So, how’s your quarantine going?
Me? Well, I usually work from home anyway so the only change to my routine is that my wife is now spending part of her week at home with me. I’m okay; she’s bored. (Note: she’s found some solace in The Tiger King. Thankfully, she watches it without me, though I do get regular reports.)
We don’t have kids at home and are keeping our distance from the grandkids (hello, FaceTime!). I am beginning to regret not getting a haircut as I had intended a couple of weeks ago. And, our usual Friday night get together with friends has transmuted into a Zoom teleconference which, when you think about it, is a very Quarantini thing to do.
We’d better get used to it.
A friend of mine alerted me to a report released this week on research conducted by the Meyers Lab at The University of Texas at Austin (UT). The research models the spread of the coronavirus in Central Texas.
This is the first time I’ve seen a chart like this specific to our region — that would be five county area around Travis County.
The research suggests that, even under the current stay-at-home orders in effect over the area, our health care system will be swamped by mid-July. That may seem like a long way off, and it is. But look at the trajectory of the three projections.
If you aren’t sobered by this, I don’t know what to tell you. But, please stay away from me, my friends and … well, just stay away from everyone. You’re dangerous.
We talked to a shop owner the other day who is distraught about his business. I get that. I’m distraught about our small businesses — my clients’, the one I run independent of any newspaper and the one my wife runs.
Our friend had read through the stay at home orders and could not figure out whether his business was essential or non-essential. We flipped the question: how would you feel if one of your team is a carrier and unknowingly infected someone, especially if that someone had underlying health issues that would complicate the infection.
Taking it one step further, he was reminded that he knows — personally — at least three people who fit that bill. I am one of them. I’m 64, a cancer survivor with COPD. (My lovely wife has pretty much locked me down for the duration, BTW, and my hands are becoming rough and dry from washing, regardless of the gobs of hand lotions I swath over them.)
Back to these projections and to the crux of the problem. There are about 2,000 hospital beds in the region and that’s no where near enough to deal with this pandemic unless we flatten that curve and do it now.
This doesn’t even account for sufficient hospital staff and appropriate safety equipment and the respirators needed. Just hospital beds.
This isn’t fake news. It’s not a joke and it’s not a hoax. No matter what we do, no matter how well we isolate or how often we wash our hands, it’s gonna be a long, hot summer.
But, another thing is certain: if we don’t self-isolate, if we don’t wash our hands and avoid crowds, it’s going to be hell.
Stone is Editor at Large for the Hill Country News. His column, The Ragged Edge, has run in dozens of newspapers across Texas and has won a handful of mildly covetous regional, state and national awards for excellence in commentary.
The Ragged Edge 