favorite articles + legit advice
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Marathon Thinking - June 23, 2020
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Fighting quarantine fatigue with yet another newsletter. I love all of your emails, links and memes –you can find them in my
past newsletters
. I’m also thrilled to hear that people are forwarding this along – if you’re new, join my
mailing list
. And, as always, thanks for protecting yourself and others by staying home when you can, washing your hands slightly obsessively, and
masking up
!
Remember flattening the curve? The catchphrase that was everywhere eons ago… which turns out to be only two months ago but pandemic time is funny that way. It’s an important phrase to dig out of your memory banks, though, because its relevance, much like coronavirus itself, is back on the rise. The goal of our sequestered springtime lifestyle – sheltering at home, shutting down entire communities, and engaging with one other almost exclusively on screens but never in person, not even from six feet of distance unless you were a total rebel – was to slow the number of coronavirus cases enough that hospitals could accommodate increased capacity. When the virus first surged in the US, between 15 – 20% of those infected wound up in hospitals, most of them extremely ill. Flattening the curve never meant that coronavirus would disappear; rather, it represented a strategy by which we might all eventually get infected (until we could all be vaccinated), but gradually enough that our healthcare system could accommodate us.
So we locked down, cleaned closets, played board games, zoomed, disinfected, baked loaves of bread, zoomed again, reconnected with long lost pals across the globe, and eventually got bored of the isolation, the walks around the same block, the zooms. As viral spread slowed down, our hopes rose, and soon it was the non-risk takers emerging from their dwellings. The taste of freedom is so sweet, it’s hard not to want more and more and more. So, people gathered at the beach and in backyards and kept their distance, but maybe it wasn’t exactly six feet (more like one or two) and they wore masks until the weather warmed up enough that the masks felt hot and sweaty, so they pulled them off but only for a short while, or so they said. And for these reasons and a hundred more, the virus began to surge again.
Which is where we find ourselves in the story today. One of the most articulate thinkers on the subject of coronavirus is Michael Osterholm.
Read his pieces
, or
pieces about him
, or just
watch this interview
from last weekend, when he said, “We are at 70% of the cases today that we were at in the very height of the pandemic in early April, and yet I don’t see any kind of ‘This is where we need to go and this is what we need to do’ kind of effort... We’re not driving this tiger, we’re riding it.” When asked about the anticipated second wave of infection, due sometime this fall or winter, Osterholm swept the aqueous imagery we hear so often off the table. He said he didn’t believe that the pandemic would ebb and flow like a body of water, but rather “that this is like a forest fire … and wherever there is wood to burn, this fire is going to burn.”
And so, remember flattening the curve. This remains the goal no matter how much we all love the notion of returning to normal. If we had fought the battle against COVID and won already, this would have been a race. But it’s clearly very much a marathon.
And now, some links. How many of you were sick sometime during the winter or spring? Sick enough that you thought you might have had flu – or even coronavirus – but you tested negative for one or both? Well one new study suggests that
more than 8 million Americans
may have been infected with coronavirus in March and didn’t know it.
Meanwhile, many of us are hoping to get coronavirus the easy way: completely asymptomatically. But if that’s your path, you may not be quite as lucky as you think. Turns out that
getting infected without getting sick
may not generate enough antibodies to protect you against another round of coronavirus down the road. Then again, we have no idea whether getting sick is protective in the long run, either.
How many of you have felt down lately? If so, you’re not alone. Americans are the
unhappiest they have been in 50 years
. Reports pf psychological distress and depression are skyrocketing – they’ve tripled since the same time 2 years ago. The American Psychological Association released a
deep-dive report about stress
, looking at contributors like discrimination, concerns about government response to coronavirus, and worries about the future of everything from children to the nation as a whole.
Here’s a
potentially
bright piece of COVID news: even though coronavirus cases are on the rise in many states across the US,
COVID deaths are declining
. This may be a function of the fact that a large number of the new infections are appearing in younger groups, and these folks are less likely to die from infection.
Unfortunately though, it may also be a function of the fact that deaths lag, so we likely won’t see the true mortality impact of these new cases for another couple of weeks at least.
And finally, this, which has nothing to do with coronavirus whatsoever. My daughter and I have an ongoing debate about Gen X and Gen Z. I have made the mistake of saying that I am counting on Gen Z to save us. She’s been clear that it’s my job – my entire generation’s job, so that means most of you reading this, too – to get the ball rolling in a meaningful way. We can’t even vote yet, she argues, so why should we be tasked with saving the world? Not that she doesn’t want to save the world: she and everyone she knows has a plan in mind to fix something, several aim to fix many things. But why should Gen Z be on a hook that Gen X and the millennials, too, are somehow free of? She’s got a point, one that’s articulated in this op/ed about how
Gen Z isn’t 1-D and they aren’t going to save us
.
The
NY Times
’ resident pediatrician, Perri Klass, wrote a great piece with lots of advice about
how to get kids to wear masks
, including license to make them feel morally superior to adults who walk around bare-faced. For teenagers, though, you might just want to show them this… (and PS, these 2 might have been a lot more comfortable in
OOMASKs
!)
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