week: COVID-19 has killed somewhere in the ballpark of 5,000 people in the past 3 months, worldwide.  In the U.S., just one country in the world, 3,000 people die in car accidents every day.  Automobiles look at puny coronviruses and laugh at how pitiful they are at killing us.  And yet we do not cower in our homes for fear of driving to work each day.  Perspective, people ... that’s what Trevor said, and I thought it was a great point.

But I won’t be hearing any more great points from Trevor for a while, nor from Stephen Colbert, because all the New York late shows have gone dark.  They all have audiences, you see.  And audiences are large gatherings of people, and large gatherings of people could cause the virus to spread more quickly.  Colbert aired a single show with no audience (as did Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me), but that’s it (at least for Colbert; not sure if WWDTM will continue, albeit audience-less).  The Daily Show said at first they would continue to do shows sans audience, but they too gave it up late on Friday.  And here’s where I worry that we’re going too far.

You see, these are the places where I get my news.  Sure, I could sit around and watch CNN or something along those lines, but I gotta tell you: I spent a long time doing that right after 9/11, and all I got for it was way more stressed and not particularly more well-informed.  In fact, study after study has shown that “fake news” shows such as The Daily Show produce more well-informed viewers than almost any other outlet.  So right now I’m losing not only my major source of news about the world, but also the coping mechanism I was using to deal with the stress of said news: being able to laugh at it.

And, at the end of the day, that’s what’s hitting me the hardest.  Not seeing my coworkers and not being able to go out to lunch with other adults sucks.  Being cooped up with my family for essentially 24 hours a day with our only “breaks” being when one of us goes and hides in our room is not all bad, certainly, but it can be ... wearing.  Losing my opportunity to go to conferences or libraries ... well, honestly, I wasn’t taking advantage of those opportunities as much as I should have done anyhow.  But losing access to the shows that were keeping me sane: that is what I worry will send me over the edge.  And I’m sure I’m not the only one.  And I’m just wondering if this is the right choice for us to make, as a society.  Because, at the end of the day (or more likely month, in this case), it will be difficult for us to quantify how many lives our choices have saved.  But I worry that the fundamental changes to our way of life will be all too apparent.

Enh.  I’m probably overreacting.  I’m sure that being alone in my bedroom for the majority of the past 6 days isn’t impacting my stream of consciousness writing at all.  I’m probably just fine.

Hopefully next week is more ... hopeful.