Days of the Virus: 100 Days

As of 4pm yesterday afternoon (June 22, 2020), my wife, mom and I have lived one hundred days in semi-quarantine, leaving the house rarely, seeing almost no one else in person, and then only at a distance.  Like other billions of humans across the planet, we have been privileged to make a nest of fear and to hide in it.

Millions -- in the United States at least -- have made a different response.  Many of us have adopted the argument that if one's own chance of surviving COVID-19 are high, that one can do as one pleases because one is only risking harm to oneself.  Of course, this assumption has been demonstrated to be patently false, but the abstractions required to apply that fact to practice seem to be lost on those blindly congregating as if in the few months of collective hibernation the virus had disappeared.

Indeed, our collective cabin fever seems to be forcing us out of doors and back to each other.  Not only do we see myopic expressions of entitled rage, but protests and uprisings by the legitimately aggrieved seem also to be accelerated by the energy held in check until recently by the pandemic.  In this time of great press, caught between the threat of an invisible carnivore devouring us from the inside and using us as living incubators for its spawn on the one hand and the struggle to respond mindfully to the darkness of centuries-suppressed violence in our culture being brought bold-face into the light on the other, it can be hard to know what to do.

My answers are not perfect, but this is what I'm doing:

First, I believe we all have a responsibility to be of service.  My family is my first concern and my promise to my father to support and protect my mother in her age keeps us sequestered.  I am only of use to her, my wife, my children, and my community if I am well enough to be so.  This applies, too, to my patients who depend on me to be available and clearheaded to support them as they navigate their own crises.  Therefore, I attend to my own mental and physical health as an expression of care and service.

Minimizing my exposure to the virus supports my ability to care for those whom I care about, but it also has the prosocial function of keeping one more human out of the loop of contagion.  For every person who contracts the virus, between one and three others are likely to get it; even if the first person has no symptoms, the fact that they can pass it on is a critical issue.  I work to keep from becoming that vector, not just for my mom, but for the community in which I live.

Too, it is important to be a voice for facts and for collective and long-view thinking:  I strive to speak and act based on what science tells us -- stay home if you can, wear a mask if you go out, wash your hands, keep away from others.  I stand for these actions and require those around me to do so as well.

In the face of the eruption of anger over and new awareness of our country's original sin of racism, I work to educate myself about my whiteness and others' blackness.  What I learn, I share with others, especially those things that others don't yet see.  I invite white family members and friends to explore what it means to be white; with white patients who are struggling to process the outcries and pain they see, I guide their questioning toward the perceptual lacunae that privilege creates; I listen to friends and people of color, to learn to hear and to understand their experience, working especially to remember that my own experience can lead me to misunderstand theirs.  I set boundaries with and push back against those in my life who fight -- knowingly or not -- to keep hold of their ignorance and to contribute to our collective amnesia.  These I believe are the most important things I can do.

There are other things, too.  I make art; I try to process the pain I witness and my own in a public and, hopefully, respectful and empowering voice.  I give money to organizations working toward the solutions that make sense to me and encourage others to do the same.

I also imagine a future.  From here, it seems to me unlikely that we'll see the far side of our current crises in another hundred days or even two.  Along with everyone else, I feel the weight of quarantine, the unique, unanswerable, dull throb of being a social animal in isolation.  Yet, if we keep our heads and, ironically, stay connected across our bubbles, I can imagine a future in which we exceed our current selves, are more willing, and safer for our better trust.

Days of the Virus: A Year

Saturday, March 14th, 2020 was the last day I worked in my office and I mark it as the beginning of quarantine/isolation for my family and me.  My post that day outlined the personal events and those in the news that led to our decision to stay home and I commented at the time that, even considering those events, my reaction felt perhaps over the top.  A year later, in the wake of ugly scenarios predicted and unpredicted, it's clear that that was not so.  

The last few months have seen a more-or-less steady drip of reminders of the portents to lockdown:  a year from the first newscasts talking about "that terrible thing happening in China," from the first cases outside of China, then those in the US and wondering whether it would stay on the West Coast, then the first cases in New York City, by which point it seemed inevitable that it would show up here in Baltimore.  Still, the decision to lock ourselves at home happened faster than I (or most of us, I suspect) anticipated then:  I remember talking to patients beginning the week of March 9th about the chances that I would be converting to telepsych; by that Friday, I was telling them we would be locking down ASAP.  

I was talking with my daughter last week about this and she rattled off the COVID-19-related events that had happened for her that week:  warnings from her university that they might close campus, the announcement soon after that campus would in fact close, and the closing of the dorms.  A similar drumbeat was tapped out by my step-daughter's school and both girls decided that they could not see us for fear of exposing us.  Both ended up moving, the younger to her mother's, the elder to her boyfriend's.  This time last year, my family was, as so many others were, too, concurrently navigating relationships, housing, and unknown mortality risks while negotiating if and how we might ever see each other again.  

Our previously irregular but not infrequent family gatherings -- sometimes weekend dinners or brunches, sometimes impromptu evening hangouts -- at first just moved outdoors.  It was odd to keep six feet apart when we were used to draping ourselves across each other on the couch, to say nothing of hugging -- mine has always been a handsy clan, so "no contact" hit us especially hard -- but Mother's Day, Father's Day and Independence Day felt almost satisfying.  Just when it seemed like we were getting used to it, summer ended and the cold put the kibosh even on blanketed bonfire gatherings.  We had a few family videochats, the last one on Christmas, I think, until the imbalance of comfort with the technology across family generations made them prohibitively awkward.  We still talk by phone fairly frequently -- frequently enough, in the last few months, that we mostly don't notice how strange it is not to see each other's faces or hug or hold hands.  

Over the last year, I've found many of the broad themes in what I thought were my own struggles were actually being experienced by lots of us (at least among those with whom I share a socioeconomic stratum and who were privileged to be able to quarantine).  Initial panic and hunkering down, tearfully bidding a hopefully temporary good-bye to loved ones isolating, followed by a brief period of confidence that "we can get through this," followed, in turn, by the realization that the pandemic was going to last much longer and be greatly more challenging than initially thought, again followed by the simultaneous experiences of the slow drag on cognition and motivation combined with a smoldering anger at the intractableness of the situation, all sliding down into a fog of a new normal.  

