Day #45: All the Things We Don't Know
After writing most of last night's blog I went to have date night and spend time with my husband. He wanted to make sure that I was clear that he is not being paid *just* to blog but there are a lot of other things involved in his job. I don't think I made it sound like he isn't working hard but just so that is clear.
The other thing that happened today after writing yesterday is I got my email from GoDaddy that my domains are going to renew. Two years ago I bought the web domains for my name and my podcast name. There was a sale. I didn't have anything to put on either site, but buying the domain names felt like a statement that I was making to myself that I was going to do something and I wanted to claim my little corner of the Internet. Well...it's now been two years and I've done nothing. I mean, it wasn't a short term plan...I was pregnant at the time and knew that I wasn't going to do anything with either domain in the short term. But it's now been two years. It's not like it costs me big money, my instinct is to renew and make goals for two years beyond now, but it's hard to justify. Again, sometimes I just feel like everyone in the world is making their mark except me. I know it isn't true. And I don't feel that way most of the time. But it's there.
Not a lot to report today. More baking. Max refused a nap. Daddy and James watched Star Wars. Another day in paradise. I have been letting myself read a *little* more news. Not too much. Some interesting things that I just want to note here to have on record.
First of all, the protests. Man, are there a lot of crazy people out there. Several states have seen protests of people who want their states reopened without any regard for science. So they show this by...gathering together in big groups. Very politically motivated, being encouraged by our president. I don't have a lot of commentary on that except that it is true what they say. You can't fix stupid.
I have become interested in some of the data around the disease. I've said before loud and clear that I am not an infectious disease expert and I have sympathy for those who are because it is really hard to study something that you are in the middle of. But some of the data are really interesting. Now, we know the numbers get skewed because this disease doesn't really impact children at all. Which is interesting. I mean, never say never, it certainly has impacted some children, but the rates for children are very very low. Which skews the numbers because if you discount everyone under 30 it gets much more deadly than the numbers say.
But it gets more interesting than that. Places that have put in widespread testing (and there aren't many yet, we are talking about navy ships and the country of Iceland) are getting really high numbers of people who test positive but are asymptomatic...really high, like 50%. So not only is it true like it has been all along that for a majority of people it doesn't present as serious, apparently for a large number it doesn't present at all. Which is tough when you think about everyone who could be out there spreading it...but might also mean it is far less deadly than feared. Or asymptomatic people may not have picked up enough virus to develop symptoms. Or something else. It is really hard to know now. There is a saying that early science is bad science. It takes time to get really well conducted peer reviewed scientific studies on all this.
All along we have worried about mostly the elderly and ill. I have heard governors talk about their concern for nursing and long term care facilities, so I decided to look up today how many deaths in the U.S. have been from such facilities. The answer is 20%. In Oregon, which has had good success with quarantine and has low numbers, it is 50%. And it could be much higher than that because not all states keep good numbers and residential senior living facilities aren't usually counted. My dad was looking into senior living last year. He has talked so much since this started about how glad he is not to be in a communal living situation now but in his own home. He has been in one of those facilities in the past while recovering from pulmonary embolism. I can see what he means.
I don't know what any of that means, but it feels like the more we know about this virus and the way it spreads in the community the closer that gets us to reopening at least some things. I mean, I'm beyond hoping that there will be baseball this summer, I'm sure they will cancel Pride, I understand we are a long way from large gatherings and a full return to normal. But if we can move beyond stay at home orders and start to have open parks and things like that that will help my summer enormously. Josh is already convinced we aren't going to visit family in Michigan this summer. I told him not to call it yet. Is there a good chance we won't? Sure. Is there also a chance this will look very different in July? I think there is. Maybe some of it is denial. I don't know. A little denial helped me early on I think. If you had told me five weeks ago that we would be here now closed with no signs of reopening and no school until at least September it would have destroyed me...I would have cried for days. Easing into that reality has helped.
My husband and I talked a little bit last night about optimism. He comes from a pretty pessimistic family. Now, there has been a lot of telling people how to feel and I am trying not to do that for him. He's open about his battles with depression and he is allowed to live in his truth. But for me I choose optimism, I am a more optimistic person generally. My family on both sides tends to divide along this extreme line...they are either very positive or very negative people.. I was doing family history research awhile back and wanted to know more about my mother's grandmothers. My mother isn't here to tell their stories, of course, so I called my aunt who would have living memory of them. She talked about her mother's mother who was a negative person and tough to be around and then her father's mother who despite having a very hard life and being in chronic pain for much of it was the happiest most optimistic person she knew. My dad's family is like that, too. We just live in extremes.
What I wanted my husband to understand, though, is my optimism is not meant to diminish other people's suffering. I feel like I don't have any cognitive dissonance when I try to find the things that are really good and beautiful right now while acknowledging that there is a ton of loss and fear. The beauty doesn't negate that. It just gives me something else to focus on for a little while. There's a reason I focus on gratitude at the end of each blog post. Even on really tough days, I find when I start to look around for them there are things to be thankful for.
