Reflections on Our COVID Scare: Stores

Two days before we were told by our medical professionals to quarantine for 14 days and that we should go to the drive-through site for COVID tests, my husband and I separately went to the same store, him to pick out and pay for a household appliance and me to collect it. The people in that store were not social distancing and were not masked. I had to handle the door to open it. The whole time I was there, I was regretting the entire transaction. For a couple days afterwards I regretted the transaction and worried what it might do to us. I was angry with my husband for going there in the first place and not turning around and walking out when he saw it wasn't safe. And when we turned up sick, I felt like we should never patronize that business again.

Are we sure that those interactions made us sick? No, of course we don't know for sure. But what I learned from this episode (again) is to listen to my gut. We were lucky to end up with colds and not COVID, and most of the cost we paid was in our anxiety in the week between the purchase and when the negative test results came in. I don't want to live again with the worry about what will happen to my children if my husband and I are hospitalized, with the possibility of infecting the people I love, with fear of the short-term and unknown long-term ravages of COVID on my body. Other than food, there is nothing I need so badly that I should put us at risk.

So, I drew up this list of rules for a personal gut check before entering a store or other public place:

1. Have your staff wear masks properly
2. Limit the number of people inside
3. Let me open the door without touching a handle
4. Invite all visitors to wear masks
5. Post your policy at the entrance and on the web

If the store doesn't meet these criteria, I'm not going in. If I'm in the store and I realize it's not safe, I'll leave without the stuff I came for. Wisconsin reopened prematurely. I am not.

Reflection on Our COVID Scare: Instruction

While we were waiting for our COVID test results, one of the things I did was to complete the university's online tutorial for teaching online. I'm very glad it was available, because I've never taught online, and I know I need to do more reading about how to teach online. Over the years, I've migrated some of my course materials to the CMS, including handouts, PDFs of readings, the syllabus, and the slideshows I make for every class meeting. But as a teacher, I know that the heart of my instructional style, and my best capabilities, lie in the face-to-face relationship, in reading the room to know whether the silence is complete comprehension or befuddlement. So I've never said yes to the option of moving my whole class online.

As I took the tutorial, believing as I did then that I would be under quarantine for a full 14-day period, it became evident to me that even if some classes are scheduled to be face-to-face in the fall, it is imperative to plan and make available remote learning alternatives for each class session. We absolutely MUST make it possible for instructors and students who are symptomatic or under quarantine because of contact with someone infected to stay away from the classroom. That means not only not penalizing absences but also making it possible for students to keep up with their coursework even if they aren't able to be in the classroom. Even before I needed testing on my own, I started making backup plans for my fall courses in case we need to shift to remote. But once I couldn't leave my house for any purpose, I saw that I needed to do more. I have to plan for students who can't come to class, and for me who can't leave my house.

Two points about this immediate circumstance. One, it's a ton of work to double-plan an entire course for two different modalities. Unless the whole class operates either online or FTF, something is going to be lost because we won't all be on the same page (literally speaking). Two, because this planning has to be done in the summer when we aren't on payroll, we aren't going to be compensated for this work. My husband is planning to record a couple hundred hours of lecture this summer so that he can operate a flipped remote classroom next year if necessary. And he's contingent labor. While his department would like to keep him on and has him in the schedule for next year, there is no guarantee in this climate that he's not going to be laid off. She he's going to do hundreds of hours of work that will never be compensated, on spec.

Additionally, and this makes for even more work, it also became clear to me that going forward I should always make backup remote learning opportunities for my students. I've always told students that if they miss class, there is just no way for them to make it up; I'm not delivering the lecture again; there is no way to duplicate class discussion (however feebly I think it went). I also tell students they are autonomous adults, and that it's up to them if they come to class. I don't expect or accept excuses if they miss class. But I am happy to make the course materials available for them to make what they will of them. At the same time, I know this about my students: they don't miss class capriciously. It's not that they slept until 2 in the afternoon (like my daughter is currently doing), or that they were hungover. It's that they had a sick parent to take to chemo; they couldn't change their shifts; they have a chronic illness; they can't get childcare when schools are closed; their military reserve duty demands them to go to extra training. If my students' learning is my highest goal--and I believe it is--then I should make course available to them the opportunity to learn a day's or a week's worth of material even if they can't come to class. And of course that means double-planning the whole semester.

