As many of my friends and family know, just a week or two ago, I was pretty vocal about what I see as a mass hysteria in relation to the CoronaVirus / COVID-19 / Wuhan Virus / China Virus, whatever you want to call it. Well, as of last Saturday morning (March 14), I started changing my tune on this subject.
Like many, I have become tired of reading about everything because it’s really making us all lose our minds – and really the more I read the more I think: no one REALLY knows what’s going on. But, as someone who is open-minded, I have done plenty of reading and listening and I have appreciated friends and others reaching out to me with information they have or that they are reading.
I have also been baffled by the reaction of nearly every major corporation and government entity taking what I have viewed as extreme action or possibly overreaction. But the more I reflect, the more I come to this conclusion: these many leaders cannot be wrong. Or, let’s put it this way, if they are all wrong, then they are all wrong. If they are right, and we don’t act in the way they all somehow agree we should be acting, then that would be irresponsible to not follow that course. I am keeping an eye on this innovative up-to-date heat map provided by Johns Hopkins University, which is providing updates in real time, something perhaps never before possible in world history.
I also say all of this knowing that what’s happening right now with this panic (whether it is for good reason or whether it is misguided) is that lives are being ruined through economic calamity. I am not so concerned with many of us who have salaried jobs and who have companies who are taking care of us. I am more concerned about the millions of people who are non-salaried, hourly wage jobs, who live paycheck-to-paycheck and have been sent home with no pay. Many of them will never see those jobs again because of the economic catastrophe that is surely under way. I also know some of these people live with depression, some may be driven to substance abuse or suicide. (I’m really not exaggerating here). I am not even sure if saving a few lives is worth that much catastrophe, because of the millions of lives upended or ruined.
And I balance this with the fact that I know how many millions of lives are taken each year due to abortion. If we are abundantly cautious about a virus potentially killing more people, why are we not so concerned with protecting life at its most innocent of stages? If we are truly concerned with our personal health, why are we an obese nation with 600,000 who die of heart disease each year? Or 45,000 who die in car accidents each year? Why were we not as panicked with the 12,000 Americans who died of H1N1 virus in a single year just a few years ago? And why is this unknown virus so concerning that every corporation in America is virtually shutting down for at least a few weeks? My goodness, Disney World has closed.
Well, I think back to a book I read by Donald Rumsfeld, where he cited a speech he gave shortly after 9/11 about “known knowns,” “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns.” That last one – the “unknown unknowns” is mostly the crisis we are in right now.
One close family member of mine who works in the health care industry was not very concerned about this a few weeks ago. In the last few days before I changed my mind on this, even he said to me, “the more I learn, the more I think the epidemiologists are doing the right thing” by suggesting that we reduce travel, reduce contact, and quarantine as much as possible. Why? Because everything those scientists and medical professionals have been taught is to brace for the worse case scenarios and they don’t like what they believe those worse case scenarios to be. They believe those worse case scenarios are more catastrophic to human life than bringing down an economy. And they believe we can “flatten the curve” of damage to life if we take action fast and take it on the front end, rather than having a prolonged epidemic on our hands.
On the flip side, this same family member is also concerned of the “societal and economic collateral” in taking all these precautions. At this point though there is already economic damage and our country is acting very fast with precautions. Schools are closed, events are canceled, and social distancing has been encouraged.
I had four trips coming up in the next month and have canceled them all – one was a personal trip to California to visit my brother this week; the other was a conference at the end of March in St. Louis that has been canceled by the organization of which I am on the board of trustees – and I supported the board’s decision to cancel. The other was a work trip to DC in early April, coupled with two personal days on the front end to visit friends. Canceled. And the final one was a work trip in mid-April to Dallas and Houston for two regional seminars for the organization I work for, which our organization’s president canceled.
While I am staying in Orlando, I am not staying indoors. I will get my regular exercise by biking, running, playing tennis, and hitting the gym, where we always wipe down all equipment. As of this writing, my small boot-style camp gym has limited to sessions of no more than 5 people at a time. I am probably going to reduce or eliminate my time at that gym for the time being and do more fitness at home as well as the biking, running, and walking outdoors.