In the early months, like a lot of folks, we put the money we saved on dining out and travel into household projects:  Jen started a raised bed vegetable garden and I started a workshop in the basement.  We settled into working from home, expanding Jen's previously insufficient workspace into a dedicated office and carting my big, comfy "therapy chair" from my office, up a very inconvenient staircase, and into my home music studio, which now functions far more often as a therapy room.  We canceled our gym membership and bought a rowing machine and treadmill (we don't use them as much as we did when we first bought them, but they do still get used!).  

We tried to keep ourselves entertained in other ways, too.  We're not a big sports household, but we enjoy baseball and Jen has followed college women's volleyball and men's basketball; some years I follow European cycling.  Mostly, we watch this on TV, although we try to get to a few games in person, but this year, of course, was all-TV; yet the normalcy and excitement all seemed lost by how pointless it felt without spectators (I can only imagine what it must be like for the athletes).  I suspect there are some media and sociological studies that will come from that.  

Television -- or, to be clearer, that seething morass of cable, streaming, and Internet audio-visual content that TV has evolved into -- has come to occupy a hugely greater fraction of my daily hours than it ever has or ever wanted it to.  I won't publicly admit exactly what that is, but most of my adult life I have prided myself in watching little to no "regular TV," like series, sitcoms, etc., with an average consumption well below published norms.  Just the other day, however, I was shocked to read that what I'm watching now is well within the current range for the average viewer.  I know why this is, of course:  the pandemic's pall of isolation saps one's energy, focus, creativity, motivation.  Although I have managed to keep creative during this time -- most of my output has ended up on this blog -- I just don't have the oomph I did a year ago.  Even reading has been affected; it's not just energy lost, but acuity and attention.  So, screen time has gone up.  Add to that videoconferencing (a typical workday is four to five hour-long sessions, occasionally six) and it's crazy how much time I spend looking at pixels.  

Everything has come to revolve around the house -- "the compound," as one friend called it.  There is a certain self-reinforcement of this kind of domestic navel-gazing, in which the more we focus on keeping ourselves fed and entertained at home, the less we think of the things we used to do outside of it.  Appointments that cannot be conducted via videochat simply aren't kept or made.  Errands that can't be converted to deliveries are not run.  The cars sit unused for weeks, even months.  Fewer and fewer things call us out of the house, so we look outside less and less.  Taking the trash to the curb has become my only regular outdoor excursion.  It's gotten to the point that, on an unseasonably warm day last week, I took the Miata out for a drive and was stunned to remember what the sky looked like!  (Really.)

Now, of course, with the vaccine, there is reason for hope.  The US is doing well among large industrial nations in getting its populace vaccinated, second only to the UK as of this writing.  Yet, even this complicates things:  sometimes it's hard to know which tier one qualifies for; leaders tell us to wait our turn and then we are told by the same government officials to get on every list we can; the US' vaccine distribution system makes our tax system look compulsively clean and organized; supplies appear and disappear like a vast game of Whack-a-Syringe.  It's confusing to see so many of my eligible friends (I know a lot of health care providers) getting vaccinated, yet the same resources they used tell me they're waiting on supply.  That said, currently, my mom is fully vaccinated and my wife has had her first shot, so there's still plenty to be grateful for.

More than that, change is in the air.  Spring has come after a long, painful winter.  Winters as such here in Baltimore aren't usually bad, but the season is just hard for my family; long, dark nights and gray days slow our minds and hearts like cold tar.  My wife has been finishing her master's degree, which has been very demanding, while growing her business at the same time, but she graduates in May.  The politics of the election, especially after November 8th, weighed on us like piles of x-ray vests, but our federal government is showing signs of function again.  I am beginning to take seriously my imaginings of returning to working from my office again -- perhaps in as little as six weeks, if I can get my first shot soon -- which would serve, as its cessation did at the beginning, to mark the end of quarantine for my household. 

So, a year on from its start, quarantine sees us still struggling -- exhausted, confused, worried -- but perhaps less so and definitely more optimistic, if a bit impatient.  Beneath our masks, we take a breath, poke a cautious nose out the front door, and consider the many things the world has to offer that we might soon, and once again, take in.  

Days of the Virus: The Wait

By the end of the first week of quarantine, my family and I had handled and set up most of what was needed for the near term.  Both my and my wife's businesses had been ported to online-only, as had her and the girls' schools, as well as my mom's social life.  The girls were each settled into their respective spots to ride out the pandemic, distant from us but safe.  Delivery of food and other necessities seemed reliable enough.  It felt strange, but it all seemed to be working and we had most of the details sorted.  We felt ready as we could be.

Sitting inside our bubble of preparedness, watching the numbers climb, it seemed to me that any day now we would be overwhelmed by stories of hospitals swamped with patients and stacks of bodies exuding viruses, inner cities collapsed into riots, governments paralyzed as leaders fall to the disease, and the sick and uninfected alike plunged into poverty.  I looked out to the horizon and could see the tsunami rolling toward our shore.

Except that this week has not been like that.  Unquestionably, the news has been terrible:  we're now over 100,000 cases and nearly 1,700 deaths nationally and some hospitals in New York City, the most affected region, are close to capacity.  The economy has taken a hit as this week's number of newly unemployed leaves all other records in the dust and the federal government's ineffectuality continues.  But these numbers, while horrifying, are not yet overwhelming; in a country of 330,000,000 people, less than two thousand deaths means only a small fraction of us will know anyone who's been killed by the disease and even 100K cases means that, although I personally know of one person who has tested positive, I suspect most folks still don't.

This week, I felt a gap between the relative mundanity of my day-to-day life and the sense that a tidal wave hung over it, ready to flood everything at any moment.  After the press of the previous week to get everything working and everyone settled into safety, life has seemed oddly quiet, even as we watched the pandemic grow.  I think that there is an emotional-fueled expectation that the storm will begin as soon as you close the shelter door, but that's not how it works if one has attended to the signs and gotten into the shelter in a timely way.  The storm moves how a storm moves.

And the COVID-19 pandemic is moving how a pandemic moves.  It is nonlinear, exponential -- but it's not magic.  It can't go from infecting a few hundred people to hundreds of thousands overnight (if it did, the story would have been entirely different from the start).  This week we've watched the number of cases triple in Maryland since last Sunday, which is a frightening rate, but it's still a small fraction of the people living here.

Thus this paradoxical experience of seeing the tidal wave arching over our heads* but yet it moves more slowly than an hour hand.  We look up and can see the sun through the water, refracted light scattering strangely, and know that disaster is upon us and that we are as prepared as we can be.  And yet we still breath, the birds still twitter and court in the arriving spring, the magnolias blossom and litter the ground with their gentle and generous petals, and children pass the days playing in the shadow of the tsunami.



