Another day of social distancing, another newsletter. Keep on sending me those emails, links and memes. If you missed a prior newsletter, you can find it   here . And continuous thanks for staying home, staying safe, washing hands and masking up!
  
This morning I was out walking my dogs around my usual loop, a little more than a mile-long route through my neighborhood, three of the four long blocks residential and one a neighborhood walk street with a few restaurants, a pharmacy, and a handful of storefronts. I walk the same loop every single morning around the same time – about a half hour after the crack of dawn, give or take – though this morning I might have been ten minutes later than usual.

Over the past six weeks, I have been amazed by the quiet of these morning walks. My local streets are a hotbed of home construction, but since the shelter-at-home orders went into effect, the crews have been sparse, some houses left completely untouched. In the afternoons, the neighborhood is alive with walkers, runners, bikers, and skateboarders, but ever since coronavirus shut down Los Angeles, everyone seems to have been given simultaneous permission to sleep in, and so the morning streets are empty. They were, that is, until last week when I noticed a few more cars passing down the stretch of restaurants and shops. The uptick was subtle at first, but each day I saw a couple more and then a couple more until today it felt downright busy.
           
Within moments of stepping out my front door, I decided to do a counting experiment: I would tally how many people wore masks and how many didn’t. Masks are required right now, though there’s a degree of vagary about it (masks in the supermarket, absolute yes; at home, no need; but walking the dog? that kind of depends). I started counting. Half a block into my walk, I had passed 6 people, 2 wearing masks, 4 without. By the time I finished my loop, I counted 53 people total, which is remarkable in and of itself because the first couple of weeks of this semi-quarantine I was essentially alone every morning and even last week I might have passed only 10 on the busiest day. Thirty of the 53 wore masks, which is just north of 56%. And of the 30 wearing masks, the vast majority – 19 of them – were in my neighborhood because they were working: mostly construction workers, though I passed gardeners and a couple of delivery people, too. Only 11 were locals, easily identifiable by their skin-tight, head-to-toe synthetic athletic wear, jogging or walking down the middle of the street, some with dogs like me.
           
I started my counting game to prove to myself that there are, clearly, more people out and about this week, despite no change in the recommendations. The shift away from locking ourselves inside is palpable. No one was breaking any rules by being out, but a month ago people hid from their invisible, viral enemy whereas today, less so. I don’t know why I started to categorize the different types of people whom I saw, but it was striking the way the folks who came into my community to work wore masks to protect both themselves and the local residents, unlike many of the people who live here. Yes, this is buoyed by strict current rules: for instance, if an inspector comes onto a construction site to find unmasked, un-distanced workers, the site gets shut down. But as I walked my loop, there was much more to it than that.

Our community goes beyond the people who live within a few blocks of us – if coronavirus has taught us nothing else, it has proven that we are deeply interconnected to one another across neighborhoods, cities, counties, and states. In order to really reduce the spread of infection, enough that we can all emerge out of our homes and get back to some semblance of life as we knew it, we need to step up and do things for each other that feel a little inconvenient. We need to mask up and keep ourselves spread out. The virus doesn’t care if your familiarity with your local neighborhood confers a sense of security – in fact, viruses like coronavirus often exploit that. If we are all going to protect one another from coronavirus, then we  all  need to protect one another from coronavirus. This message is getting muddled by federal and state governments, but common sense (and maybe a dog walk) reminds us of its truth.
 
And now, to the links. Let’s start with Bill Gates, who walks through the steps that must be taken so that life can return to normalcy. The  short version  is linked here; the  longer version  here. Some of this information you may already know, but trust me, you will benefit from reading Gates’s version of why we are where we are and what we must do next.
 
Here’s a promising article about vaccine development, suggesting that   there may be a vaccine on the horizon sooner than anyone thought possible . But beware of the known pitfalls: once a vaccine is developed, it has to be scaled into massive production; it won’t necessarily work for everyone; and as a pediatrician I can promise you there will be side effects, once it is given to millions, that were not appreciated on study samples in the thousands. If history teaches us anything, those side effects will cause uproar, especially when we have coronavirus under control and people have long forgotten the shutdown of 2020.
 
This may be no great surprise, yet still it feels like a gut punch – with a large dose of foreshadowing – to read the headline:  1 in 5 Kids in Wuhan Area Report Depression, Anxiety Amidst Lockdown . Over the past few weeks, a slurry of incredibly smart, thoughtful mental health experts have weighed in with advice about how to look for the signs, engage your kid(s), and find help from home. This includes people like  Lisa Damour ,  Lori Gottlieb , and  Tina Payne Bryson   , all of whom I am lucky enough to know and I can tell you they are as wise as they appear in print and on screen. So if you haven’t yet, start taking note of their advice.
 
There is a reason why storytelling is such an effective way of teaching. We can read ten articles about how coronavirus feels in the body or the disruptive impact of COVID-19 on a family, but there’s nothing quite as effective as reading about someone’s firsthand experience. This story written by  a mom of four battling coronavirus at home  is no exception.
 
Speaking of kids at home, here’s one you may not have heard about yet: Lin-Manuel Miranda and EduHam are offering the latest iteration of online education. Your kids (and you!) can learn how to  turn primary historical documents into musical theater . To parents from the School House Rock generation, your kids just took history class to a whole new level.
 
And finally,  this might make you cry .
 
But this might make you laugh.