Suddenly my teaching job got a lot more full. I'm not complaining, and I'm a tenured full professor with plans to really hone in on my teaching over the next decade. But, wow, it's a daunting lot more work. Right now I'm optimistic that re-planning everything will improve all my teaching, both face-to-face and my non-extant online skills. Ask me again in a year if I still think this.

Reflections on Our COVID Scare: Food Inventory

One of the most stressful aspects of the lockdown has been managing the food inventory. Very early on in the pandemic I was actually shocked by the account of a prominent Washington DC person who said that she had been going to Whole Foods every single day. By contrast, our family decided we would send me out once every ten days to our basic grocery store, with an occasional supplementary run to Trader Joe's. We shifted that strategy a little bit when it became clear that there were COVID outbreaks in meatpacking plants across the country and the meat supply was threatened. I stopped buying meat at the grocery store and started going to local butchers whose meat sources are out of the factory food chain.

This approach was meant to minimize the chances of our catching or sharing the virus, but it had some real downsides. Something you wanted but not at the store? Then you're out of luck until your next ten-day run (yeast, flour, I'm looking at you). We don't drink a lot of milk these days, but we do use it as an ingredient. A half gallon might run out in 24 hours if the kids decided to make a lot of pudding. But our last gallon went bad before we finished it. And the actual trips to the store have been enormous runs, taking multiple grocery carts and multiple hours.

The issue with being quarantined, instead of just conservatively cooperating with the lockdown, however, is that you don't have any warning that it's coming. You can't decide that on Saturday you're going to stay inside for 14 days and go to the grocery store now. If you have active reason to believe that you might be contagious, you can't just mask up and go out to prepare. You have a moral obligation to stay home starting immediately. The quarantine order just falls on you.

The news from our doctor that we should quarantine came about halfway through our 10-day grocery cycle. That meant we were still good for a while, but that we couldn't go out and replenish the stuff that was going to run out during our quarantine. Did I have enough meat (probably)? Milk? No, definitely not. Flour and yeast? This gave me the most anxiety, since my family has been devouring homemade bagels and loaves of oatmeal/flour bread at the rate of about one batch every 36 hours.

I got especially worried when I realized that in our case, it was both the adults who were potentially contagious. Of course we wanted to protect our kids. But could we really hand over responsibility to them for feeding themselves and us for a two-week period? If we were actively feverish in the bedroom, I don't think we would have had a choice. But my husband and I did continue to be in charge of cooking for them and ourselves on a regular basis, and I did keep kneading the dough (hoping that cooking would kill any virus). I just hoped that if we got truly sick, there was enough canned soup and rice in the house for the children to feed themselves. I worried particularly about my picky eater, who started off lockdown cooperatively eating whatever was offered but has backed off of that in the past month. I asked her sister what they would have done about eating if we got sick, and she told me today that "[she] probably would have yelled at [her] sister a lot."

This is hard to manage, and stressful. I see now that I absolutely have to have a fourteen-day supply of food on hand at all times, just in case. I'm grateful to be wealthy enough to keep a well-stocked pantry, to have older children who can manage the stove and oven, for the previous owners of this house who let us keep their backup basement fridge.

Reflections on Our COVID Scare: Infection

I learned just how easily infection passes.

Our household has been really careful since lockdown. The children have left the house pretty much only to walk in the neighborhood, with one or two in-car only outings (like to a friend's birthday parade). My husband has gone out only once or twice himself. I've done all the other necessary outings and practiced as much social distancing and covering up as I am able (masks, gloves for shopping, turning my face away from people who pass too close in the grocery store, etc.).

But last Tuesday, we needed a large piece of household equipment. My husband went out to select and pay for it, and I went back later to the same store to bring it home (because trunk space). The store we went to was not practicing any care measures. Within 48 hours, both of us were showing the symptoms that had us calling in to the doctor asking whether we should quarantine.