I don't want to sound like a greeting card. And it's my coping strategy. I don't need other people to do it. But when I lost my mother young, when I went through some of the things I've been through in my life (and my life has not been hard, believe me, I am aware how lucky I am,) I found when I was able to laugh again, when I was able to read, to sing, to go for walks outside...when I got those positive things to work for me it didn't make the grief go away but it helped me to feel like me again. There are a lot of miracles around us and noticing them, even small ones, make the really shitty parts of living on this planet a little bit easier. That's been my experience.
One positive thing I read today from a news source I trust...hospitals in our state have started to ask the governor to allow them to reopen to some of the services they haven't been able to do because they aren't busy enough with cases related to this virus. That feels like good news to me. That is a real data point to rally around. Does it mean I'm going to go protest at the capitol tomorrow to demand an immediate reopening of everything? Nope. Because I'm not a crazy person. I think it is possible to be a tiny bit optimistic that the tide is turning and better days might be ahead without being a crazy person. I think it's possible to believe in science and also be optimistic. Science is also not infallible and it feels like some of the worst predictions might not actually come to be. That is good news.
The BBC has been doing a podcast this week commemorating the Apollo 13 mission with memories from those who were a part of it...astronauts, their wives, people who worked at mission control, etc. those who are still with us. I caught their story about the reentry and landing on the radio yesterday when I went for my coffee. The reentry is of course famous, how they went into blackout for MUCH longer than was believed possible with them still surviving. Listening to that audio, with commentary from those who lived it, honestly it made me cry. I just kept thinking....at what point would they have called it? They all knew that if that heat shield didn't work, if the angle wasn't just right, they would not see the astronauts on the other side. There would just be...nothing. How long would they have waited before they realized that what they would see was...nothing? It's impossible to know. When you are in something, you can't study it. You don't know what you are living through. You don't know what the end will be. I wonder what we will all learn about what is happening now when this is over. I do believe there will be an over.
Media consumption today: I'm still reading the L.M. Montgomery book and for some reason I'm still reading Peck's Bad Boy Abroad although it remains terrible. I like getting little glimpses of what the world and traveling was like then, even through this terrible lens, I think that's why I haven't abandoned it yet. I listened to a bit more of the Graveyard Book, it's a cute book but I'm still alternating it with The History Chicks, depending on my mood. I watched a little Parks & Rec today. TV comfort food. I'm also trying to read a chapter of Genesis a day, part of an ongoing project to read the whole Bible (I didn't start at the beginning.) Genesis is so weird and this is a weird time to read it. I manage to read a bit of it about half the time. I did today.
Today I'm grateful for my husband, yeast, baking, bagels, no to do list, books, snuggles, singing, being climbed on by my boys, being healthy, being lazy, being me.
The other thing that happened today after writing yesterday is I got my email from GoDaddy that my domains are going to renew. Two years ago I bought the web domains for my name and my podcast name. There was a sale. I didn't have anything to put on either site, but buying the domain names felt like a statement that I was making to myself that I was going to do something and I wanted to claim my little corner of the Internet. Well...it's now been two years and I've done nothing. I mean, it wasn't a short term plan...I was pregnant at the time and knew that I wasn't going to do anything with either domain in the short term. But it's now been two years. It's not like it costs me big money, my instinct is to renew and make goals for two years beyond now, but it's hard to justify. Again, sometimes I just feel like everyone in the world is making their mark except me. I know it isn't true. And I don't feel that way most of the time. But it's there.
Not a lot to report today. More baking. Max refused a nap. Daddy and James watched Star Wars. Another day in paradise. I have been letting myself read a *little* more news. Not too much. Some interesting things that I just want to note here to have on record.
First of all, the protests. Man, are there a lot of crazy people out there. Several states have seen protests of people who want their states reopened without any regard for science. So they show this by...gathering together in big groups. Very politically motivated, being encouraged by our president. I don't have a lot of commentary on that except that it is true what they say. You can't fix stupid.
I have become interested in some of the data around the disease. I've said before loud and clear that I am not an infectious disease expert and I have sympathy for those who are because it is really hard to study something that you are in the middle of. But some of the data are really interesting. Now, we know the numbers get skewed because this disease doesn't really impact children at all. Which is interesting. I mean, never say never, it certainly has impacted some children, but the rates for children are very very low. Which skews the numbers because if you discount everyone under 30 it gets much more deadly than the numbers say.
But it gets more interesting than that. Places that have put in widespread testing (and there aren't many yet, we are talking about navy ships and the country of Iceland) are getting really high numbers of people who test positive but are asymptomatic...really high, like 50%. So not only is it true like it has been all along that for a majority of people it doesn't present as serious, apparently for a large number it doesn't present at all. Which is tough when you think about everyone who could be out there spreading it...but might also mean it is far less deadly than feared. Or asymptomatic people may not have picked up enough virus to develop symptoms. Or something else. It is really hard to know now. There is a saying that early science is bad science. It takes time to get really well conducted peer reviewed scientific studies on all this.
