Dinner with Friends

I'm writing this between online meetings with friends - we "had dinner" with them earlier, and will be getting together later with some additional people to play a game online somehow (not sure yet how this all will work). Dinner was fun, and I think their kids especially got a kick out of the videoconference. I'm on conference calls all the time for work, but my husband never does them, so he was surprised by the video and the screen sharing capabilities when we displayed a picture for them.

I read two really good articles from The Atlantic this week. The first, How the Pandemic Will End, lays out short- and long-term predictions for what will happen in the coming months, looking at a future Generation C, born into a post-COVID-19 world. The end result for them could be either inward isolation or outward cooperation in the United States.

The other article, The Four Possible Timelines for Life Returning to Normal, lays out four scenarios ranging from a miraculous resolution in 1-2 months to 18+ months of waiting for a successful vaccine. All of these hinge on the fact that people who are infected and recover achieve some degree of immunity, which we don't really know anything about yet. I think the longer-term predictions in this article are realistic yet still hopeful: over the coming months, with social distancing, we can learn more about the disease, develop potential treatments to make future outbreaks less severe, and get to a point where we have better control over the spread of the disease. But in the meantime we will need to have at least some social distancing measures in place long term (e.g. small groups are ok, large events are not; maybe sporting events will be played without a crowd).

Disney World and Disneyland have officially announced that they are closed "indefinitely." This is unprecedented, and is the longest the parks have ever been closed - even after 9/11 and natural disasters they only closed for a day.