*Yes, I know tsunamis don't actually do that.  Work with me here.

Days of the Virus: The Cost of Individualism

Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground,
Mother Earth will swallow you,
Lay your body down.

-- Stephen Stills, from "Find the Cost of Freedom" performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

As of this writing, there have been nearly 29 million cases of COVID-19 and more than half a million deaths attributed to it in the US alone, according to the Washington Post.  Google reports that, worldwide, 2.59 million have died and there have been 117 million cases.  Think about those numbers:  the US represents about 4% of the world population, yet we carry nearly a quarter of all cases and over a fifth of all deaths.  

Anyone paying attention to our country's response to the pandemic should be unsurprised by this.  Every other country with the means to protect itself has done so with a hunger and fear appropriate to the situation.  However, the United States covets its individualism to a degree that has led it deeply into the territory of denial and unnecessary death.  

This phenomenon is not new.  Our body politic organized itself on principles of self-determination.  We've fought wars over an extreme version of this, a perceived "right" to do as we please, regardless of the consequence to ourselves or others.  A quarter to a two-fifths of our population continues to value that "right" above all others.  It's no accident that we struggle with self-preservation that requires behaviors based on collective values.  

Our species evolved out of a tension between the individual and the collective.  Survival strategies based on strength in numbers and being as community are useful; they make attack on and defense against the community very difficult for individuals, which are easily overwhelmed.  Creating cohesive communities, however, tends to reduce variation across the individuals comprising the group, so a weakness in one individual is likely also to end up being replicated across the group, leaving the group vulnerable.  On the other hand, a certain amount of individual variation can counter this by supporting innovation, whether genetic or behavioral, within the group.  A group whose members are not all alike benefits from the varying strengths of its members while reducing the cost of the weaknesses, in a kind of tag-team effect.  That said, variation, in turn, reduces group cohesion; too great a variance within a community and that community falls apart.  Thus, the robustness of a collective is dependent upon a balance between empowering the strengths of the group and those of the individual.  

We, in the US, are far out of balance, as evidenced by our behavior and performance during the COVID-19 epidemic.  The culture of the United States is, according to solid research, the most individualistic (as opposed to collectivistic) in the world, and has been, I believe, since such measures began (around the 80s or early 90s).   Even in the face of an outrageous and unnecessary fraction of our people dying, we seem unable to change.  

Let us consider the cost of our so-called "freedom."

Days of the Virus: The Best of Times And...

In my post on Saturday, I mentioned how much this reminded me of when Hurricane Andrew went through Dade County.  It turns out, it reminded someone else of that, as well:  Bryan Norcross, a meteorologist who was a high profile local figure in the lead up to the storm then.  He posted this useful reflection recently.  It was validating, as well as nostalgic, to hear his thoughts and comparison of our current national emergency to the disaster in South Florida in 1992.  It was also encouraging in that he emphasized our collective capacities, something I remember from the days immediately following the storm:  neighbors who had previously been strangers were pooling resources to help folks repair damaged homes, clear streets, and feed each other.  And Baltimore has always felt that way to me, with strong grassroots organizations and neighborhood identities that seem to undergird welcoming and active communities. 

But, as the daily news proceeds in its drumbeats of dire warnings, I also find myself imagining horrifying outcomes.  If disaster brings out the best in people, it can also bring out the worst.  Baltimore City, one of the most segregated cities in the US, has vast tracts of poverty that are already grossly underserved by the healthcare infrastructure (as well as education, transportation, food networks, etc.).  Given how close to the surface dissatisfaction with support and power structures has proven to be in the past, it's very easy for me to imagine that some of the people in these neighborhoods will feel pressed to express that dissatisfaction and to demand support in painful and destructive ways, as, at the same time, the virus runs unchecked through them.  Honestly, this makes sense to me.  What doesn't make sense is the likely response from the powers that be:  rather than attempt to meet the valid demands of the underserved, they will beat them, jail them, and leave them to die -- that is the "worst" being brought out, to my mind. 

And Baltimore is not the only place in the US where such conditions exist.  Americans in sum tend to treat the poor badly and, at best, misunderstand poverty and what there is to do about it.  In cities across our country, enclaves of the impoverished are cordoned off and ignored.  Yet, from even the most selfish perspective, it is in our collective interest to attend especially closely to these folks as part of our response to the pandemic:  without access to healthcare, they can easily become deep wells for incubating SARS-CoV-2.  And then we will blame them for it. 

Of course, at this stage, the point is almost moot.  There are already fewer hospital beds, ventilators, healthcare providers, etc. than are likely to be needed.  Today's situation regarding poverty in the US took centuries to evolve (one starting point that's as good as any is 1619) and it cannot be wisely resolved in a few weeks.  Still, to the degree that we can bend the curve on our cultural unwillingness to see ourselves as a collective, we can have a better chance of flattening the curve on the wave of SARS-CoV-2 passing through our national corpus.  May these potentially worst of times also bring out the best of us. 

Days of the Virus: Six Months

Nothing is sacred
The ceremony sinks
Innocence is drowned
In anarchy
The best lack conviction
Given some time to think
And the worst are full of passion without mercy

-- Joni Mitchell, "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" from the album Night Ride Home and based on the poem "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats

On Saturday, March 14th, not quite a quarter of the way into this year, my wife, my mom, and I began quarantine from the COVID-19 pandemic and I wrote my first post about the experience.  Now, 184 days and nearly a million deaths later, almost three quarters of 2020 has passed through us and the only thing that feels notably different from six months ago is how accustomed we have become to the drumbeat of mortality and the chaos that, at least in the United States, has grown out of the combined willful ignorance and entitlement that seems to be the foundation of our contemporary culture.  Indeed, as we slouch toward Election Day, it seems very likely that the thickest part of the spear impaling us is still to arrive.  

To my family and to my few dozen patients, I peddle optimism.  I am not a purveyor of falsehoods:  I do believe that that essential thing that makes us human -- our mutual interdependence and the compassion that arises from it -- will carry the day in the long run.  A vaccine will be developed and disseminated and communities will reconvene, dazed and bedraggled but ready to be whole again, as after a great storm.  However, just how long that "long run" will be I cannot reliably guess.  From the perspective of a private practitioner, I cautiously anticipate that on or about the anniversary of our quarantine we will be able to break it and I can return to my regular work.  As a father, husband, and son, as a friend, as a citizen, these days any trek off of my property -- "the compound," as a rural friend calls my suburban home -- is accompanied by such anxiety that it's sometimes difficult for me to imagine ever re-entering the world again.  

