Mercy and Comfort

Yesterday evening my husband and I went for a walk around our neighborhood. The weather was perfect and it was good to get out. There were quite a few people out walking, jogging, biking, or playing in their yards. Everyone casually crossed the street to avoid each other. That would make a good premise for a video game, actually - avoiding the other people outside by a certain radius.

I tried to have a conversation with some other local relatives about what we should do with my grandmother if a more restrictive lockdown is enacted here. She's in her 90s and lives alone, and doesn't have a smartphone or internet access to order or take care of anything online. Right now we can shop for her and drop things off at her house. If it comes to a point where we aren't allowed out as often or can't buy the groceries she needs, I think it would be best for her to stay with one of us, instead of being by herself for such an extended period of time; not that this has to happen now, but we should plan for it in case it comes up. This turned into a family argument 🤷‍♀️ Hopefully it's at least in people's minds, and if it comes to that, there will have been some thought about it.

My plan for now is to stay at my house (with periodic walks outside). I don't even want to go to the supermarket again. We can order the things we need. We're seeing now that the virus is hitting even younger people very hard, and continuing to mutate. We really don't know anything about it, it's brand new. According to that Imperial College paper, infections in the US will be peaking in May-June, depending on location. (Since I'm in somewhat of a "hotspot," I wonder if that will be sooner here.) I have the luxury - and duty - of being able to stay home through the summer.

Every call for work now starts with a rundown of how is everyone's health, what's the situation in your town, how are you all doing with isolating? We can take the whole first part of a meeting just chatting about virus stuff. I kind of wish we wouldn't - while it's nice to connect, it's also nice to be working as a distraction from everything else going on.

I've been trying to keep up with mentioning policy changes and stuff here too, and I'm sure I'm missing a lot, but yesterday they announced that they would be deploying two military hospital ships, Mercy (west coast) and Comfort (east coast), to help with the coronavirus response - not to treat COVID-19 patients, but to free up capacity in other hospitals. They'll be ready in the next few weeks. They're also talking about setting up military field hospitals for non-coronavirus trauma patients. And they've asked doctors not to perform elective procedures, to keep resources available for the influx of coronavirus patients. The president is also invoking the Defense Production Act, which prioritizes production of necessary supplies (in this case medical supplies, but I guess could be weapons or military stuff in wartime), and I think can kind of force private companies to produce things at the government's request? Kind of like how some liquor and perfume companies have switched over to produce hand sanitizer, and I've seen some companies switch to making N95 masks.

Today China reported zero new cases of the virus!