Normally, we think of getting colds as unavoidable, a natural consequence of being out in the world in regular contact with other people. I've never before had an experience where I felt like I could isolate having "picked up a cold" to one particular encounter. And I'm shocked at how easy it was to pick it up, since I didn't touch anything except the door handle at the store, and my husband; we don't know which of us was the vector for the other. We're lucky that what we got was minor and not COVID, a threat which raised a host of questions for us--including what would happen to our children if we both were hospitalized at the same time. This is why I'm developing a list of safe practices that a public place needs to put in place before I enter.

It's shockingly easy to pick up a virus.

Reflections on Our COVID Scare: Masks

As soon as the nurse scheduled us for COVID tests, I looked at CDC guidance. It seemed completely impossible for the two adults in the house to isolate from the teenagers who needed food and parenting (not to mention keeping up to the recommended sanitation procedures, which involves cleaning surfaces all the time). But thanks to a timely gift from a friend, we did have masks that we could wear to keep ourselves from coughing our viruses (or whatever) onto our kids. So, my husband and I have been wearing masks almost continuously in the house since Thursday.

Our masks are cute, and mostly I was entertained by wearing them instead of annoyed. I noticed that the mask hides my double-chin, which I appreciated. At one point over the weekend, though, I'd had enough, so I betook myself to an isolated spot in the house and did some reading or chores by myself, without a mask on. And every once in a while it seemed too warm under the mask. Overall not too onerous to wear.

But in the grand scheme of thing, given the choice between wearing a moderately annoying mask and possibly protecting my children, or having a comfortably naked face and possibly infecting my children, it seemed pretty obvious that I shouldn't complain. So I wore the mask. I'm sure you would do the same for your own children, as almost anyone would.

And I thought to myself over and over again, if someone would wear a mask to protect their children at home, why wouldn't they do so in public to protect strangers?

Sacrifice

I couldn’t, can’t sleep from the outrage and grief.

How many Americans are staying home right now?

The most patriotic thing most of us have ever done.

Sacrificing our livelihoods, our pleasures, our visits to our parents’ sickbeds, our children’s births

Working without PPE, without knowledge of the disease

To save the lives of the unknown, beloved stranger—our nurses and doctors, our teachers, our first responders, our neighbors.

Some powerful few suggest that for the sake of the economy, we should turn ourselves into unwitting bullets that will kill hundreds of thousands of other Americans,

To render pointless what we have already done and will keep doing.

I never want to hear again that “All Lives Matter,” that they are “pro-life.”

How can I persuade you that freedom should not murder?

Awaiting Pandemic: March 12, 2020

Awaiting Pandemic: March 12, 2020

Amanda I. Seligman

In June 1992, my classmate and I drove west. The Great Plains terrified me. Fresh out of our first year of graduate school, where I studied the changes that had shaped the North American landscape, my mind’s eye could recreate the vast herds of bison that used to thunder over the American grasslands. Under skies broader than I had ever imagined, horizon unbroken in all directions, you could see them coming for miles but never get out of their way. No matter how fast you tried to run, they would trample you. I knew that nineteenth-century American hunters had shot the bison herds to the brink of extinction, destroying the animals and imperiling the indigenous cultures wrapped around them. But the curse of the historian is to conjure up the past and the future into the present moment. I could almost hear the imminent hooves, and I could not dodge them. I trembled.

I feel that way again, sitting in my living room, letting the internet unreel COVID-19’s spread across the planet into my historical imagination. It’s easy to lose an hour flipping among multiple news outlets, Twitter, and Facebook. I have been preparing in a low key, non-freakout way over the past month. In February, I dipped into Max Brooks’s World War Z, checking whether he had placed the origin of the zombie apocalypse in Hubei province (he had, if I read Chinese geography correctly). On every trip to the grocery store, I bought a few extra essentials to set against the looming lockdown: toilet paper, two dozen cans of soup, ten pounds of flour, five pounds of rice, soap, toothpaste. At each restaurant and school event, I asked myself if this was the last one before we all go into our bunkers. But today I can hear the ground rumbling, and I know things have shifted. Instead of bison, it’s contagion. It might be a while before my next trip to the store.

