Life in the Time of Coronavirus, Snapshot #2

After I finished work today, I drove Pumpkin down the hill to her friend's house, where she dropped off a box with a gift she'd made inside of it. She left it on the doorstep, not even ringing the doorbell, and then we drove home.

It was like a teenage prank, except it was her wanting to give her friend a gift to cheer her up and this was the safest way.

As we drove down the hill, it seemed like a normal night - people out walking their dogs or just out for a walk, families with kids out for bike rides or playing in the street. But if you paid attention you noticed what was not normal. All the kids were in family groups. No one was playing with friends. The walkers crossed the street when someone approached from the other direction. There were no little clusters of dogs yapping at each other while their owners held their leashes.

San Diego is not on a "shelter in place" order like the San Francisco area is, but life has definitely changed. Our bars and restaurants are closed, serving take out or delivery only. Movie theaters are closed. I don't actually know if all gyms are closed, but I got an email today from the YMCA saying they are closed.

Pumpkin has talked on a video chat with her friends both days this week. Petunia was jealous, so today Pumpkin kept the call open with one of her friends, so that Petunia and the friend's little sister (who is one of Petunia's good friends) could talk. It was nice, and made Petunia very happy. I'll have to work out a way for her to video chat with more of her friends.

My work closed all its offices worldwide today. Many of us had already been working from home. Now everyone is. One of my main clients is in Seattle. They are a couple weeks ahead of us on the work from home thing, and have adopted a culture of "cameras on" in our meetings. Today, I joined them in that. It was fun to see their home offices and they got a kick out of the large collection of LEGO behind me (on top of my husband's desk). Next time, they may get to see my kitchen: My husband and I compare meeting schedules in the morning to work out who gets the office and who moves to the dining room table at different times.

There are news stories circulating saying that taking ibuprofen or other NSAIDs for fever may make COVID-19 worse, and recommending taking acetaminophen instead.  There's a little circle of science/pharma folks on Twitter trying to figure out if there is any data to support this. No one has found any. As close as I can tell, the source is a letter in Lancet describing a HYPOTHESIS about why people with diabetes and hypertension may be at elevated risk. Here is a Twitter thread with the latest, and embedded in it is an earlier thread that led me to that Lancet letter:

Really brief update on the situation regarding #covid19 and ibuprofen, since there are now news circulating that @WHO is warning against using ibuprofen. I just got off the phone with them, and to say they are warning against using ibuprofen is at best stretching the truth.

— Kai Kupferschmidt (@kakape) March 17, 2020

Maybe this hypothesis is right, maybe it isn't. But if you don't already have Tylenol in your home, you aren't likely to get it now. We have children's acetaminophen because my kids like the flavor of that better than children's ibuprofen (cherry vs. grape or bubble gum). I found a bottle of acetaminophen and a bottle of acetaminophen PM. Both expired in 2014. Oops.

I started stressing about this yesterday. I went on Amazon to see if I could order acetaminophen but even as I went there I knew I would not be able to do so.  I seriously considered asking my husband to go to the drug store to try to get a bottle, but he rightly pointed out that (1) there was unlikely to be any on the shelves, and (2) an unnecessary trip to the drug store would definitely put us at higher risk. There is no actual evidence that ibuprofen use would do so.

So I wrote "tylenol" on the list of things to look for next time we go to a drug store, but we decided not to make a special trip out.

And I reflected on human nature and fear and how I'm not really any different from the people who went out and cleared the shelves of toilet paper.

I'll close this snapshot with one of the nice things about this week. I decided to take a walk every weekday, as long as it isn't raining. I usually do this when I'm working in the office, so I decided I should keep my habit at home. One or both of the kids have joined me each day. It was a beautiful day today, so we stopped as we walked up the hill home and admired the view.

Stay healthy, everyone.

Life in the Time of Coronavirus, Snapshot #1

I saw several tweets going around about keeping a journal right now. The tweets were about a physical journal, but screw that. I've never been able to keep a physical journal going for long. The best I ever did was during our four month "Circle Pacific" trip - I wrote a fairly detailed entry about every day. That was on a laid back, kid-free, long term trip when sitting in a bar for an afternoon catching up on my journal entries seemed like a great way to spend some time. I still jot notes down when I travel, but they aren't extensive. The idea that I'd manage to keep a real journal going now is pretty laughable.

