It may be helpful that my current goal is to blog once a week on Mondays. Weekly posts may give me some kind of measure to keep track of what is happening, so many seismic changes even as time seems to slow down. Today marks the first full week of Nothing Is Normal in my neck of the woods (schools closed, work halted, more people have heard of Social Distancing). So here’s a weekly check-in, of sorts.
On March 12, I began jotting down key data points from the New York Times map of the virus (and it is true that different sources provide slightly different counts). At that time, 127,800 people had been tracked with the virus. 4,718 had died. In the US, around 1,200 had the virus. I didn’t jot down the number of US deaths until a few days later.
As of this morning, 341,500 identified worldwide; 15,187 have died. 33,018 identified in the U.S., and 428 have died. And based on the slowly improving but still insufficient amount of testing available, those numbers likely do not show the full picture. The story of what is actually happening will not be told for several years, I fear.
An odd thought came to mind just now. In movies, there is sometimes the dark trope of a person falling from an airplane or off a tall building, plummeting to a certain death. I have always wondered what someone thinks about during such a fall, because nothing hurts yet. Everything that you know, everything that you are, is still the same, still intact. The ground below must seem like an illusion. And all of the actions that one usually takes for self-protection or survival are suddenly futile.
It’s not a pleasant thought, I know, and I am hoping that human ingenuity, compassion, and sense of community will outpace human frailties to help us survive this current state of free fall.
One note: The New York Times shared a report today based on extensive interviews with health experts (rather than the random guesses of someone who studied something once) that laid out what needs to happen, so I will share that link here, in case you are curious https://nyti.ms/3dkfoCc
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