Getting some practice at thinking things through is interesting, but what good is it? If you aren’t a boss, aren’t you powerless? Isn’t all this thinking just a way to end up frustrated and even more scared?
Bosses only have limited power. There is always someone else who can either give them orders or do something that will affect the territory a boss governs. This is even true for leaders of nations. No one can control everything, and no one can know everything. This means bosses are in shoes more like yours than they want to admit, so we need not regard them as godlike. They are wrapped up in this pandemic too, and most of them don’t really think things through. They just believe they do.
Knowledge truly is powerful. You have it. You have practiced developing for yourself a broader, deeper understanding of your situation. You are not dependent on authorities to tell you what to believe because you delve into information from a variety of sources, and you know how to discard the bogus ones. You connect information together to see for yourself what’s happening. You mentally walk through what is likely to happen if particular decisions and particular actions occur.
If you are in the UK or USA, my two countries, you face an easing of lockdown that probably won’t be like New Zealand’s or even Germany’s. The latter is more relevant to most of us. Germany started to ease lockdown without practically eradicating the virus first and it immediately started to surge again. Germany expected that. They began easing lockdown with deliberate readiness to promptly take a step back at the slightest sign of resurgence.
The UK and USA are hell-bent on reopening the economy while the infection rate appears to be rising (UK) or is in full throttle in most places (USA). Remember, part of the difference is that Germany is reopening its society. The British and Americans are reopening their economies, with the good of society generally relegated to an afterthought.
It’s time to fire up your thinking. Turn it specifically to your situation and that of the people closest to you. That’s what all this knowledge and ability is for. NASA doesn’t practice solving potential missions problems endlessly in case missions go perfectly. NASA does it to know enough and have enough practice at devising solutions so that when an unexpected problem happens, they’ve got the best possible chance of solving it and saving the crew.
You and your loved ones are your crew. Your lives are your mission. This pandemic is your Apollo 13, and mine, and my family’s, and my friends’. But it is a slightly different scenario for each of us, so nobody can provide a canned solution.
Use your ability to think your way through the tangle and find your own solution instead of blindly doing what authorities say is okay. That is power. It may lead you to actions you would have regarded as unimaginable just a few months ago, but the fact that you can imagine them now, plan them and do them is the best superpower anyone can have in these times.
Let’s consider some real-life examples. I’ll anonymize them to protect the privacy of people I know who made these decisions. Needless to say, I could cite several that involve planting big vegetable gardens and retreating from the world for a while, but let’s look at some that may be closer to your situation. In the last example, notice what the couple is waiting for, and why. Experience shows that a vaccine is not the only development that could ease the grip of this pandemic on the world.
Family with an Essential Worker
In normal times Sally, Ben and their two teenaged children live in a rural English village with a couple of pets. Ben left his job shortly before the pandemic hit so he was already at home. In lockdown, he is unable to find a new job. He might not want one anyway if it involves mixing with other people. He can tap the UK’s benefits system.
Sally is a home health care worker. As an essential worker, she continues working at full tilt. Her job takes her in and out of several homes each day. Some of her clients live with other people who may or may not be staying away from potential exposure to virus. She often also has to go into essential stores on behalf of clients to do their shopping if they are unable to or if they are among the especially vulnerable (primarly the elderly) who have been ordered to stay strictly at home. Every day, she could be getting exposed to the virus.
To protect the children, Sally and Ben sent them to spend lockdown with grandparents who are either self-isolating or at least getting less exposure than Sally.
Sally’s agency ran out of personal protective equipment (PPE) a few weeks into lockdown, unable to compete in the market against the huge demand for PPE to supply the NHS. Sally appealed to friends for help, got a small batch of PPE that way and shared it with her colleagues. Around that time, she realized how easily she could bring the virus home to Ben.
Sally and Ben now live the way my household did until my spouse’s exposure at work was greatly reduced for two weeks. It’s lonely and weird. They hate it. But if Sally does get sick, she is now less likely to pass it along to Ben right away. If he does get COVID-19, he should get a much lighter exposure. There is evidence that picking up fewer particles of virus would give him a better chance of having only a mild case. That, plus perhaps not developing symptoms at the same time, would allow them to take care of each other better.
The full protocol would take a separate article to detail. In essence, Sally and Ben continue to live in the same house but live as separately as they can. Upon getting home, Sally immediately puts her contaminated clothing in an easy-to-clean plastic box, takes a shower (including washing her hair), disinfects behind herself, puts on clean clothes, and then puts her work clothes and bath towel through the laundry machine. She doesn’t even see Ben until after she is clean.
They try to maintain some distance all the time. For instance, to watch television they sit at opposite ends of the living room. They don’t hug or cuddle or sleep in the same room any more, let alone the same bed.
As I said, they hate it. But they are doing what they can to stay safe without making Sally completely move out of the house and live alone. They looked at the trade-offs and chose this as the most tolerable compromise. Even though they aren’t cuddling and they miss the children, they live together.
Retired, Elderly and Highly Vulnerable
Darla and Denise are sisters who live 20 minutes drive apart in Texas. They are in their eighties and, as is common at such an age, each have a health condition or two to elevate the risk that catching COVID-19 would kill them. Their houses are set up to allow them to live on their own as long as possible.
They are relatives of mine. Most of my family thinks the way I do. Denise’s offspring are in the medical profession. They got an early view of the coronavirus, so she had early warning of what was coming. She passed that along to her sister.