All along we have worried about mostly the elderly and ill. I have heard governors talk about their concern for nursing and long term care facilities, so I decided to look up today how many deaths in the U.S. have been from such facilities. The answer is 20%. In Oregon, which has had good success with quarantine and has low numbers, it is 50%. And it could be much higher than that because not all states keep good numbers and residential senior living facilities aren't usually counted. My dad was looking into senior living last year. He has talked so much since this started about how glad he is not to be in a communal living situation now but in his own home. He has been in one of those facilities in the past while recovering from pulmonary embolism. I can see what he means.
I don't know what any of that means, but it feels like the more we know about this virus and the way it spreads in the community the closer that gets us to reopening at least some things. I mean, I'm beyond hoping that there will be baseball this summer, I'm sure they will cancel Pride, I understand we are a long way from large gatherings and a full return to normal. But if we can move beyond stay at home orders and start to have open parks and things like that that will help my summer enormously. Josh is already convinced we aren't going to visit family in Michigan this summer. I told him not to call it yet. Is there a good chance we won't? Sure. Is there also a chance this will look very different in July? I think there is. Maybe some of it is denial. I don't know. A little denial helped me early on I think. If you had told me five weeks ago that we would be here now closed with no signs of reopening and no school until at least September it would have destroyed me...I would have cried for days. Easing into that reality has helped.
My husband and I talked a little bit last night about optimism. He comes from a pretty pessimistic family. Now, there has been a lot of telling people how to feel and I am trying not to do that for him. He's open about his battles with depression and he is allowed to live in his truth. But for me I choose optimism, I am a more optimistic person generally. My family on both sides tends to divide along this extreme line...they are either very positive or very negative people.. I was doing family history research awhile back and wanted to know more about my mother's grandmothers. My mother isn't here to tell their stories, of course, so I called my aunt who would have living memory of them. She talked about her mother's mother who was a negative person and tough to be around and then her father's mother who despite having a very hard life and being in chronic pain for much of it was the happiest most optimistic person she knew. My dad's family is like that, too. We just live in extremes.
What I wanted my husband to understand, though, is my optimism is not meant to diminish other people's suffering. I feel like I don't have any cognitive dissonance when I try to find the things that are really good and beautiful right now while acknowledging that there is a ton of loss and fear. The beauty doesn't negate that. It just gives me something else to focus on for a little while. There's a reason I focus on gratitude at the end of each blog post. Even on really tough days, I find when I start to look around for them there are things to be thankful for.
I don't want to sound like a greeting card. And it's my coping strategy. I don't need other people to do it. But when I lost my mother young, when I went through some of the things I've been through in my life (and my life has not been hard, believe me, I am aware how lucky I am,) I found when I was able to laugh again, when I was able to read, to sing, to go for walks outside...when I got those positive things to work for me it didn't make the grief go away but it helped me to feel like me again. There are a lot of miracles around us and noticing them, even small ones, make the really shitty parts of living on this planet a little bit easier. That's been my experience.
One positive thing I read today from a news source I trust...hospitals in our state have started to ask the governor to allow them to reopen to some of the services they haven't been able to do because they aren't busy enough with cases related to this virus. That feels like good news to me. That is a real data point to rally around. Does it mean I'm going to go protest at the capitol tomorrow to demand an immediate reopening of everything? Nope. Because I'm not a crazy person. I think it is possible to be a tiny bit optimistic that the tide is turning and better days might be ahead without being a crazy person. I think it's possible to believe in science and also be optimistic. Science is also not infallible and it feels like some of the worst predictions might not actually come to be. That is good news.
The BBC has been doing a podcast this week commemorating the Apollo 13 mission with memories from those who were a part of it...astronauts, their wives, people who worked at mission control, etc. those who are still with us. I caught their story about the reentry and landing on the radio yesterday when I went for my coffee. The reentry is of course famous, how they went into blackout for MUCH longer than was believed possible with them still surviving. Listening to that audio, with commentary from those who lived it, honestly it made me cry. I just kept thinking....at what point would they have called it? They all knew that if that heat shield didn't work, if the angle wasn't just right, they would not see the astronauts on the other side. There would just be...nothing. How long would they have waited before they realized that what they would see was...nothing? It's impossible to know. When you are in something, you can't study it. You don't know what you are living through. You don't know what the end will be. I wonder what we will all learn about what is happening now when this is over. I do believe there will be an over.
Media consumption today: I'm still reading the L.M. Montgomery book and for some reason I'm still reading Peck's Bad Boy Abroad although it remains terrible. I like getting little glimpses of what the world and traveling was like then, even through this terrible lens, I think that's why I haven't abandoned it yet. I listened to a bit more of the Graveyard Book, it's a cute book but I'm still alternating it with The History Chicks, depending on my mood. I watched a little Parks & Rec today. TV comfort food. I'm also trying to read a chapter of Genesis a day, part of an ongoing project to read the whole Bible (I didn't start at the beginning.) Genesis is so weird and this is a weird time to read it. I manage to read a bit of it about half the time. I did today.
Today I'm grateful for my husband, yeast, baking, bagels, no to do list, books, snuggles, singing, being climbed on by my boys, being healthy, being lazy, being me.
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