I will still run errands to the grocery store, and I will still attend church, because what we need now more than ever is the church. My church has taken precautions by removing the holy water, telling us not to shake hands during the peace offering, not to hold hands during any prayers, and to continue using hand sanitizer, which has been placed around the church – and also not to come to mass if you are sick or in an at-risk category.
But let me say one thing about the HYSTERIA that needs to calm down. What’s the deal with the bum rush to the grocery store and Wal-Mart, etc? We are not in a hurricane here. The food will still be there, the toilet paper will still be there. You can leave your house to get it. We are doing a lot to minimize our contact to prevent transmission of a virus we may not see or experience symptoms of for possibly up to 2 weeks. But let’s not buy everything up. We should go about our normal routine here. It’s this kind of panic and hysteria that is not going to help anyone. Our electricity is still on. We can still drink the water.
Over the past few days, in addition to the regular dosage of vitamins I take daily (C,E, and multivitamin), I am also taking Airborne as an immune system supplement. I drink my Florida Orange Juice every day, as usual. I drink lots of water, as usual. I exercise almost daily, as usual. I get 7-8 hours of sleep each night, as usual. I may even get a little more now. And, my hands have never been cleaner. If we all perhaps use this experience as a learning lesson, perhaps it is to improve our own daily healthy living. This is a time to get more rest and just reflect and be grateful for every single day we have, and every opportunity we have with our loved ones.
And let’s not forget that at the end of the day, this virus was born in China. There are all sorts of conspiracy theories out there, but one thing is clear: China has been lying to the world for many months. We as a nation have also become too dependent on our goods (including medicines and pharmaceuticals) coming from China. The more I read about it, the more alarming it is.
I visited China in 2013 with one of my brothers and we visited two friends who were living and working there at the time. It’s a wonderful country with rich history and really amazing people. But it is controlled by a totalitarian communist regime. And that government lies and steals and kills (even its own people) every day. I am glad I got to experience visiting that ancient place, but in some ways, I feel naive that it was a benevolent country making a turn towards a free-market, democratic society.
Our scorn at this virus and the way it got out of control should also make us fully aware of the responsibility China bears for this upon the world. We should also look to ourselves and start acting in a way that puts America back in the driver’s seat of controlling our supply of goods as much as we can. It is for this reason that I will continue to refer to this as the China virus (China, not Chinese, as to distinguish the place from the people).
Enough of that for now… for now we need to come together as a country and give support to our scientific and medical community to help save lives and bring this economy back to normalcy. We were immensely economically strong just a few weeks ago and we will be again, I am confident, by the end of this year.
We have been asked to increase our “social distancing” at this time. This is a strange new term that is quickly becoming part of our vernacular. Social Distancing might seem tough but it’s a temporary sacrifice we must make to protect the most vulnerable among us. Let’s use this time to complete home projects, catch up on books, movies, or Face Timing with a friend or family member we haven’t connected with lately.
We are fortunate to live in a time when technology enables us to work from home, receive goods by Amazon, and food via companies like Uber Eats. This is a time to reflect, to make plans for future trips, that business we’ve always wanted to get off the ground, or that book we’ve thought about writing. We might have had other plans for 2020, but we know previous generations had to change their plans in their own time and stepped up to do what was right. We simply have to pause our crazy 24/7 fast-paced lifestyle to Netflix and chill. Not a bad deal to live in a world where we can actually step up and stop a plague thanks to modern technology and the ability to share information across the globe faster than the speed of sound.
It’s a moment to take a deep breath and remember to be grateful for every past and future day of normalcy. And when this is all over, let’s make it a point to be active with our neighbors and in our community once again. Let’s prepare for the day when we completely end social distancing.
For now, I close with with words for our souls and our mental preparation. Those words come from C. S. Lewis – written 72 years ago – which ring with some relevance for us. Just replace his words of “atomic bomb” with “China virus.”
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
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God bless us all. We are Americans. We will get through this. And perhaps we can finally all come together to defeat another enemy, even if it is a virus. And then we can end social distancing once and for all.
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In response to the virus, I have also released a special emergency episode of the Agents of Innovation podcast, trying to help people respond to the economic disruptions caused by the COVID-19 health crisis. Tune into Episode 72.