Work Updates

Last week, just before the Thanksgiving break, a video message went out from the head of our COVID-19 Task Force to all colleagues, kind of reminding us of the guidance to not travel or mix households over the holiday - because they need us all to stay healthy. It was a generally upbeat message that had sort of ominous undertones, and was the first time, among all the communications I've gotten from my employer, that I felt they were really serious and worried about the disease's impact on our colleagues.

Cherrydeck for Unsplash

8:00 AM on Monday morning after Thanksgiving, a message went out from the head of our site, again reminding us to stay vigilant and prevent the spread, and outlining site policies related to the latest state restrictions:

• Employees must work remotely unless impossible (previously we were able to return to the office voluntarily at 25% capacity, which we were well below)
• Masks must be worn at all times indoors, even if physically distant - so must now be worn at all times except while eating or drinking, even if in a room alone (previously they didn't require masks if you were 6 feet apart [e.g. spaced out in a conference room], or in your own office or at your own cubicle desk, which they said met the 6 foot requirement)
• Before returning to the office from out-of-state travel longer than a same-day trip, employees must quarantine for 14 days or get a negative PCR test result after day 7 (excluding people who commute from out of state)

Besides my brief trip into the office several weeks ago for a blood drive, I have no need or plans to return anytime soon. I appreciate that they're reviewing and applying these new state guidelines, especially since they seem to be generally voluntary and unenforceable, and many employers and organizations seem to be downright flaunting them.

The funny thing is, our colleagues in Wuhan, China have been back in the office for months, and most nights when we have meetings with them, they're all sitting together around a conference room table, masks optional. I never thought I'd be jealous of being able to sit in a conference room together 😂

Thanksgiving

With the coronavirus raging all across the country, many people canceled or reduced their Thanksgiving plans. It was already an assumption among both our families that we wouldn't be getting together, so no hurt feelings there, but I know other people who had to make painful decisions or change plans last minute in light of new guidance and travel restrictions.

Pandemic Thanksgiving for two

From what I saw on social media, many of my friends kept their celebration to just their household, or maybe combined a couple households outdoors, at a distance. Our catered dinner plan worked out perfectly - I split a full prepared meal with some other family members (we picked it up yesterday, took out our half, and delivered the rest to them). The food was delicious and we still have plenty of leftovers.

We tried watching a replay of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and it was weird! There were no crowds, of course - the event took place just on one block in front of the Macy's store in New York. There were people on floats waving to nobody, and the whole thing was very eerie.

One other eerie thing: yesterday our state sent out an emergency alert to cell phones advising that COVID cases are rising and hospitals could soon be at capacity. I'm not really sure what the purpose was, because I feel like if you're someone who's concerned about that type of stuff, you're probably already aware - and if you weren't aware, you're probably someone who thinks the whole thing is a mild flu or a hoax. Maybe it was meant to drive home the severity for people who weren't really taking it seriously. Our state also announced that bars would have to close at 5 PM last night (Thanksgiving-eve, the biggest party night of the year), and lots of people and businesses were joking that, "Ok, happy hour has been moved to 8 AM-5 PM," or trying to find other loopholes to stay open and keep people drinking...

News Alerts

August de Richelieu for Pexels

For a while I was getting daily Yahoo News alerts on my phone about the coronavirus. Those stopped for a while, and then I started getting daily election news alerts, as different things developed. Then those stopped. Today I see the coronavirus updates have started again, with a headline about how the CDC has officially recommended that people not travel for the Thanksgiving holiday (one week from today!)

I also caught this interesting article suggesting that paying people $1000 to take a vaccine might just be the price we have to pay to achieve herd immunity. Though it mentions that the number of people who said they would take a vaccine went up 8% between September and October polls (and since the latest vaccine news in the past couple weeks, I've seen more people specifically mentioning they would take it ... or at least fewer people saying "no way"), so maybe vaccine hesitancy will become less of an issue...

New Restrictions

👆 This!

As I predicted, we did indeed get some new restrictions, this time at the state level, starting at the end of this week: 

1. Masks are now required to be worn at all times when indoors with people from outside your household, even when social distancing is also possible. (I just heard an interview with our county commissioner today where she explained that many transmissions were between people having meetings in conference rooms where they were "appropriately" spaced 6' apart, but indoors, maskless, in a room with the door shut - what did they think would happen?!)
2. When you enter the state, you must either quarantine for 14 days or provide a negative COVID test from the past 72 hours. (This is not applicable to people who work out of state or travel out of state for medical treatments.)

This is all great, but who is going to enforce this? Will people be at the borders to check for COVID test results? Will they be patrolling homes to make sure people are wearing masks if they don't live there?

The Secretary of Health also said there are no plans to go back to our earlier red/yellow/green phases that they were using at the beginning of the pandemic.

Locking Back Down

Well we knew it was just a matter of time before restrictions were re-imposed, and based on the lack of toilet paper in stores recently, everyone has been preparing for another lockdown. Today the adjacent large city just announced a number of new restrictions through January 1st: no indoor gatherings of any size, and reducing the amount of people who can be indoors at one time (I assume at places of business); no indoor dining, and outdoor dining must be with members of your own household (not sure how that is checked or enforced); closing gyms and libraries and cancelling youth sports; and colleges and high schools moving to online learning.

