COVID-19 A Week Later
What a difference a week makes. Last week, I wrote up an unpublished entry pooh-poohing the COVID-19 outbreak. I even used the phrase "Bah Humbug". I was so grateful that I had not published that entry, because I did not want to look even stupider than I do already.
What's changed in a week?
Last Monday I got hit with panic pandemic, and it has been plusungood for my anxiety. It has been hard to focus on anything else, even though I know full well that wallowing in COVID-19 news is doing me little good.
The news has been flooded with COVID-19 news. Even the KWLUG list is full of it.
The outbreak has been declared an official pandemic.
It has become trendy to cancel all in-person meetings and self-isolate. Both UW and WLU have cancelled classes. Communitech has put all face to face meetings on hold until June (!). All the cool tech companies are telling their workers to work from home (about which I have strong opinions). Even the Kitchener Farmer's Market is being shut down.
Waterloo Region has now had five or six instances of COVID-19. As far as I know all have been obtained by travel, but community transmission is on its way.
Italy has been overwhelmed with patients looking for intensive care, and now doctors are triaging patients, letting the old and sick ones suffocate to death.
We have determined that the virus behind COVID-19 is indeed significantly more fatal and significantly more transmissible than the flu. Furthermore it has a much longer incubation period.
Ironically, I am writing this from a conference room, but few people showed up to the conference. I think I am going to stop publicizing events (how did I become the bad guy for publicizing events?), and I won't be attending much.
I guess I regret that previous entry now, huh? Sort of. I still feel that comparing the flu to COVID-19 is not whataboutism. I still feel that the protections we take against COVID-19 are similar to those we should be using for the flu, except that now we are supposed to be taking those interventions seriously and actually washing our hands regularly.
I strongly feel this has been an induced panic. If we tracked flu infections and death with the same breathlessness we have been giving to COVID-19, we would all be freaked out about the flu as well, regardless of the transmissivity and fatality.
I continue to feel that this issue touches all of our risk perception buttons, being novel and sudden and seemingly under human control.
However, I am shocked to see that we have actually curbed air travel, and even taken social isolation seriously. I feel embarrassed to be attending this conference, in fact. Our economy must be grinding to a halt.
In some ways I am pretty angry with how we have thrown meetups under the bus. Social distancing is a form of social isolation, and there are consequences to isolation too.
Similarly, I am somewhat upset by the narrative that taking courses online is an acceptable replacement for in-person teaching. Now we are all scrambling to learn online conferencing system, which will be used to justify getting rid of in-person lectures.
In some ways I am pretty angry with the narrative that we should be obligated to "work from home". It is another ploy to make us believe we should merge our work and private lives and be on call 24/7. If we can all work from home why shouldn't we? (I have found I do not work well from home at all. I guess that means I am even more unemployable than I thought.)