Like many, I've found "COVID projects" to keep myself occupied and for self-care; some are very satisfying and rewarding and I plan to continue them long after the pandemic is an awful memory.  I attend to my relationships and do my best to care for those around me.  Although not abstinent, I do minimize my news intake -- which is, as Brené Brown points out, "the definition of privilege" -- but I cannot lament what I am exposed to:  I believe it is my responsibility to know and care about the lives and suffering of others, even as I must curate my resources for responding.  Indeed, that is the name of the game for all of us these days:  to feed and protect ourselves enough that we survive and can remain of service.  

If my imperfectly informed guess is right, we're at about the halfway mark of our quarantine.  If my equally imperfect other guesses are even in the ballpark, the second half of our quarantine will be the more challenging.  May we all have what we need to make it through.  

Days of the Virus: Blursday

What Fassbinder film is it?

The one-armed man comes into the flower shop and says: "What flower expresses, 'Days go by, and they just keep going by endlessly, endlessly pulling you into the future. Days go by endlessly, endlessly pulling you into the future?'"

And the florist says: "White Lily."
- Laurie Anderson, "White Lily," from Home of the Brave

Someone I was talking to the other day said, by way of explaining his loss of focus, "...because it's Blursday."  Even for me, as someone who is fortunate enough to have a regular work schedule, the days are blurring together.  I might know it's Thursday because of the patients I see on that day, but somehow the Thursdays -- and Mondays and Saturdays, etc. -- are much harder to distinguish from each other than prior to quarantine.

Quarantine and social isolation are hard on us for at least the following reasons.  First and foremost, we are social animals; being forced to be apart from each other reveals this to a degree impossible to appreciate when in each other's regular and free company.  Even more introverted folks, when separated from their trusted others, suffer.  Too, the loss of structure and routine, especially for those out of work, can be disorienting and thus emotionally burdensome.

What stands out for me, though, is the loss of novelty.  Away from home, we have more we can do -- go to the gym, go out for dinner, go for a walk or a drive, go (somewhere else) to work.  Yes, we can workout at home, cook for ourselves, walk around our yard or neighborhood, but even a large and ideally-equipped home can only replace so much of The World, no matter how small a piece of it we typically wander in.

Perhaps more importantly, I hadn't noticed before how much variations in my routine that arose just out of interacting with other humans, even strangers, adds to my sense of the passage of time and so to my sense of existence.  One day I am able to get right up to the stoplight at Perring Parkway and Taylor Avenue on my commute; another day, I'm stuck behind someone playing with their phone when it turns green.  One day, a suite mate's patients fill the lobby and I greet them as I navigate through, while another it's empty and I stay in my thoughts.  One evening, my wife and I strike up a conversation with other folks waiting for a table at a restaurant, another we keep to ourselves.  Even my two-block walk to the gym after work varies depending on who else is on the sidewalk and traffic on the busy street I have to cross.

My relationship with my wife and mom has deepened in this time we've shared together, appreciating each other more and more for what we contribute to each other and how precious we are to each other, but our day to day life changes very little and the domestic stage on which it is currently playing out almost not at all.  We three wear our daily paths and deviate from them only slightly and rarely, simply because there are so few randomizing forces to influence our vectors.  Impetus from ourselves to do something different can only be so effective because it comes from ourselves.  We need outsiders to knock us off our trajectories and cause us to course-correct:  without them, we have no markers by which to track the passing of time. 

For now, our interactions with strangers must remain restricted to waving in gratitude through the door at delivery folks and hello to neighbors in our respective lots.  I work to increase the novelty in my life by being creative where I can, trying out new things, home improvement, etc.  Sometimes the best I can muster is finding whatever fits through the fiber optic cable.  I remain very fortunate -- safe, secure, with an income, healthy -- and very aware of the plight of those much less blessed than me.  My challenge is to stay well enough, mentally and physically, to be able to continue to care for my family in our time of collective isolation, so I fight Blursday with novelty.

Days of the Virus: 412

Last Friday, April 30th, I hung up with my last patient of the day and ran down the stairs from my home office to hug my daughter for the first time in almost 14 months (she had come for the first visit in nearly that long and was waiting until my session was over).  Even now, days later, it still brings tears to my eyes to think of how much I missed her.  

The day counter I embedded in one of my early posts about the pandemic read almost exactly 412:  I started it the hour of my last in-person patient, March 14, 2020 and I stopped it moments after that first hug with my daughter.  Four hundred twelve days:  days of hopefully expecting this thing to be over quickly, crushingly discovering that it would not, anxiously wondering how long it would last, impatiently waiting our turn for vaccines, and, now, being confusingly grateful for our safety and aghast at the horrors SARS-CoV-2 is still wreaking.  

The pandemic is not over, of course.  Countries' healthcare systems are still collapsing across the globe.  I know of two friends-of-friends killed by COVID-19 in just the last few weeks.  What has happened in my family's circumstances, though, is that we are all vaccinated and past our post-shot waiting period, so we can cautiously re-venture back into a world that we've become accustomed to fearing, and can no longer meaningfully call ourselves isolated, quarantined, or locked down.  I fear less both for myself and for what I might bring home to my family.  I still wear masks in public, but I can be in public.  I have to be mindful not to offer a friendly handshake when introducing myself to a stranger, but I do meet them.  It still is anxiety provoking to go anywhere outside my yard, but I remind myself that I can go -- and I do go, anxious or otherwise.  

The year 2020 was vicious not just because of COVID-19.  The Great Ambivalence my country continues to suffer was only exacerbated by the pandemic and the anger and frustration between Team Red and Team Blue escalated to new heights, ratcheting up the pain like a nationwide replay of Milgrim's obedience experiments.  Government dysfunction at the federal level aggravated problems with food and healthcare infrastructure, highlighting the divide between the Haves and Havenots, between Whites and People of Color, between the I-Got-Mines and Everyone Else and it scrambled the rollout of vaccines into a near free-for-all.  I think few of us are sad to see the backside of 2020.  

All of that makes the phrase "back to normal" a non-starter.  We still have the same racial issues and government paralysis we did a year ago, even if we can point to some evidence of change.  Whole sections of our economy have been profoundly undermined -- a walk through any downtown will tell you that.  These are the new normal.  But there is still a "back to" to get:  back to life, back to being with each other, back to what makes us human.  

