100 Days

So, the whole pandemic business hit home on March 17, when we closed my campus for what we thought was going to be a sanitizing and regrouping event, but which turned into a whole new way of doing business. That means that we have just passed 100 days of Coronavirus. Here's what it looked like for me:

As everybody knows, I love me some spreadsheets.

• The columns on the right show activity outside the house: a few trips to the closed campus, grocery shopping and picking up prescriptions, some takeaway from local restaurants, and a few miscellaneous outings, mostly for cat veterinary issues (and one BLM rally). The (C) marks show when Coco took care of business and I stayed home.

• That dark purple on the far right represents almost-daily walks on the neighborhood, usually with Coco, sometimes alone, always well away from any other humans - I mean, seriously, we cross to the other side of the street when people are about.

• On the left, we have social zooming - those online meetings for personal reasons beyond the seven or so hours a day I spend zooming for work - and the joy of grocery delivery, which became available to us in May.

• Gray days are those days I left the house only to take a walk. On solid black days I never left the house at all.

This is how it has been for 100 days, and for Coco and me, that's likely how it's going to remain for some time. Whatcom County has moved into Phase 2 of the state reopening plan, but since then has seen an uptick in cases and will not be eligible to move to Phase 3 until that changes. We have not flattened the curve in our state yet, and it's not that we're at the cusp of the second wave: we're still just in the first wave.

The recent relaxation of restrictions has seen more social activity, and not always with proper precautions -  as Apoorva Mandavilli, a New York Times science reporter, says: “There are ways to be responsible and socialize, but people don’t seem to be able to draw the line between what’s OK and what is not. For too many people, it seems to be binary — they are either on lockdown or taking no precautions.” Perhaps that's why as of tomorrow it will be a misdemeanor in Washington to be in public without a mask.  It is certainly why Coco and I are not going back to anything near normal any time soon.

• We already don't leave the house without a mask; we even wear them walking if we're going through the village instead of into the wide streets of Edgemoor and never enter a building without one on.

• We're not going to be socializing any time soon. We love all our friends, but you can zoom us. I'm not going to sit on a deck trying to figure out how to have a beer with a mask on, with my friends ten feet away, either at their place or ours.

• We're not going out to eat. We'll still do takeaway, because we want to support our local businesses, but an hour or more in a dining room, even with 50% capacity, is not in the cards for us.

• I'm in no hurry to get back to campus. I will come back to support our Summer Quarter start, but I am staying pretty well connected with my team virtually, and I don't need to add one more body to the crowd without a specific reason.

In short, we'll be managing our "exposure budget", as some observers are calling it, pretty tightly for some time to come. I guess I am technically in a higher-risk category, but even without that, we seem to have done okay so far and see no need to change.

I can do another hundred days easy.

Earlier pandemic musings:

Day 27

Day 13

Day 6