The sisters bolstered their emergency-preparedness supplies and self-isolated a week and a half into March. They use online ordering, curbside pickup and in a pinch drive-through pickup to get all their supplies.
Texas is reopening. The sisters listen to authorities enough to know what the authorities plan, but they do not take assurances from the authorities as gospel. Infection and death rates are still climbing in Texas, with the exception of a couple of urban centers that instituted lockdowns to flatten their curves.
Thinking it through, the sisters are staying isolated from the rest of the world, but are defining a bubble in which they can safely move. Denise is resuming her habit of visiting her vacation home at a nearby waterside where she can go fishing without being near anyone else. Darla and Denise are resuming their habit of meeting with each other at one of their homes over coffee.
They can meet with each other because they are both in the Unexposed cohort, and they are staying that way. If either becomes At Risk, they will pause their visits for a quarantine period.
Their children live much farther away. Two of Darla’s are Unexposed. Depending upon how reopening unfolds, they could visit as long as they are able to get there without breaking their Unexposed status. Using public transportation would almost certainly expose them to the virus, so they would have to drive. Offspring who are At Risk (one of Darla’s and both of Denise’s) will continue checking in by telephone or in online sessions.
Two Families, One Business
When the pandemic hit, Nancy and Carol had two wool shops in two English market towns. At the start of lockdown, they transferred all the stock from the shop in a thriving town market hall to the now-useless tea room section of the other shop. When the market hall insisted on continuing to charge full rent while not making any moves to devise a safe way to reopen, they terminated their lease at the market hall.
After a brief period of shifting mainly to curbside pickup, they now rely heavily on the online shop that used to be an auxiliary operation. Occasionally they make a local delivery run to drop off parcels for customers who live nearby (outside the door without face to face contact), but most parcels go out by mail. To reduce potential exposure to the virus, they don’t ship daily any more. They ship orders once or twice a week, and they switched to a postal program that allows them to simply drop off the parcels without staying in the post office while they are all posted and their account is debited for the cost.
They have always planned ahead. Now they must do so with a longer planning horizon and additional concerns. Many suppliers are not producing, so Nancy and Carol must find out which ones will not reopen anytime soon and stock up before those suppliers run out of inventory.
The companies they normally use to card and spin their house-brand yarns are not operating. Although they know how to do every step of production themselves, they are not equipped to do it on a large scale. They are looking for new processing businesses. They are also contacting people from whom they usually buy fleece, asking whether fleece from their sheep will be available this year. If all of that comes together, they will need to source enough of the natural dyes they use. They cannot produce enough of those dyes themselves.
Each of them makes one supply run to a supermarket every week or two and they take turns making the postal run. Nancy and Carol typically alternate days working in the shop instead of working alongside each other. Carol’s husband can easily work from home and their children have stayed in lockdown. Nancy has some children from a previous marriage who can shuttle between her home and the ex-husband’s home. As long as that other household is also in lockdown, risk is low but not zero.
They are in the At Risk cohort, not Unexposed, because of their trips to the post office and supermarket. Nancy and Carol physically stay as separate as they can and have no plans to form a social bubble of their households. To them, the risk to their families would not be acceptable.
One Household, Strict Lockdown
Tom and Jeff are a couple living in a high rise condominium building in Denver, Colorado. They have a corner unit with stunning views off a wrap-around balcony, keeping them from feeling too confined.
They do not have specific risk factors, but the spectre of AIDS still shadows the gay male community. In the 1980s, the White House intentionally dragged its heels about that epidemic in the belief that it only killed people the Administration regarded as undesirable. The White House did not believe scientists who warned it would not remain confined to the gay male community. (This is documented, not conjecture. See Randy Shilts’ superb book And The Bank Played On if you are unfamiliar with how the AIDS epidemic unfolded in the United States – disclosure, this is an affiliate link.) Tom and Jeff have seen more than enough death inflicted on friends by political decisions to let a contagion rip through the population.
Echoes of those times reverberate in the way COVID-19 is being handled, so they are not taking chances. They watch what scientists learn about the virus, think for themselves and don’t take official pronouncements at face value.
Shortly before the pandemic hit, Tom resigned from his job, which he had been planning for months. Jeff took leave from his job, which he already did remotely from home. They took advantage of their freedom to embark on a two month tent camping trip, mostly in some of the most remote and beautiful areas of the American Southwest. They returned to Denver only when campgrounds closed and, almost beyond imagination, borders between states began to be sealed.
They leave their condo only so one can shop for groceries once a week, wearing a mask, and to go for a daily walk with ample distance from other people in a large park nearby. At least one elderly resident has died of COVID-19 so they know it is in their building, and the elderly use the elevators. Even though they live several floors up, Tom and Jeff use the stairs instead of the elevators.
Tom is a few years away from being financially ready to retire, but he has enough savings to not even consider looking for work until doing so is safer. He is considering starting a small business instead. Jeff can continue working remotely, although the company that employs him is on reduced production and schedules. Regardless of any loosening announced by federal or state government, until they deem it safe to do otherwise, they will stay as isolated as they can and maintain distance whenever they happen to bump into friends in the park or supermarket.
Based on their experience with AIDS, they do not expect a vaccine to be the key to living more freely without undue danger. Instead, they watch for effective treatments, which they anticipate will take a few years to develop.
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