Careless
A week after a new all time high of 100,000 new covid19 cases across America, and day after day sustained as the new normal, Thursday, 150,000 new cases were reported, evidently to be a new base as we climb and climb and climb. Friday 13 Nov, 184,000 new cases. Something is going dreadfully off track, and I suspect it's that we're getting used to it and losing our wariness. Then there's this from NYT recently:
"The virus is no longer spreading primarily through nursing homes and nightclubs as it did in the spring, but rather via casual gatherings such as dinner parties, carpools and game nights, our Health desk wrote: 'This behind-doors transmission trend reflects pandemic fatigue and widening social bubbles, experts say — and is particularly insidious because it is so difficult to police and likely to increase as temperatures drop and holidays approach.'”
We in our family are intending to forego all gatherings, for the approaching holiday season and on into the new year. No family gatherings, No unnecessary shopping, No restaurants, No pubs. No oyster bars. Further, I am going to step back and take a more cautious look at the gatherings that we do currently indulge in. Even church activities, which are about the sum total of our social life outside of the two-person team here in 7H.
What comes ludicrously to mind is a Sunday school conversation some thirty or thirty five years ago, a conversation about the shared chalice, I think the topic of threat was AIDS, could AIDS be transmitted via the Communion cup? (or maybe it was the flu, I don't remember) and one woman in my group said piously, "I believe God does something to the chalice so that it's clean and pure and nobody can catch anything from it". Okay if she believed that, I suppose. The church, of course, says no such thing, makes no such outrageous claim, nothing so absurdly ridiculous, the crossing from naive to foolhardy.
The problem, I think, is what the NYT quote calls pandemic fatigue. We're tired of it, sick of bothering with it, so we are relaxing, letting down our guards, growing careless about distancing, careless about wearing facemasks, careless about what we touch, careless about washing our hands. Carelessly going ahead and doing things that back in March we suddenly STOPPED doing. Now, when the virus is accelerating out of control, is no time to be blasé about it.
Caught unawares, some of us are going to be very sorry, about what we caught and may die of, and sorry that we contaminated someone we love, someone we would never have wanted to hurt or kill.
T