But I like the idea of writing down some of the details about what life is like right now. I refer back to old blog posts a lot to remind myself of details of various times in my life.

If I had to pick one phrase to describe my life right now it would be "mentally exhausting." On the surface, life was going on like normal until Friday, when the announcement came that our schools were closing. But ever since it became clear that COVID-19 would spread here in the US, I have been making a lot of decisions and doing extra planning. I have been doing that without all the information I would like, because the information I really want is just not available.

I wanted to know whether the virus was spreading in the community, but the bungling of the testing situation here in the US made that unknowable until it spread enough to infect someone who got ill enough to be noticed. Or perhaps it had to wait until the testing situation improved enough to allow testing of people without a high-risk travel history. Either way, we had our first reported case of community transmission last week. I suspect transmission had been occurring in the community before that, but I do not know to what extent.

The other thing I wanted to know (and still want to know, to be honest), is how different my risk profile is from someone my age (47) who doesn't have asthma. This is not knowable right now. I spent a lot of time reading various things written by public health experts and doctors and eventually realized I was chasing information that just doesn't exist. The places that have had enough cases to be able to provide that sort of detail have not had the time to analyze their cases in that sort of detail. I am just going to have to make decisions without that information.

Here's a probably incomplete list of the decisions I've had to make in the last month or so, in rough chronological order:

1. Would we still go to the Valle de Guadalupe (a wine region in Mexico, about 2 hours from San Diego) to celebrate my sister's birthday? The trip was planned for the weekend of Feb. 29. (Answer: Yes, we did. It was a lovely weekend and I am glad we went.)

2. Would we send Pumpkin to spend that weekend with a family friend who had just returned from a business trip in Japan? (Answer: No, I canceled that when I woke up Friday morning to the news that Japan had closed its schools. Pumpkin went to spend the weekend with some other friends who were already slated to take Petunia. In retrospect, Japan has done a better job than we have of containing the virus and it would probably have been fine to keep our original plan.)

3. Would we stock up on food, etc? (Answer: Sort of. We had recently done our usual Costco run, so were well stocked on toilet paper and hand soap, anyway. I decided to take the advice to buy a little extra on each shopping trip and so we have a good supply of most of our non-perishable favorites and given what I saw when I went shopping this morning, I'm glad I did that.)

4. Would we still take our planned trip to LA for my husband's birthday? My parents were coming over to watch the kids and we were planning to spend two nights in LA, attending the Keane concert on the second night. This trip was earlier this week - driving to LA Monday, driving home Wednesday. (Answer: Yes, we went. This decision feels questionable. Time will tell if that was an OK decision or not. This was a "big" birthday and my husband has been wanting to see Keane live for years. At the time we went neither San Diego nor LA County had reported a case of community transmission. We had fun. We went to the Broad museum and saw amazing modern art, we had some wonderful food, and the concert was great. We tried to take precautions, keeping our distance from other people and using a lot of hand sanitizer.

LA county reported its first case of probable community transmission while we were there. San Diego country reported its first likely case of community transmission Wednesday night. Realistically, there has almost certainly been community transmission in both counties for awhile now. We can only hope the level was still low enough that we made it through the trip uninfected.)

5. Would we work from home upon our return from LA? (Answer: Yes. My husband's company made that decision for him, and I decided I should stay home, too.)

6. Would we go ahead with a planned visit from one of my best friends, who lives in San Francisco? The visit was scheduled for the weekend of March 21. (Answer: No, my friend and I decided to cancel the visit yesterday. This one really hurt, but we've got a phone call scheduled for Monday and we'll reschedule the visit for a later date.)

7. Would we continue grocery shopping every week like normal? (Answer: Yes, but I decided to try to switch to less busy shopping times. I also bought some cotton gloves to wear when I am in the store and try hard to keep 6 feet of distance from other people. Today's shopping trip was a mixed bag, though - I went before 8, but the store was already crowded and not everyone seemed interested in keeping their distance.)

