I'm 73 years old today. In the middle of a pandemic that disproportionally kills older people, in a country with a totally broken public health system.
We'd been planning a family birthday party for this weekend; if it happens at all it'll be via Zoom or Hangouts.
Doom destruction and despair People dying everywhere Happy birthday! Happy birthday! -- sing two verses while washing your hands
Going to stop here before I make myself more depressed.
Okay, it's officially a pandemic, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Here on Whidbey Island, there have been three confirmed cases of COVID-19 as of yesterday. Things are closing -- today is the last day for a lot of things. Consonance has been postponed, so I no longer have to be sorry I'm going to miss it. We canceled the family birthday party, which would have been this weekend, a week ago. S has canceled her Thursday volunteer work.
The name of the game right now is "social distancing". The idea being to slow down the spread of infections and flatten the curve -- spread the cases out over time rather than having them come in one huge peak that overwhelms the health care system. What little there is of it.
To be honest, I don't think it's going to be enough. But we'll do what we can, and hopefully get the Rainbow Caravan out of this alive.
Fortunately I'm an introvert. Social distancing is something I'm good at. (If only it were that simple.) The tricky part is going to be deciding when to cancel all upcoming appointments, lower the portcullis, and haul up the drawbridge. It's a two-pass algorithm: wait until one of us develops symptoms, and then start two weeks before that. Right.
It's a good time to plan on leaving the house as little as possible. Preferably not at all, but some of us have medical appointments. We have a reasonable stock of supplies -- I think we could easily stay here a couple of weeks; more if we have stretch it.
( Notes & links )
Tl;dr: if you read nothing else, read FlattenTheCurve | COVID19 Update & Guidance to Limit Spread.
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