I know that it all seems like kind of a blur…
- 3/12 – 3/16 : Businesses across the country, including Florida’s entire tourism industry, ground to a halt. Public schools followed. My job announced remote work for employees in the USA. Toilet paper was surprisingly hard to find!
- 3/27 : A $2.2 trillion dollar stimulus package – the largest in US history – was passed by Congress; US surpassed Italy with 100,000 cases of COVID-19; healthcare workers struggle for PPE to protect themselves against the virus.
- 3/31 : Public schools began their crash course in virtual learning.
- 4/3 : The CDC advised everyone to start wearing masks in public to help further slow the spread.
- 4/6 : US total cases exceeded 350,000; death toll passed 10,000 people.
- 4/14 : US total cases exceeded 600,000; US death toll passed 25,000 people.
- 4/16 – 4/17 : Protests erupted in several states over social distancing measures. President Trump unveiled plans for reopening American economy, despite no discernible decline in in new cases or deaths.
In many ways, time feels like it’s standing still because it takes so much effort just to get from one day to the next, only to have it look pretty much like it did the day before.
Somebody should make a movie like that! Do you think that Bill Murray would be available???
It definitely concerns me to see so much restlessness in our country right now because looking at the numbers and the continuing struggles for medical supplies, I don’t really think we’re ready to be talking about starting up the country again already. I hope I’m wrong, but I feel like what’s going to happen is the most restless among us are going to force the issue until the segments impacting them re-open – like beaches, for example – which will result in a surge of new cases and deaths, but will be even more difficult to confront because people will be even less likely to accept social distancing measures again when they already balked at them once leading up to this.
And I know that we can’t just stay inside forever, but … there’s got to be a better answer because right now the talk makes it sound like “Back to business as usual!” is what the loudest protesters want, even if that’s admittedly not what’s even outlined in the plan of the guy who’s banner they were waiving on the capital steps!
It’s really amazing the impact that only a month can have on people’s heads.
I know that I’ve been really stressed, and admittedly in the grand scheme of things my own personal impact isn’t that bad.
Last week I saw a teenager complaining on Facebook about how this had been going on for months now, and regardless of your typical teenage melodrama, I can sort of appreciate the sentiment because I’m sure the folks who took to protesting last week felt the same way.
The idea that we’ll be extremely lucky if we have a vaccine in production this fall and can put it all behind us by Christmastime … which is still EIGHT MONTHS away … seems like too much for anyone to comprehend.
We all just want to go back to the way things used to be – kids in school where they belong while their parents begrudgingly go to work, nights out at restaurants and vacations at big, crowded theme parks and cruise ships, and not having the headlines every day dominated by this single issue from seeming every angle – political, scientific, and more unsubstantiated opinions than anyone should have to judge in their day.
But the thing is, we can’t just go back to the way things used to be.
We don’t have that luxury in the middle of a global pandemic.
To date 165,000 people around the world have died from this one communicable disease – a quarter of them Americans – and despite our best interests, we’ve yet to see any real evidence that we’re past the peak of it.
So if we want to start trying to grab back elements of normality in our otherwise chaotic lives, we have to be really smart about it. And that’s tough to do when we still have people walking among us, and some on television and in positions of power, who think the entire COVID-19 thing is some bizarre hoax.
I think that’s the most weary part of this for me because it’s really hard for me to try to balance everything all around me while I’m still encountering people who think that it’s all bullshit.
I mean, I don’t really care what they think, and I’m trying to get past the point where I care about trying to change their minds, but like most conspiracy theorists … sometimes it’s still scary just knowing they’re out there. People who think … like that.
All of that said, I do think that some pretty impressive things have also happened in the last month, which I think I’ll try to write about tomorrow because this blog post became longer than I was expecting as it is!
Stay safe, stay sane, and have hope for a brighter tomorrow. That’s really the best that we can do today.