Well, a lot has happened since March 13th.
The "wash your hands and cover your cough" and do some mild social distancing campaign was too little too late. Heavy social distancing followed by shelter in place became the rule in a lot of places as the race was on to keep COVID-19 cases from overwhelming hospitals. Some place managed to get ahead of the curve and kept cases to a minimum, mashing the curve down - notably San Francisco and California. Some places get going too late and got swamped - notably Albany GA and NYC. The Atlanta area was in the middle. The metro counties got going a couple weeks ahead of the state and managed to keep the local hospitals afloat and use of the emergency overflow spaces to a minimum (so far...)
Watching all this play out so fast was horrific. Knowing how much worse it could have been was not much consolation. Hearing about the pain that places in the world that got going late, notably Italy, were going through was sobering enough to not think twice about obeying the shelter in place rules.
Helping my wife's 80+ y.o. parents, we doubled down on our social distancing, doing curbside for groceries and generally staying out of any buildings except our house. We still do takeout and delivery of restaurant food, trying to help keep economy going. Our grown kids, who live in the area, have done the same. They are helping our chances, and consequently, the in-laws chances of "keeping clean". I have to say, even doing that is stressful, remembering to wear a mask and wiping down stuff. Really, though, compared to what a lot of people are going through, that stress is really a "first world problem."
Anecdotal stories and statistics filled our news feeds and were handed down through friends and relatives. A lot of it was like waiting on a Tsunami, not knowing how high the wave would be.
Consuming so much news was confusing and stressful. There is so much not known that getting a clear picture of what to do, how to do it and what will happen was very difficult. "The virus can 'live' 72 hours on surfaces". "The virus was found on a cruise ship two weeks after everyone was off." "There is plenty of testing." Friends with symptoms can't get tested. It's only airborne droplets that are contagious. Aerosols can travel 30 feet. It could be on you shoes. This person has it. That person died. Only older people with co-morbidity get the severe form of the disease. A young, healthy person died. Lots of kids get it and are asymptomatic. Are they "carriers" or not? Drug treatments are being tried. They help! They are worthless! They aren't being tried the right way!
Usually, more information is better and reliable information is the best. With this thing, so much is unknown, or known imperfectly, that speculation, conspiracies and misinformation fill the void at a great rate. It felt like this: https://www.instagram.com/tv/B_PrvZdhMiR/?igshid=yumazu0pfnn5
Using Twitter news feeds is normally helpful, but there is just too much and whole day of it will sink your psyche, so I've tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to limit my Twitter time.
One source of information I've found most useful and enlightening is a woman who blogs on Facebook. Her "about": ".... a pathologist with degrees in infectious disease epidemiology, mathematical modeling of epidemics, and fieldwork in epidemic control." In other words, she's a subject matter expert. Here's a link https://www.facebook.com/jenniferkastenmd/
So, after the first couple weeks, we've kind of settled into a new routine. What does that look like? What's surprising, interesting, annoying? What's keeping us busy?
That'll be the next blog posts.