8. What will we expect our kids to do while they are stuck here at home and we're trying to work? (Answer: They have some homework from the school and we came up with a list of some extra learning-related things they can do. Other than that, they just have to leave us alone to work.)

9. Will our kids still go to their extracurricular activities? (Answer: No. Several were canceled, and we're going to skip the others but continue to pay for them because we want those people to continue to have money, too.)

10. Will we have our cleaner come as usual? (Answer: No. We've canceled, but are again continuing to pay as if we hadn't. This afternoon, we're cleaning our house ourselves.)

11. What else will we do to help our local community during this time? (Answer: we'll make an extra donation to our food bank. We're going to order some books online from our favorite local bookstore, Mysterious Galaxy.  We're on the fence about ordering in or buying gift cards to support local restaurants - Postmates has set up for contactless delivery, but what I really want to see is my government step in to help those businesses.)

In thinking about my last few weeks, I really think governments need to just make the decisions for people. There is too much individual decision making going on. I felt relief when my county decided to cancel gatherings of more than 250 people, because then I didn't have to decide if we should go to the play we had tickets for today. Decide for people. Shut down bars, mandate restaurants switch to take-out and delivery... Just do it.

Also, someone needs to try to calm people down about grocery stores. The situation we have now with people packing in and panic-buying is not good!

That's my first update. I'll try to post again later in the week with how working from home with two kids and another adult (who is also working from home) is going. How are things going for you?

Weekend Reading: The Big Changes to Our Routine Edition

So... our schools here are closing as of Monday. All events over 250 people are canceled. I'm getting waves of cancelation notifications from my kids' activities. Fun times. In the midst of all of this, my husband and I are trying to work out how we'll handle working from home when we both have a lot of meetings. We've done two days so far with mixed success. (Key lesson: plan out lunchtime better, since the "overflow" meeting room has been the dining room table and that means the other person can't finish their meeting and stroll out and start heating up lunch.) It is going to be interesting to see how we do when we add two restless kids into the mix.

Anyway, I have just a few links for you.

Here's a good explanation of why we had a shortage of coronavirus tests.

And here's a summary of tips from some experts on social distancing. Spoiler alert: they're not really sure what we should all be doing right now, either, but I still found the article useful.

This set of graphics on the South Korean COVID-19 clusters is interesting. Look at Patient 31.

I love the videos circulating of Italians finding a way to have community even during lockdown:

Sicily has figured out this whole self-isolation thing.#COVID19 #CoronavirusPandemic pic.twitter.com/93whPVtQcR

— John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) March 13, 2020

Here's your bunny of the week:

pic.twitter.com/9X5fUqnzbr

— うさぎ島の写真bot (@rabbit_isle_bot) March 13, 2020

That's all I have this week. I'll try to make a point of reading some non-pandemic content next week so that hopefully I'll have better links to share! Have a good weekend, everyone.

Weekend Reading: The Better Late than Never Edition

This post is going up late this weekend because I was busy on Friday night. I could have skipped my rollerblade and posted instead, I guess, but that's silly talk.

Anyway, I do have some links for you this week:

Zach Carter wrote in the Huffington Post about how Elizabeth Warren has changed the Democratic party. If you, like me, are still mourning her exit from the race, read this and feel a little better.

Connie Schultz wrote a wonderful piece on the pain of how this turned out.

I recommended this in my last post, but it is worth pointing out her, too: I found this Washington Post profile of a white woman in Augusta, GA, who had always voted Republican until Trump really thought-provoking. What would change if women like her truly abandoned the Republican party? What would it take for that to happen?

Ezra Klein wrote a very good piece on the problem with the Sanders campaign treating other Democrats like the enemy.

In recommended listening: I am about 3/4 of the way through this discussion between Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias about what a Sanders or Biden presidency might be like, and I am finding it very useful.

If you, like me, weren't really sure what the big deal was a bout a judge stating the obvious and saying that AG Barr's word can't be trusted, Talking Points Memo has an explainer for us.

This article about what has gone wrong with getting tests for coronovirus is interesting... but I think we won't really know what happened unless the scientists at the CDC and FDA start talking.