So far, I've had at least one patient per day return to in-person sessions.  Each meeting, it feels simultaneously very strange and reassuringly familiar.  (Emphasis on the "strange" at first:  my first in-person session, I felt so anxious that I was seriously derealized for the first five or ten minutes!)  Yet every session reminds me that we are not alone, that this is not a computer simulation, that we are real people living real lives doing real things feeling real feelings.  And that seems about as close to "back to normal" as we need.  

Days of the Virus: Creeping Malaise

Gotta stay awake
Gotta try and shake off 
This creeping malaise. 
If I don't stand my own ground
How can I find my way out of this maze?
- Pink Floyd, "Dogs" from the album Animals

Today I struggled more than previously to stay connected, to feel grounded in myself.  It wasn't the whole day; sessions with patients went well, which always feels good.  But by the time I closed out my last video chat, I felt drained, disconnected, and hungry for something unnamed.

Changing out of my work clothes and coming downstairs, I became more conscious of an absence that has been inching its way into my awareness, but still couldn't get my hands around.  I plopped resignedly onto the couch.  A copy of BMoreArt lay on the coffee table, a new subscription I've been excited about; I opened it to where I left off, but couldn't concentrate.  I thought about a piece of music that I'd started working on recently, but my mind cringed at what seemed like a pointless expenditure of energy that I didn't have and that could only end in dissatisfaction.  Same response to the thought of picking up Lynda Barry's comics workbook.  Finally, lacking any better idea, I grabbed a bag of pretzels from the pantry, returned to the couch and turned on Netflix, picking up where I left off in the fifth season of Twilight Zone.  Two episodes ("Uncle Simon" and "Probe 7, Over and Out") of Serling's sparkling, indulgent, thesaurus-busting dialog later, normally a tickle for me, I felt worse.

By this time, my wife had finished her workday and came to join me on the couch; she saw plainly that I wasn't myself and asked about it.  We talked, unpacking the difficulty we had both been having over the last twenty-four days trying to sort out the best recipe for self-care -- how to recuperate-in-place, how best to use the limited energy we have when work is done, how to stay connected with each other.

Part of the balance I've been trying to strike is spending time with my wife versus making time for creativity.  Being married to the woman of my dreams, my best friend, my partner in business as well as life, we seem never to run out of things to share, discuss, even debate; being with her is a delight and a repletion.  When circumstances keep us separated for an extended time, we both feel the loss and the cost of reconnecting; our quarantine has felt like a boon in that regard.  On the other hand, I have some of that "gotta dance" creative drive; I feel a need to make stuff, whether with sound, words, images, wood-and-screws, or what-have-you.  If I don't do something with it, it kind of stagnates and spoils and that spoilage can give off a noisome fume that thickens my mind and mood like the blue cannabis smoke filling the car I first heard Animals in.

At the end of a day's navigating a sea of troubles, I often don't seem able take up my creative arms in opposition and instead settle into the comfort of the company of my wife.  Not a bad thing, but if I do this frequently enough, the miasma from the putrefaction of my creativity starts to cloud my sense of self.  This can feed back on itself, making it harder to push myself upstairs, into the studio and the uncertainty of invention and away from the comforting presence of my partner and the numbing reassurance of Netflix; a few loops of this and the haze thickens until a find myself drained, disconnected, and namelessly hungry as I did today.

But, this evening, my wife and I sat on the couch and chatted, holding hands, cuddling.  After the sun went down and we discovered our lamps wouldn't turn on, we actually had fun figuring out why (there was a wall switch we'd never used).  We lay together some more, her scrolling through her social media and me reading that article in BMoreArt I couldn't start earlier.  We were present, just being, and it seemed what we both needed.  After a while, I said, "I'm going to go write a bit" and came up to my studio and she picked up her current British character drama where she'd left off.

We both cope with the stress of quarantine differently, but we each recognize and respect our differences.  It's easier for me to trust her way than my own, but when I remember, I can remind myself that it's okay and go do my thing.  And when I do, that creeping malaise blows off me like someone opened a window.

Days of the Virus: Week Two

Today marks the beginning of the second week of quarantine for my family and me.  The most striking thing about that is two things:  how dramatically things changed in that time and how quickly it became the new normal. 

In the last week, the number of cases of COVID-19 has grown an order of magnitude:  from a few dozen cases to nearly 250 in Maryland and from ~3,000 to nearly 33,000 nationwide*.  Some state and local governments appear to be taking the situation seriously and are responding as proactively as possible, given the late start, while the Federal government's responses continue to range from impotent to nonsensical.  At the beginning of the week, droves of young immortals flooded beaches and bars as spring break erupted; this weekend it seems that at least some of them have been chastened, although I presume it's too little too late. 

My cul-de-sac has been filled with cars and children playing and people walking their dogs; it appears everyone is either out of work or working from home (although I haven't actually asked, as my relationships with my neighbors has been limited to friendly waves and an occasional respectful note asking them not to park in front of our house).  Normally, a drone shot of my circle would clearly indicate whether the photo was taken on a weekday or a weekend, but no more; every day is the same, with the only changes the occasional delivery van popping by. 

I've been conducting therapy via videoconference since Saturday the 14th.  Patients' responses to the transition ranged mostly from grateful to tolerant and everyone who took the plunge expressed surprise at how transparent it becomes even a few minutes into the session, rather like getting lost in the screen at the movies.  The first week was a challenge for me, though, for two reasons:  setup meant scheduling extra time outside of patients' sessions to get the system tested with each person (then there was the snafu with my original platform, prompting a last-minute port) and, unexpectedly, my desk chair proved to be problematic after an hour or two of sitting in it.  This week however, neither of these should be an issue, as the former was a front-end problem now resolved and the latter was replaced by my office chair 💖 gratefully retrieved today. 

By Thursday, it actually started to feel natural to sit at the computer waiting for patients to log on, to be able to replenish my drink at the end of a session simply by walking downstairs (and saying hello to my wife and mother while I'm there), to disassemble my "office" at the end of the day and return my music studio to its natural state -- and to scan the headlines in the morning and the evening to see what fresh, unforeseen horrors have arisen and how many lives have fallen since my last scan. 

