Virus Corona

Of course the big news of late is the coronavirus pandemic which has been spreading across the world. It’s hard to believe that we’ve been reading about it in the news since at least January, but since then it’s spread to South Korea, Italy, the United States, and many other countries.

Predictably, the incompetent administration of Impeached President Trump has been completely incapable of dealing with the pandemic, and as his lying, grifting nature dictates, Trump has been trying to suppress information to make himself look good so the pandemic doesn’t interfere with his reelection. This is a terrible thing for public safety, as we have no idea how widespread the virus is in the United States, and there’s no way for someone who gets sick to know if they have the flu or the COVID-19 illness that the virus causes – or maybe something else. Of course, Trump almost completely ignored the disaster that Hurricane Maria wreaked on Puerto Rico, so everyone with a couple of neurons to rub together saw this coming. (To be slightly fair to Trump, his ineptness in dealing with Maria was probably not just due to his incompetence, but also to his abject racism.)

For myself, it wasn’t until about 2 weeks ago that the pandemic really pushed into my mind as something that we should be concerned about and preparing for. Which maybe still puts me a bit ahead of most of the country. Apple (my employer) was perhaps a day behind other major tech companies in moving to a work-from-home policy, but honestly a day one way or the other won’t make any real difference. What will make a difference is that they’ve gone all in on reacting to events.

Last Friday, March 6, we were encouraged to work from home. I had some things to do which required I be in the office, but it was pretty quiet – maybe two-thirds of people were out. In the afternoon I walked to another building to get coffee. It was cool and partly cloudy, and I briefly reflected that this might be the last semi-normal day for a long time. I mean, I’ve read and seen plenty of disaster fiction, and if the pandemic really got bad who knows what things would be like on the other side – if I’m even among those who gets to the other side. It was a quiet, sad moment.

Friday night we ordered take-out from a pizza shop, and they were slammed. Saturday we went to one of our favorite restaurants, because we knew that small businesses would probably be hit hard by the coming changes and we wanted both to support them and to enjoy them while we could. They were pretty quiet when we arrived around 6, but by the time we left at 7:30 they were getting pretty full. We also picked up a bunch of extra stuff at the grocery store, but the run on toilet paper and cleaning supplies had already begun. We did, however, stock up on supplies for the cats – if things get bad, I don’t want them to be the ones that suffer, if we can help it.

By Monday, my work had a basically-mandatory work-from-home policy in place. There were some exceptions, but I didn’t really qualify. I had already gone into the office on Monday, so I stayed there until mid-afternoon to finish setting things up. There were maybe 8 people in my area all day.

So we’ve moved to teleconferencing for meetings, lots of chatting over Slack (though I’ve long been a big fan of chat apps for work), and the new buzzword “social distancing”. Debbi was still going in to her office, so I hung out with the cats, ate lunch by myself at home, and walked to Starbucks for coffee in the afternoon, or just around the neighborhood. The weather was beautiful last week – I wore shorts – so having the windows open was also nice as there are many trees and flowers in bloom. Wednesday I went to get comic books as usual.

By Friday, it seemed clear that work-from-home was going to be the norm for the foreseeable future. So I went into the office at the end of the day to pick up some things (especially my headphones, but some other items as well). I saw one person on my floor, and one of the janitorial staff, who I chatted with for a few minutes. I walked around the floor and took in the quiet, since I figure I won’t be there again for a few weeks. It was pretty strange.

Friday night we went to another favorite restaurant, and we’ll probably hit another one tonight. Is going to restaurants bad? Maybe. It’s hard to cut them out completely. We picked up some more items at Target today. I think this weekend is probably going to be the peak of the panicked-stocking-up around the country, mainly because most school districts have announced they’re closing for the next few weeks, so parents are trying to make sure they’re prepared for that. It remains to be seen whether the supply chains restock many of the items in the next couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, the Bay Area has finally ended its month and a half long drought with a heavy dose of rain today, and more in the forecast in the next week. So the past week feels like the calm before the storm figuratively and literally. We’ve both been feeling a lot of anxiety about this, and neither of us generally has trouble with anxiety. I haven’t really felt like this since the last few months of my mother’s life back in 2014-15, that tightness in the chest, a weakness in the legs where I have trouble pushing myself to keep moving forward. The preparation we’ve done in the last couple of days has helped a lot with that, but I’m sure it will come back.

I’ve always felt that the government has an important role to play in public health and safety, and in managing the economy wisely. The Impeached Trump administration and the last 40 years of mostly-conservative government has wrecked the federal government’s ability to do all of these things: Disaster response is indifferent and terrible, the country is running huge deficits in times of relative prosperity, which is exactly the opposite of what it should have been doing. All of this results in, well, a lot more anxiety. And I suspect most of the nation doesn’t understand just how bad it could get.

So, it’s been a stressful week. But this week might feel like a walk in the park a few weeks from now. I hope it won’t be that bad, but I fear that it might. And Impeached President Trump has a way of living down to everyone’s worst expectations.