dispatch from home

1. We had plenty of time to talk about pandemics last week as we self-quarantined here in our house on our Not-a-Vacation. Here is my Not-an-Expert takeaway. Among the many complex factors involved in pandemics, two of them are the rate of complications/mortality, and the rate of contagion--how easily you can catch the disease as you, say, walk through an airport. AIDS and Ebola had high percentages of complications and mortality, but they were difficult to catch. In fact, it wasn't possible to catch them while walking through an airport.

COVID-19, on the other hand, appears to be pretty contagious, but thankfully has a relatively low rate of complications/mortality. If an otherwise healthy adult comes down with COVID-19, the great risk isn't that you'll die from it--although that is possible, as are complications-- but that you'll pass it on to someone who is not so healthy and thus is at much higher risk. You probably already know this, unless you've been living under a rock. And if you have, good idea! Stay there.

2. Anyway. All of that was to say, we are lucky that we're having this as our massive wake-up call. Because if something comes along that is both highly contagious and also deadly, we're in for it. We can look at COVID-19 like a practice round. Sadly it's a practice round with dire consequences for 2-5% of our population. Be safe, people. Stay home.

3. I knew that. I know that. But it's so hard to take it seriously. I'm not a person who has ever been afraid of viruses, head colds, or the winter crud that everyone around here gets and can't shake for weeks. I keep catching myself thinking, I could just run out and get a few more things. We're almost out of yogurt. I forgot to get hamburger buns. Maybe I should pick up some batteries.  And since there weren't any confirmed COVID-19 cases at our hospital before Friday, I probably did more running around than I should have. Not a lot, but you know, some.

4. Then today I woke up with a dry throat and some muscle aches and now I am panicking. If I have it, it's probably not going to do anything other than make me feel sick for a few days. But if I have it, I've probably had it for 4-5 days before the symptoms showed up, and there was that last-minute running around. What if I am Typhoid Mary? What if our town suddenly turns into a COVID-19 hotspot, and I'm the one responsible for spreading it around?

5. So, yeah, I hope you are rolling your eyes at my ability to make everything all about me. Because if I have it, I almost certainly got it here locally, and that means it's well on its way around our town and couldn't possibly all my fault. But that paranoid fear has been strong enough that I am now committed to staying home. As I probably should have been all along.

6. There will be an easy way to find out if I have it, because we were packed in this house like sardines last week on our Not-a-Vacation, and PellMel was required to be tested today before she could go back to the hospital where she works. She left before there were any warnings against travel within the US and nobody had any idea how quickly things would change. Now they are requiring anyone who has been out of state to be tested before they can return to work. She'll have her results tomorrow, and then we'll know. Because if she's got it, we've all got it. Lemmings in shiny metal boxes and all that. Although we may have done more running around than we should have, we really didn't do much.

In fact, I'll wait to post this until I can tell you her results. (IT WAS NEGATIVE. PHEW.)

7. Back in the first week of March, when there was something dire on the horizon, I did some stocking up--not hoarding, but enough so that we could stay home for 3-4 weeks. I might have bought a 12-pack of toilet paper instead of the usual 9-pack, but that was about as extreme as I got. Of course, I didn't buy any perishables, because we were going on vacation, right?

Then we didn't leave town, and three people with young-person appetites came and stayed with us for a week, and just about all of my carefully stocked food was eaten. (Fortunately, we still have a fair amount of toilet paper. *she says drily*)(ha. did not intend that pun, but it made me smile.)

*shrugs* I'm still glad they came. We're not going to starve, although we may eat some strange meals. So here I am. I've got plenty to keep me busy: our taxes, for starters, which we decided to go ahead and get done even though the deadline has been extended. Hope you are able to stay home, too, and if you have some kind of essential job, thank you for being out there.