Still, a week is nothing.  I believe we are very much at the leading edge of the pandemic here in the US.  The first 20, 50, even 70 miles of a cycling century, if you've trained well, feel like a breeze -- "I could do this all day!" I've thought to myself almost every time.  It's miles 85 and up that are the the hard part -- and we don't actually know how many miles we have to go. 

Pace yourself. 

Days of the Virus: Ceci ñ'est pas une ami

Like most of us who, in our social isolation/quarantine, are fortunate enough to have the household infrastructure to do so, I have been spending a lot more time on videochat than I normally would.  Much of this is professional:  my psychotherapy practice is now exclusively online, so I'm spending as much as six hours a day looking at the faces of my patients as they manifest on my computer screen.  Talks with family and friends are also limited to phone or video; no in-person connections allowed, let alone hugs, yet, it's still better than nothing.

Patients, friends, and family alike have almost universally emphasized how much better videoconferences are than talking on the phone (one-on-one or in groups).  I agree:  the screen often quickly melts away in the same way it does in a movie theater and one becomes immersed in the interaction with the person.  The mediating machinery disappears, leaving our perception filled with only the parts that represent the Other.

From time to time, though, this suspension of reality is interrupted.  Sometimes it's due to glitchiness in the system; I've frequently been reminded of what "long distance" telephone calls were like when I was small, with the routine salutations of "Can you hear me okay? -- I can hear you fine" or talking about the quality of the connection with the same casualness one might take discussing the weather.  Today, bandwidth and software issues in videochat have replaced copper wire and exchange switch problems from the days when Ma Bell was queen.

But technical challenges are not the only interruptions to the illusion.  I've been increasingly aware of a kind of uncanny-valley-ness to videochat.  I can, without prompt or warning, become profoundly aware that I am looking at a shimmering constellation of pixels carefully arranged to resemble my interlocutor, a two-dimensional simulacrum composed of 1s and 0s, teleported electronically into my monitor, my own personal Truman Show-reality that I am expected (and choose) to interact with.  I can, for moments, feel profoundly self-conscious talking to a picture on a screen that, bizarrely, appears to respond to my responses to it.  I feel hyperaware of the Magritte-ness of the proxy with which (with whom?) I am interacting:  "This is not a friend" my heart tells me and I am afraid, fearful that I've been duped, that what I trusted to be real is a lie, and perhaps a malicious one.

Fortunately, I can also recognize the moments for what they are, paradoxes of perception, the irony of knowing that the image is false but also knowing that it represents something real.  I ground myself in the trust that my friend or patient is real, sitting somewhere in their own bubble of isolation, the camera in their machine capturing and communicating their visage across cables of wonder to the magic mirror into which I gaze; it isn't actually them, but it's enough to reassure me that they are there and hopefully vice versa.  After a few more moments, the illusion reseats itself and I can again interact as if the person were here with me and feel the intimacy we share, attenuated though it might be by the media through which it is exchanged.

I am grateful to live with others, sharing our isolation.  Walking away from my computer and being able to kiss my wife, to hold my mother's hand, reassure me that they are real, that this is real, that I am real.  It seems that it would be terribly easy to lose grasp of reality if I had no confidants but pixels.

Days of the Virus: Drawing In

In the last week or so, developments around the coronavirus have gone from "a nasty thing that's happening to those poor folks over there" to "holy shit, people I know could die."  It occurred to me last night that it would be appropriate and possibly a meaningful personal exercise to log some of the experiences my family, friends, and I are having in this time, unique in my lifetime.  So, it is my intent that this be the first in a series of posts related to SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 disease it causes, and, especially, what's happening in my small part of the world pandemic.

This time last week, I was on day five of a particularly nasty flu.  It was the first day that I could detect symptoms attenuating, although that was only the subtlest change and I was far from recovered; since the previous Tuesday, my lungs had felt like I was breathing ammonia fumes, I was coughing frequently and often painfully, and was generally achey as hell.  News of SARS-CoV-2's expansion from epidemic to pandemic filtered into my bedroom only in small, disjointed pieces, peppered in between episodes of The Twilight Zone, Marvel movies, and long naps.  Once I was recovered enough to be cognizant of what was happening, I discussed with my wife and business partner taking the precaution of preparing to transition my private psychology practice to telepsych -- psychotherapy conducted by video chat.  It seemed a prudent thing to have as a backup.

Over the course of the week, my RSS news feeds transitioned to nearly exclusively coronavirus coverage; even some of my favorite comics had begun featuring public health awareness topics.  By midweek, both my daughters' and my wife's schools had closed or announced plans to close by the weekend and local government announcements became increasingly dire.  As Italy, and now Spain and France, have gone into lockdown, the theme seems to be get ahead of the train.  By the end of my workday today, it became clear that my family's best course of action is to self-quarantine. 

Writing that feels a bit over the top.  I'm not impulsive, at least not when it comes to big life decisions.  It has taken quite a bit of steady, strong evidence to convince me that we -- my family, my community, my country -- are at significant risk, but I am convinced.  The resources I respect, the science community, public health institutions, level headed friends, are fairly consistent in their assessment that we need to pay attention.  So, while at this moment I can hear kids playing outside my window and the birds raucously feeding in my backyard, it feels incongruous that in a week or two my city's hospitals could be overwhelmed with people with collapsing pulmonary systems and my community could be in a police-enforced lockdown.  Yet, it appears that those scenarios are not beyond reasonable expectations; thus, I act, even as it feels over the top. 

I remember a similar feeling at least once before:  August 23rd, 1992.  Meteorologists were predicting that Hurricane Andrew would come ashore some dozen or so miles north of my ground-level South Beach apartment and the city was evacuating.  Under an eerie foreboding, my brother and I picked up everything off of the floor, packed up the cats and some overnight bags, and headed to a friend's fortified apartment in South Miami, well inland and, so we thought, further from the storm.  A long, frightening, largely sleepless night later, we emerged from our impromptu revetment to a changed world:  the familiar neighborhood was unrecognizable, a tangled jetsam of power lines, roofing, and tree detritus. 

Today feels similar, although the timeline is multiplied a few dozen times.  From my experience with Hurricane Andrew, and other events, I know the world can change, sometimes in an instant.  It is rare that we get warning; it is good to heed it when we do. 

