
There were a lot of questions when I wrote the previous post. There are even more now, but we do have some answers mixed in. Will schools close? Yep. All schools in the state are closed until late April and many across the country are closed too. Will more restrictions be put in place? Yep. No gatherings of more than 250 people and if you do have a gathering smaller than that, there are restrictions about how your employees must be trained, the minimum distance between people, etc.
Is this an overreaction? That’s one we don’t have an answer for. At this point I feel like if we’re going to do this, then let’s do it. Let’s learn everything we can to make ourselves smarter for next time, but for now? Let’s lock it down. We don’t know what the right answer is, but I’m guessing we’re less likely to regret shutting things down. All of these dates about how long things will be closed are fuzzy. We just need to see that exponential curve start to flatten.
Humans aren’t great at absorbing the implications of math, especially in two ways that make this a tough problem. First, it’s hard to grasp the speed of exponential growth. Delaying by even a single day can mean thousands of additional people get infected. And since it seems that most symptoms take around five days to appear, we’re much farther up that curve than the numbers show right now.
The second math complication is that humans don’t process probability well. It’s called “neglect of probability“. It’s either not going to happen or it’s definitely going to happen. Will millions of people die from this disease? Will we run out of food? Will toilet paper be the next BitCoin? None of these are 0% or 100%, but treating them as such leads to a lot of irrational behavior.
I’ve completed 7 days of working from home and Elijah will be off of school for six weeks. Sporting seasons are being canceled. Most public events are canceled. Travel is locked down to some other countries. And so we’re back to the most divisive question: too much or not enough?
We have quite a bit of data at our fingertips. We can compare countries who did too little with those who reacted quickly. There are a lot of good articles out there and I specifically recommend one from Tomas Pueyo and another from a group of researchers and foundations. The second one is especially eye opening because their conclusion on March 10 was that this area wasn’t doing enough to stop the spread yet. A lot more measures have been put in place since then so hopefully the predictions have improved, if they were correct to begin with.
On a more micro level, our family is chugging along. It’s a tough situation to plan for. Trips to Costco and Safeway both showed a lot of people stocking up. I’m not sure if there is some secret, delicious recipe for toilet paper, but if you don’t have it now, you’re not going to find it. We’re well-stocked here (including ammo so don’t think about it… kidding… sort of.)
I’m blessed to have a job that allows me to work from home. Our team is adjusting well and I think we’re getting into a productive groove. My only real hangup is that this desk that I built in 2013 has never been the most comfortable thing. I can’t figure out exactly what it is, but a day at this desk leaves my back feeling sore. Since we’re going to have such a long spell of working from home, I ordered an electric base for a standup desk. I use mine a lot at work and it has always felt like too much of a luxury for home, but this situation pushed me over the edge. I saved some money by purchasing only the base. I’ll start with a simple plywood top but eventually I want to put a beautiful walnut top on it.
So we continue to chug along a day at a time. It’s amazing how many conversations I have about this single topic. I find myself wishing for a day where I don’t have to think about it. My hope is that once we get to “peak lockdown”, we’ll hit “peak panic” too and just hang tight for a while.
Psalm 91
1 Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High
will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.
2 I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress,
my God, in whom I trust.”
COVID-19: Part 4
I’ve now completed two weeks of working from home and it doesn’t feel like we’re at the halfway point yet. I’m seeing more and more empty shelves from people panic-buying and most of the world is still firmly on the path of exponentially increasing case counts.
But before I talk about any of that, let’s stop and be thankful for a few things:
That list could go on and on and I think it’s important to regularly enumerate your own reasons to be thankful, especially in this scenario when it’s so easy to focus on the negatives. Keep those reasons to be thankful in mind as we dive into the reality of the situation…
I’ll throw a very uneducated guess out and say that around Tuesday of next week, we’ll cross one million cases world wide (assuming we have enough test kits to prove that.) [UPDATE 3/20: Oops, when I made that estimate, I forgot that China’s cases aren’t growing at the same rate anymore. That means we’d cross 500k around Tuesday and it takes us until the end of the week to get to a million.] This is going to get worse before it gets better. The one page of data that I keep going back to is one compiled by Mark Handley: http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/ Every country is following the exact same growth rates, and, aside from China and South Korea, nobody looks to be anywhere near having this under control. Buckle up, we’re just getting started.
Locally, it’s hard to get a grasp on how seriously people are taking the social distancing. For example, this photo gallery shows a lot of empty scenes where normally there would be crowds of people. But if you drive around during the day, there are plenty of people on the roads.
As an elder at church, I’ve been in a lot of discussions about what to do with our services and how we can continue to minister to people as our ability to meet is restricted. For now we’re moving to having small devotions with individual families and doing more online. We’re also discussing how this will affect Easter because it feels very unlikely that we’ll be back to normal by April 12.
At home we’re continuing to make changes and lock it down. Tyla is starting to get into a routine doing her best to homeschool Elijah. What a blessing to have a wife who went to college to be a teacher! We’re also blessed to have a supportive school providing us with lots of materials.
Last fall we booked a vacation that we’ve been dreaming of for a long time: Disney Aulani. We spent a long time deciding if we were willing to spend that much on a vacation, but once we pulled the trigger, we were very excited for it. We were scheduled to leave a week from Saturday. Today I canceled the trip. While we are bummed to miss out on this, I’m very thankful that with the exception of the airline, we got 100% of our money back. And the airline changed their “sorry you bought a nonrefundable ticket” policy to give us a credit that can be used through the end of the year. So I’m trying to view it as “Hey, we have a gift card for a free flight to Hawaii and back!”
There are an infinite number of unanswerable questions about what the next couple months will look like. Personally I’m focusing on a lot of prayer, doing the best I can to make sure my family stays healthy both physically and mentally, and making sure we have food to eat. Time spent being anxious is time that would have been better spent praising God and trusting him to care for us.