CoronaQuarantine, Day 8
The days are already starting to blend together. Today marks the end of my first full week working from home, and I'm going to guess at minimum I will work from home all of next week as well. It could be longer, but we'll just have to "monitor the situation closely" in the meantime, as many official notices have been saying over the past could of weeks.
I spent quite a while chatting on Facebook Messenger with Lynn last night. She works as a chemist at the Washington State Department of Health, and is predictably slammed at work with epidemiology work. I realized last night that I have no fewer than three friends with direct connections to this pandemic: Lynn the Department of Health chemist; Danielle the nurse at Valley Medical Center in Renton; Gabriel the middle school science teacher in Tacoma. This gives me a wide-ranging access to first-hand facts and data, a lot of it local. Gabriel is almost certainly the most broadly well-read in regards to all of this, for both national and global contextualization. Danielle is increasingly going to have the most to report from the front lines—they closed her department earlier this week due to the indefinite cancelation of all elective surgeries, but as of two days ago she was being posted as a screener for all visitors to the hospital, and they've already got a wing for COVID-19 patients. Honestly this makes me most concerned about her being at risk; when we were on FaceTime on Wednesday evening, she kept touching her face.
But, as it turns out, of all my friends, Lynn would have by far the most immediate expertise on clinical data. That did not really register to me until we chatted last night, and she did a really good job of soothing a lot of my anxieties—while at the same time acknowledging how volatile and variable the whole situation is. But, she also seemed to feel good about being in Washington State, which took the most drastic steps first, after being the epicenter of the outbreak in the U.S. at first. It's now New York State, with way more cases than us, according to Lynn because they waited until far too much later than us to take steps like closing bars and restaurants.
She seems to think it relatively likely the "social distancing" strictures may star to ease up, very gradually, in about a month—as in, mid-April. She also seems to think Washington, while still very much under strain, is among the better-prepared states in the country. That said, she also had to remind me: this does not exactly mean we'll come out the other end first. It just means we won't have the most massive spike in cases. Like everywhere else, the number of cases over time is going to be the same no matter what; we are just doing a better job of flattening the curve. I told her I presume this means that, once they do tell us we can start going out again, it will have to include a warning that it will still mean more of us will get sick—and she basically said yes, that's correct.
That said, she was apparently semi-confident that it's possible we could still do our State Park visit during my Birth Week at the end of April. Not guaranteed, but more possible than I was thinking a couple of days ago. Shobhit was saying this morning he thinks I should postpone all of that until later, but I still want to wait to decide. There is still too much unknown, and I think by mid-April we'll have a better idea of what kind of steps are at least semi-safe to take. As I've already stated, visiting a state park is a lot safer than being anywhere there could otherwise be huge crowds. It may still mean actually hanging out with fewer people that week than I would have under normal circumstances, but again, we'll see.
Unlike people being quarantined due to the closure of the business where they work, only my evenings are more mellow on average than usual; my work days are as full as ever, just being done from home. Being unable to go to any movies, however, does free up more spare time than I typically have in the evenings. So, in addition to a fairly long time chatting with Lynn (and on occasion, with Zephyr too, at the same time but in a separate chat window; I kept wondering if they were sitting right next to each other as they both chatted with me), I spent a good amount of time last night working on the Winter Social Review, which I'll be posting tomorrow. I could tell you more about that here, except that would just repeat a lot of what I still have to write in the draft of the post itself. I just finished up the social rankings, and finding all the photos to accompany the names.
I am not the biggest fan of this working-from-home thing, though. Aside from the cats basically taking turns hopping into my lap, I am spending more days than not with Shobhit gone to Big 5 and being at home just by myself. Getting the occasional work phone call has become much more exciting than usual. I haven’t even left the building to go to a store since, I think, Wednesday? Maybe it was Tuesday. I'm already losing track. At least I know for sure today is Friday. I did leave the building today, technically, because I took recycling out and that involved going outside. But I never did leave building property.
I did just get a nice surprise at the start of my lunch break, though: I got a Facebook video call from Sara in Denver! She has mostly gone off of Facebook since way before all this COVID-19 stuff, and I had long been thinking about her and how she's doing. She also works for a grocery store, but not the central office there like she did with me here, and she's trying to get a leave of absence as she has asthma and lung issues. Apparently her employer requires a doctor's note for this, which sounds like fucking bullshit to me. Don't the doctors have more important things to do right now than to tend to frivolous requests like this? Jesus Christ.
She is otherwise doing well, though, and it was great to see her, if only for a few minutes and if only via video chat. That is one positive byproduct of all of this: people all over are reaching out to each other in ways they either never or rarely did when everything was normal. I'm liking that part of it, at least. We hung up and I finished the pizza I had for lunch, and now I have to get back to work again, looking forward to the "virtual Happy Hour" Laney and I will have via Skype after work tonight.
[posted 12:43 pm]