Days of the Virus: The Cost of Paradox

You know, I'd rather see this on TV.  
Tones it down.
- Laurie Anderson, from "Sharkey's Day" on the album Mister Heartbreak

I'm very fortunate.  As I've described elsewhere, I live in an easily protected place with family I care about and get along with and am able to continue my work.  By almost any standard outside the US, I am wealthy (in the US, I'm solidly middle-class).  My house is in a safe neighborhood; I have nice toys; my family has plenty to eat and we get both our groceries and takeout delivered.  We are all reasonably healthy for our age and able to care for ourselves and each other.  We are about as well set up to weather the pandemic as could be wished. 

In contrast, am also free of many risks and stresses.  I don't have to make my living doing things that regularly expose me, and therefore the rest of my family, to the SARS-Cov-2 virus.  I'm not working in a hospital, retirement or nursing home, or dentist's office; I'm not a police, firefighter, EMT, or other first responder.  I don't work in a grocery store and I don't deliver groceries, takeout, or packages.  I'm also not unemployed:  I'm not a restauranteur or server or cook; I'm not an artist or performer; I'm not a retailer.  I'm also not homeless nor am I living in a crowded, underserved and over-policed neighborhood lacking basic infrastructure services.  As of this writing, no one in my family or network of friends or in my patient caseload has died of COVID-19. 

For all these reasons and more, I consider myself and my family lucky.  And therein lay a problem. 

As I've been chronicling in this series, the pandemic has been difficult.  The loss of physical contact, of variety and novelty, the ongoing uncertainty and fear of dying or of someone close dying -- all these are things that normally cause pain and would be normal to grieve.  In a normal world, when we suffer a loss, our family and friends rally around us for support; they witness our pain and tell us it will be okay and reassure us that they are and will always be here for us.  They can do that because it's very likely that they are not suffering a similar loss at the same time.  Conversely, we, who are in pain, feel free to be so because we know our pain, relative to our loved ones in that moment, is significant. 

That's not true now.  The burnout, depression, anger, disorientation, etc., that any one of us is experiencing right now, while significant on the scale of things, is not greatly different from most others in our community.  Everyone is struggling, laboring under deficits imposed by the pandemic. 

Grief -- the process we go through when the world changes around us -- requires permission, welcome.  To grieve, we must accept our grief, the pain of it, the inconvenience of it, allow it to bubble up and wash over us when it chooses to.  In grieving, our bodies and our minds process the losses and accustom us to this new world, absent of the things or people we lost and different from the world before. 

The ubiquity of loss and grief in a pandemic -- it is a pandemic after all -- makes this permission difficult.  How can I "complain" about how hard it is when there are people dying alone in plastic isolation bubbles with no more human comfort than an iPad screen can provide?  How can I "indulge" my anger or sadness at my lost privileges like a private office and a gym membership when folks in my city have no safe shelter of their own, let alone safety from the virus? 

To be able to grieve in times like this requires we tolerate this paradox.  It is true that I am very fortunate; it is true that others suffer horribly.  Yet those truths do not make my suffering untrue.  If I am to be well, both for my own sake and so that I may be of service to others who suffer beside me, I must grieve my loss, feel my pain. 

This is what is required of us:  to grant ourselves our pain.  Humans' greatest strength is community (even if Americans aren't especially good at it).  Not only do we serve each other better when we can accept our own grief, but we grieve best when we grieve together.  In permitting ourselves to be in pain, we permit each other; in permitting each other, we permit ourselves.  And with permission, we can grieve and disencumber ourselves and be of service. 

Days of the Virus: Creativity (and Not)

It's not a new thing for me to feel torn between the relaxation of sitting down at my DAW or picking up my viola and creating anything from bizarre noises to (hopefully) transporting music and the relaxation of sitting next to my wife on our couch and taking in a movie (or, let's be honest, bingeing on some series on Netflix).  No, that is not at all a problem unique to quarantine.  Yet, for some reason, it has seemed more challenging recently than usual. 

I think part of it is that the stresses of setting up to work from home and getting my daughter's settled into their own quarantines (or worrying about them when someone else is helping them do it) and the almost inescapable fire hose of bad news has simply left me more drained at the end of each day, such that I often could do little other than be a couch potato.  And it's typically the case that my creative projects suffer when I end the day feeling really drained. 

This is understandable, but also moderately frustrating.  Prior to the outbreak, I had been working on an all-viola album, something I anticipated would take me most of this year to do, but that I felt moderately optimistic that I could complete.  Suddenly, I found myself with next to no patience nor even physical strength for practicing.  In the last few weeks, most of the work that I've done -- which is little -- has been on the computer, transcribing pieces, experimenting with effects, etc.  I feel disappointed, even as I admit how drained I am. 

Yet, it's hard to get too worked up about it, given how fortunate my circumstances are.  So far, anyway, the evidence is that my family will be able to ride this out fairly safely.  My wife and mother and I have little need to leave our house and are all good at keeping our risk low when we do.  Our daughters are safe and in good hands.  My wife and I can make our livings from home and my mother's savings are likely to be robust in the long run to the short-term ups and downs of the economy.  Hardly an hour passes when I don't feel momentarily gobsmacked at our good luck, especially when it was not long ago at all that we were much more vulnerable. 

Many of the headlines and memes I see these days are variations on the theme of having suddenly too much time.  That is definitely not my problem.  For better or worse, I need to work at least as hard as I usually do to make time to create.  On the whole, I think I'm doing okay, my predisposition to disappointment notwithstanding.  I may or may not bring my auralization of a collection of viola works into reality by 2021, but I haven't quit on it.  I have other satisfying side projects, too, to engage in, not the least of which is this blog.  The balance of work, family, and creative time is an unstable Lagrange point, requiring constant tweaking and course corrections, as small factors have unpredictably large impacts on the system.  Twas ever thus. 

Days of the Virus: Pacing Oneself

Last Saturday marked the end of nine weeks of quarantine for my family and me.  The first month-plus wasn't too bad.  We have been fortunate to be able to continue to work; we live in a safe suburban neighborhood in which it's easy to isolate ourselves; our children are safe and we have remained healthy.

Starting about four or five weeks ago, the isolation began weighing heavily on me.  For two or three weeks, I ended each day just a little more exhausted than the one before, despite doing what I knew to do to keep my energy up -- making music almost every day, hanging out with my wife in the evening, working on household projects together with her and my mom on the weekends, keeping my sleep schedule regular.  I couldn't figure out why I felt like I was losing ground.

