Spring Fever and Rules

After having had almost zero real change in my daily routine due to the virus crisis I’m finally going to have to make a couple of accommodations. While my state has no stay at home rules, the fact that I’ve got an out of state doctor appointment in two weeks does put me under Texas “Stay at Home” rules. I live in Arkansas where there are no such requirements so far, but since it is their state they get to make the rules.

Fortunately, Texas rules are not as limiting as some other states, they allow you to go outside all you want as long as you practice social distancing. My wife and I will still be able to run on the streets and also to play tennis with each other, not with other people though. We can still take the boat to local lakes and fish together. And we could hike, though hiking season is basically over here, unless you love poison ivy, mosquitoes and poisonous snakes, which we don’t.

The things that we can’t do are not much different than before I fell under Texas rules. My board meetings are by phone now. They tried Zoom but it was just too complicated for some of our less tech savvy members. Church is broadcast now, so is Sunday School which works fine on Zoom. Hmm, so my Sunday School class is smarter than my board directors? No pickle ball, you just get too close to your partner at that sport. Basically the main new restriction is that I can’t play tennis with my regular singles opponent and friend, that’s over for now.

And when I drive to Texas I will have to drive out of my way, around Louisiana, because they are stopping cars coming out of that state at the Texas border and forcing them to turn around or to check into a Texas hotel for two weeks and self-quarantine. But if you come in from Arkansas you are just fine. At least for now. Of course my appointment is two weeks off, I would not be surprised if it gets cancelled if things get much worse in either Texas or Arkansas.

It is hard to know how to think about the covid19 epidemic. I’ve seen people call it the most serious crisis of our lifetimes. I’m sorry but I don’t think it is even in the top ten. The latest models show maybe 80,000 predicted US deaths. Cancer deaths this year in the US will be around 600,000. Now that’s a crisis, that’s almost ten times as much grief and it is inflicted on a much younger set of victims.

But the virus has caused more inconvenience to a much larger audience because cancer is not a thing to most people, unless they have it or a family member or close friend does. The covid19 disease has disrupted the lives of many millions of people who will never be infected, and because it is highly contagious, it has created more fear than something like cancer. Cancer generally has no known cause, and isn’t spread by doorknobs and hugs. You could also compare the virus to heart disease. It too dwarfs covid19 in victims claimed.

Accidental deaths, death by car crashes or other accidents, total almost twice the projected Corona toll. In fact the common (non Corona) flu varieties kill 60,000 in the US each year, almost as many as covid19 will likely take from us.

So why is this such a big deal in our lives? It is new for one thing. It is also invisible and unpredictable. And because it is contagious it has caused our national and local governments to react by imposing formerly unthinkable restrictions on our democracy. It may turn out that the economic damage from the restrictions designed to flatten the curve could do more harm than the disaster they are intended to avert. Or maybe they were perfect or maybe they were not nearly enough? We may never know, since there is no way to try it more than one way. I suppose you could compare the way different countries handled things versus their results but there are way too many uncontrolled variables to get much hard science out of that. Or at least it appears that way to me.

There is also plenty of statistical data that proves economic hardship kills people just as dead as any virus. Poverty and stress kill people, they shorten lives. It isn’t arguable, it is factual. So there probably is an optimum response that balances the economic pain to the people with the viral death toll. However, nobody knows exactly what that looks like. Any time you start comparing dollars to death tolls, it becomes a very complex and morally dangerous calculus.

Me, I’m a compulsive rule follower and I’ll live by my Texas imposed guidelines until I get my Texas appointment taken care of, then I’ll be free to go back to my state’s rules. I do not profess to know what state policy should be, but I will continue to follow it as it is laid out by our governor and health department.

And at some point in the next few weeks or months the pressure will start to mount, especially in places like my rural area, for a return to normalcy. Our county has a land area of nearly eight times that of New York City yet we have only twelve confirmed cases to date compared to NYC with 65,000 cases. We may see a rapid escalation of infection here, or we may not. There is some efficacy inherent with living in the middle of nowhere when it comes to not catching communicable diseases.

It isn’t unlikely that our curve here would be much flatter than a metro area curve, even if we had not taken a single step to slow the spread of the disease. Maybe we are even hurting our chances because when and if the disease does peak here in the sticks, maybe weeks or months from now, will there even be any medical supplies left over for our sick people?

All those questions are unanswerable right now. There is no shortage of people who will express an opinion but nobody really knows because this is such a new thing. My advice is follow the rules, including utilizing the exceptions they include. That means I’ll still be spending a lot of time outdoors and away from other humans. But for city dwellers it may mean just staying inside, period. Whatever the case, I’d advise following your areas’ requirements because it is the right thing to do. Look for ways to help others, even if it is just a phone call or dropping a hot meal off for older friends, especially if they are living alone. Maybe doing a grocery pick up for them, grocery delivery only exists in cities. We do not have that option in rural America, you have to go to the store at the very least for curbside pickup. Many rural locations do not even have that available.

My concerns are for others. We have months worth of food, we have decades worth of money and we do not have to work to pay our bills, just for entertainment’s sake. We don’t have kids at home to educate or entertain. We don’t have living parents to care for. But many of you, maybe all of you younger than us, do have some or all of those things to be concerned about. My advice, which is worth exactly what it cost you to read, is this. This will pass, and it likely is not as bad as we think it might be. Nobody ever got a page view on the internet or sold a news story by playing down how bad something might be. Good luck and follow the rules and odds are things will work out fine.

What do you think, is shutting down the world to flatten the curve the solution or the creation of an even bigger problem?

What is the biggest change in your own personal world that the virus pandemic has caused.

What is your biggest worry, your family’s health, your finances or your job?