I don't have a link for this but I want to say something about the coronavirus situation. I do think that something has gone terribly wrong in our Federal level response, and my guess is that it is going to come down to a lack of ability of political will to force collaboration between the various Federal agencies. Maybe we'll get the story at some point, maybe we won't. But please remember that a large part of the response is being driven by state and local public health employees, who are not incompetent and are not being muzzled by Trump's political desires. They are doing good work to slow this outbreak.

That's all I have because I've been taking a bit of a break from Twitter and reading less.

Here's some bunnies for you:

pic.twitter.com/Oe1gXNwccK

— うさぎ島の写真bot (@rabbit_isle_bot) March 7, 2020

Blegh

I should be working on book promo tasks, so of course I'm going to sit here and read Twitter and write about politics instead.

To make me feel better: Go pre-order the next Annorlunda book! Nontraditional, by Nan Kuhlman, is a great collection of linked essays about the winding path life takes. It focuses on the author's students at a community college in small town Ohio, and interweaves stories from the author's own nontraditional career path. I think you'll really enjoy it! It will be out next month (although I think Amazon is shipping early, which is an entirely different post I could write....)

OK, so back to politics.

Needless to say, my disappointment with how this year's primary is going continues. I can't really blame people who swung to Biden. Anyone with any sense is frightened by the possibility of a Trump re-election. It doesn't feel like the moment to dream big, even if you're also going to fight hard. I really thought that was what we should do, to decrease the chance of the next Trump. But I can understand why others might have decided to focus on just beating Trump, and everyone's punditing on how best to do that has favored Biden.

The Bernie folks are yelling that Warren should have gotten out and endorsed him, but I think they are wrong in their assumption that all Warren voters would go to Bernie next. I wouldn't, and the polls I've seen indicate that I have a lot of company.

Petunia (who is 10) has been asking me a lot of questions about the election and she wanted to know why Biden is my second choice. I told her that I thought he'd be the next best president if we couldn't have Warren. But the real reason that felt too complicated to explain to her is that I think that the success of either a Sanders or Biden presidency is going to come down to the team they hire. And based on how he has run his campaign, I think Sanders would over-prioritize ideological agreement in his hires.

I also think that in this case, the choice of a running mate might be more politically important than usual, and again, I see no evidence Sanders will factor that into his thinking.

So while I don't think a Sanders candidacy is doomed to fail, I tend to think a Biden candidacy has a better chance of success. More importantly, I think that a Biden presidency has a better chance of success. That is why he's my next choice.

I have no idea what Warren will do. I hope she uses whatever leverage she has to get her anti-corruption ideas into the platform. This administration has been a corruption extravaganza. We really need to fight back against that. I am confident that she'll continue to fight to fix things as a Senator, or from whatever post she lands at next.

I think that progressives would be in a better position if Sanders hadn't run, and had instead supported Warren's candidacy. But a sizeable proportion of Sanders supporters are a bit blind to his weaknesses and refuse to understand why someone like me could not get behind his candidacy. There is a cult of personality in that movement that is not healthy. There is also an over-focus on the presidency. It is good that people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are running for and winning Congressional seats, and I hope that movement continues to build strength in down ballot races. That is how they will build power and ultimately change this country, if they are going to do that.

In some ways, I think a Biden nomination may help change this country more than even Biden recognizes. He's running very much on a "go back to how it was" message, but of course there is no going back. We can only go forward, and Trump has put the country in a place where maybe we can start to see some old political truths break down. There was a long Washington Post profile of a white woman in Georgia who feels politically unmoored by the Trump presidency. I really recommend reading it and trying to do so from a place of empathy for women like the one profiled. As Ezra Klein has been discussing (see any number of his podcasts about his new book), our identities have become more "stacked," so changing your politics really will feel like changing a large part of your identity. I can see why that would be hard to do. However, if enough white women in the South do that and stop voting so overwhelmingly for Republicans, there could be a huge change in the political calculus in this country. I don't pretend to know what that change would mean, but it would be a big change.

In general, I think we should stop trying to game out strategic political actions, and just work for the immediate outcomes we think would be best. It is too hard to predict the reactions to any given action. So I'm back to where I started this primary: committed to supporting the eventual nominee and planning to work for down ballot races.