After talking with my wife and my therapist (yes, a lot a shrinks have shrinks), it became clear that I was suffering from burnout.  This was, while obvious in retrospect, a surprise and a bit of an embarrassment, as I have plenty of experience with burnout both personally and clinically, so I felt like I should have recognized it.  I left my last corporate position and turned to private practice specifically to avoid burnout; I felt like the institution I was working for was using me up and I would eventually be tossed aside as a desiccated, cynical husk.  In private practice, I began to grow again, my compassion and love for my patients rejuvenated and I felt grounded anew in the inspiration that had led me to this path eighteen years before.  How could I be burning out?

Then, on a videoconference with colleagues discussing our respective practices, a friend shared poignantly his insights about the emotional cost of conducting clinical psychology via a computer screen.  As "talk therapists," the intimacy of our work creates a deep and powerful channel of energy that we experience when sharing a physical space with a patient.  Conducting psychotherapy with an animated image of our patients robs us of that sustenance, leaving us feeling drained -- and, in my case, wondering why.  The group consensus enthusiastically endorsed and validated our fellow's experience and I confronted my failure to recognize the loss' affect on me.

With this new understanding, I've been able to get my scales rebalanced.  A few patients have completed and I'm not refilling those slots.  I'm taking more rest time over the weekend, sometimes moving my work schedule around to consolidate time off, and prioritizing "shouldless" time -- hours when I do what feels good to do in the moment that it feels good to do it, whether it be washing the car, making music, taking a nap, or baking blueberry pie.

For the last two weeks, I have felt ready at the beginning of the workweek, rested and present for my patients.  By the start of this weekend, I've even felt like I had space for my family, able to be present for them, like I have enough of the compassion and care that, as a therapist, I've previously had to steward so carefully, but now I can "spare" some to be a husband and father and son again.

Of course, I'm not 100%; I don't expect to be nor do I expect others to be for a long while yet, but things seem to be working well enough.  I've had several creative projects going:  I have a new composition I hope to publish soon.  I sampled a tubulum I've had for years and made a very serviceable digital representation of it.  I designed and received delivery on the materials for a workbench in my basement; as I write this my legs and back ache (in that good way) from schlepping said materials into said basement.  I purchased a sketchbook and have actually put pencil to it twice.

These things to me are not only acts of repletion but evidence of balance and sustainability:  when I'm burning out, I can't even lift myself up to engage in them.  And preventing burnout critically depends on awareness; having been shown that, even when things seem ideal, it's possible to have more going out than coming in, I can stay alert for that debtward trend and, hopefully, catch myself when (not if) it happens again.

Days of the Virus: Settling In

If last week and the first part of the weekend were about facing facts about SARS-CoV-2, then yesterday and today have been about taking action.  The last 30 hours or so have been spent, apart from a few breaks for sleep and a walk outside, coordinating my practice to provide care-at-a-distance for my patients -- folks who themselves are having to respond to quarantines and quarantine-like circumstances.  Despite what I consider decent planning overall on my part, it has been highly stressful:  the software that I expected to use for videoconferencing turned out to be unreliable and communication with my patients about the changes has been less than perfect.  The stakes for this are high, too, because of how much I care about my patients -- these are my people, it's my charge to create a space in which they have the chance to get themselves well.  I know the nature of the process is that it goes up and down (I tell my patients all the time, "you can't screw this up"), but it's still a challenge to keep from feeling disappointed in myself. 

Of course, from a psychological perspective, it's easier to worry about getting the telepsych software set up than about a worldwide pandemic or who among my family and friends won't survive it, so, as defenses go, it's not terrible. 

My family is pretty much settled in now.  My octogenarian mom, who is pretty extraverted, seems to have made peace with the boundaries needed to keep her safe.  My daughter has moved back in with her mother after her dorms closed; she has her old familiar room back and her mom is always well-prepared.  We get to talk frequently via videochat and text, but she decided days ago that she didn't want to risk passing the virus to her grandmother, so we're isolated for the duration.  Similarly, my stepdaughter has taken the leap to stay full-time with her boyfriend; there's faith on his side, too, as their relationship, which has been flourishing in the most beautiful way, is still young.  My wife's business has been conducted almost exclusively online, so that's hardly any change for her in that regard, and her school has transitioned to online classes but is on spring break now anyway.  Missing her daughter is hard, as they are very close, but they keep in touch via electronic media almost hourly. 

So, we're not done with the transition yet, but it's well on it's way and it's easy enough to see a routine emerging in the next few days.  It's helpful to pay attention to that; again, it's a useful defense and, so long as one isn't completely blinkered, a good idea. 

Days of the Virus: Random Marks

This is a place where I will put some more or less stream-of-consciousness thoughts or notes as they arise.

• First day of (effective) quarantine:  March 14, 2020, starting about 4pm.  
• The last day of quarantine was April 30, 2021, ending about 4:30pm.  
• Etymology of the word "quarantine":  The term comes from the Italian "quarantena" or 40 days, which was the length of time passengers on ships arriving in the Venetian harbor had to wait to disembark during the Black Plague.  
• The R0 of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19, a.k.a., the novel coronavirus) has been estimated to be between 1.4 and 3.9, with best estimates around 2.2.  That means that, on average, a person who is inoculated with the virus will pass it on to at least two other people.  

Days of the Virus: Information

I've run across a range of information resources that have impressed me as useful and thought a simple way of sharing them is just to post them here, as a list.  In no particular order:

• CDC, coronavirus.gov
• Washington Post's free updates on SARS-CoV-2
• The COVID Tracking Project
• The Economist, Anatomy of a Killer
• Washington Post, Why Outbreaks Like Coronavirus Spread Exponentially...
• Washington Post, Social Distancing Could Buy US Valuable Time...
• The Conversation, Why Are Older People More at Risk...
• The Conversation, Get Dressed and Set Goals... (on working from home)
• The Atlantic, How the Coronavirus Became an American Catastrophe
• The Lily, How to Host a Virtual Hangout
• The FiveThirtyEight:  How Coronavirus Tests Actually Work
• CNN:  The Night Sky as a Shared Experience
• Washington Post:  Simple DIY masks could help flatten the curve
• xkcd:  Pathogen Resistance
• Longrich Paleo Lab:  Public Use of Masks to Control the Coronavirus Pandemic
• The FiveThirtyEight:  Coronavirus Case Counts Are Meaningless*
• Washington Post:  Four Reasons the Coronavirus Is Hitting Black Communities So Hard
• Washington Post:  Coronavirus Doesn't Discriminate, but America Does
• Vi Hart's summary of a Pandemic Resilience proposal she helped build

I'll update this list as I have opportunity to do so.