They've asked surrounding counties to do the same. My county already announced last week that it was going to move to virtual learning for two weeks beginning next week, so we'll see what else changes...

Thanksgiving is next week and while some conscientious people are lamenting the fact that they're now restricted from even the small family gatherings they had been planning, I'm sure others are planning to move forward with a family dinner - after all, who is checking people's homes to enforce all this?

On the Rise

COVID cases are on the rise all over the country (and world), with each day blowing the previous day's record setting number of new cases out of the water. I'm trying to go back to the level of caution that I was taking back in March and April, not going anywhere or seeing anyone or touching anything. It's a bit harder now, though, because I do have things like doctor's appointments. I'm definitely not being as casual about things like just running into a store quickly, as I was over the summer. But some people had gotten to the point where they felt safe gathering with small groups of people, and the problem is when everyone's bubbles intersect, you're still exposed to more people than you realize. They're saying this newest outbreak is due more to small gatherings than to large, superspreader events.

The state of Utah, after not mandating anything this whole time, has finally implemented a mask mandate. I've seen a lot of people over the last couple weeks saying they wouldn't mind another lockdown, like some other countries are doing, or wondering why there isn't one. Some schools have just reopened for the first time this year, while other schools and workplaces are shutting back down and moving back to a fully virtual format. A local children's hospital recommended all schools in the region go virtual for a period of time, and I just saw that schools in my county are now virtual for 2 weeks - although my school district had already elected not to go back for in-person learning until at least January, much to the disappointment of some parents. I've seen many parents whose kids are in virtual classes say that they would sign any kind of waiver just to let their kids go back to the classroom.

My thought is, the people who want to and believe in wearing masks are wearing masks. The people who want and are able to stay home are staying home. The people who don't believe in any of that won't be swayed by an unenforceable lockdown. President-elect Biden's new coronavirus advisor says a 6-week lockdown (where the government pays for people not to work) could save the economy. Let's see if the case is still the same after January 20th...

Thanksgiving Plans

Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels

Thanksgiving is coming in just a couple weeks. I wasn't planning on cooking any kind of special meal for just the two of us, as I'm not especially a fan of traditional Thanksgiving foods, but I saw a local specialty grocer is offering Thanksgiving meals to go - and I know whatever they serve is going to be excellent - so I ordered a meal. It says it will serve six people, so we're splitting it with a few family members (I'll remove our portion and then pass the rest along - contactless). Actually looking forward to the Thanksgiving meal this year!

However, another thing to consider is that many college students will be heading home for Thanksgiving break. I know some schools that were open for in-person learning are actually closing their campus after Thanksgiving, and students won't be returning, so they won't bring anything back to campus from home. But college students are notorious COVID spreaders, and I just read an article calling them "little ticking time bombs" of COVID-19 as they return home to their families.

Election Week

My predictions and hopes about the election came true:

1. We didn't know accurate results for days. Actually, we still don't have complete results, but we know enough to know overall how things turned out. (Except poor Georgia - two more months of campaign ads leading up to a runoff vote in January, and the whole country's attention turned to them!) But despite weeks and months of preparation about "don't expect results right away," the news stations started sharing live results on election night, and then everyone got bent out of shape when the initial numbers started changing as mail-in ballots were slowly counted over the subsequent days.
2. A lot of people were unhappy with the outcome (or still are, as the sitting president's most fervent fans don't believe it's over yet, and the president has yet to concede or say anything at all, really). But, far more people were elated with the outcome, which brings me to...
3. People were in the streets cheering, when the race was called on Saturday! All over the US, as well as around the world - England set off fireworks, Germany rang bells, France lit the Eiffel Tower! (As one meme said, you have to be pretty bad at your job if people all over the world dance in the streets when you're fired...) I actually drove around my area to see if there were any local celebrations, but couldn't find any - they seemed to be concentrated more in the cities, though I did hear of people honking horns and such. And... now they're recommending that everyone who was out celebrating this weekend get tested for COVID and quarantine for 14 days as a precaution.

On top of the good news of the weekend, it was announced this morning that one of the vaccine candidates was found to be 90% effective (as opposed to 60% like they'd been estimating). There are still some steps before it can be approved for emergency use authorization, but once that happens, front line workers will be given priority access. Dr. Fauci says the US may not be back to normal until 2022, but I think even that is pretty optimistic...

Election Eve

This isn't a political blog, but like everything else in 2020, the general election is unprecedented. Tomorrow is election day. Living in a swing state, I have had TV ads, internet ads, mailers, text messages, phone calls, signs, and any other type of reminder you can think of shoved down my throat all year, escalating into an insane crescendo over the past couple months. I have been ready since January for this to all be over. I turned in my ballot weeks ago, and now it just needs to be counted tomorrow.

The only things I know for sure are:
1) We aren't going to know the accurate results for days, maybe weeks.
2) No matter what the outcome, a lot of people are going to be unhappy.

It's #2 that a lot of people are worried about. I've seen people making election day prep and self-care recommendations ranging from stocking comfort food and taking breaks from the news, to removing heavy objects from outside your home and making sure you have access to your garden hose in case of arson.

My hope is that election day itself goes smoothly (hopefully with record numbers of people voting early, the polls will be relatively quiet), and that change peacefully comes to this country. Instead of rioting, I would love to see people take to the streets cheering.