I send an email to the school superintendent and repost it on the middle school parents’ Facebook page. My university is extending spring break to give instructors time to transform their in-person classes to remote learning. I ask the schools to do the same. My fellow parents’ responses run mostly along predictable lines. Some folks are 100% on board with my mildly phrased suggestion. Others quite rightly point out the hardships closing schools will cause for working parents and families that rely on free lunches. A few are dismayed at the prospect of a couple weeks of alone time with their children. I order myself not to write a rebuttal essay about how public health is undervalued because its effects are invisible. I refrain from explaining that because none of us has lived through a comparable emergency their complaints that not everyone learns well online are off-base. But I do remind myself about the basic stats of the 1918 influenza outbreak: 50 million dead from a planetary population of less than 2 billion people, or somewhere a bit above 2% of the global population. And I choke back the anger of my gut response to my more reluctant internet neighbors: so you want your children to be the bullets that kill your elderly parents and cause the health care system to break down?

Distracting myself from my work with quick hits of current information worsens my mood, exhausting me. I’m on sabbatical this semester, preparing new classes. My colleagues are swamped trying to move their classes online for the duration, but I lack their focus and keep dipping back into the river of news. It reminds me of what happened after 9/11. Psychologists warned us to turn off our TV sets so that our children would not think that new planes were hitting those towers over and over again. I suspect I am traumatizing myself in a similar way by watching the crisis continually unveil itself in my news feed. But I don’t know how to adjust my inner balance: how much information helps me understand the present moment vs. repeated input that will overwhelm me so thoroughly I crumble into an anxious heap? I try closing tabs, putting an extra step and a deliberate choice between me and the news. I set up rules about when I can look to the present and when I must focus on the past. They don’t last long.

I wonder about the other rules that we are supposed to be following now, the ones implied in the idea of “social distancing.” I understand that we should keep some physical space from other people. But what other rules apply, and how do we know when to implement them? How do we recognize the moment to reduce our outside activities? Is today it? Is it already too late? The Unitarian Universalist Association, offices closed for the duration, is recasting “social distancing” as “community care.” But in practical terms, how do I implement the important idea that it’s my responsibility not to become infected so that I don’t pass on the virus to people who are more vulnerable than my family? Should I bother trying to keep my own kids at home if the schools stay in session? I’m not worried about them getting sick, since children seem less affected than adults. I don’t want them to be vectors infecting others, but what’s the point if everyone else is still merrily out in public? Should I skip church, where last week we already substituted bowing “Namaste” for our usual handshakes and hugs? I probably shouldn’t go to yoga, but can I swim in the pool or walk on the track? Can I go to the grocery store at times when it’s likely to be uncrowded, or is now the time to forego fresh foods?

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s resulted in part from the absence of bison doing their part for the ecosystem of the Great Plains. Pandemic mutates our economic and medical ecosystems. I know that I don’t need to buy clothes in person, but I have $40 in Kohl’s cash that will expire soon. Is OK to spend it online? Does doing so put the packer in the warehouse and the delivery driver in jeopardy or protect their jobs in a time of economic crash? I’m hanging out at home today because a pre-existing cold combined with an adverse reaction to a shingles vaccination to make me feel pretty crummy. Ought I postpone the second shingles injection until after the crisis is over, so that my clinic can focus on more urgent needs?

When someone asks me to identify the worst natural disaster in history, I point to the flu outbreak in 1918. Sitting in my PJs at home a century plus two years after, I can hear it on the horizon again. It’s not the thunder of bison hooves I can imagine, but the planetary echoes of the whoosh of a bat or the scritching of a pangolin somewhere in Hubei province. There are eight identified cases of COVID-19 in Wisconsin today, with one recovery, no deaths, and an unknown number of untested infections circulating or quietly self-quarantined in our community. The disaster isn’t here yet, but I am hunkering down as if for a long series of blizzards. I read a few weeks ago about the utter exhaustion of the nurses in Wuhan and today about the terrible choices of the doctors in Lombardy. I define medical triage for my increasingly less innocent child: quite literally dividing patients into those you can save, those you can only comfort, and those to treat later. I cannot calibrate my emotions or my actions. We will know only if we succeed or fail in tamping down the disease collectively, not individually. I am exhausted from knowing the past and reeling from the anguish of a future we are trying to prevent. The bison are coming up over the planet’s curve. I imagine if we lie very still, they might evaporate into a figment of the past, leaving only the dust they kicked up, making us wonder what all the upset was about, because the worst didn’t happen after all.