This Time, It’s Serious
I’ve mentioned before that my day-to-day life has hardly been different now than before we learned the phrase COVID-19…a phrase and condition that has dominated the news, conversation, and our lives for the past month.
I still drive to work every day. There are no children at my house, so dealing with bored not-school-kids isn’t present. I go to stores as little as possible, hoping I can go two weeks in between grocery store trips. So the fact that virtually everything is closed and virtually everyone is home is really not something I notice unless I think about it.
That’s not to say we haven’t taken steps here at the radio station…about half our crew in Waterloo is working from home, or with reduced hours. We routinely use bleach wipes to clean surfaces, and the phrase “social distance” has been used as a warning lately as often as “hello” was once used as a greeting.
For a while yesterday, I think I was the only person in the building. Hard to catch a virus that way…or so I’ve told myself.
I live in a rural county, one without confirmed cases of coronavirus…until yesterday. And that was a false sense of security anyway…how many cases were there we didn’t know about because the person wasn’t tested…meaning how dangerous was it and we didn’t know. That’s worse.
I’m now wondering, as community spread really takes hold, if perhaps it’s time to spend less time here and more time at home. Not because I’m sick, or have been exposed…but precisely because I haven’t. I can do virtually everything from home, thanks to technology and a good engineer…to the point that you likely won’t know if I’m on your radio from the studio, or my home. Even though many of us here have official “essential employee” letters from the Homeland Security department, maybe I should limit my exposure outside of home. Just because I can venture outside doesn’t mean I should.
It’s something I’m going to re-examine this weekend. Luck runs out at some point. And now that we know the whole month of April is going to be different…maybe every one of us should re-examine, so that May is more normal.
