#this virus isn't going around causing water main ruptures

[redbeardace]

Between Panic and Indifference

Okay, serious post time.

As you may know, I live near Seattle.  And if you’ve been paying attention to the news (in between the politics), you’ll know that we’re currently going through a bit of something.  I’ve been making jokes about it, but I sort of want to talk seriously about some of what it’s like here right now.

Quick recap:  About a month ago, it was announced that the first case of COVID-19/coronavirus had popped up in Everett, Washington.  Everett’s one of the larger suburbs of Seattle, home to a Boeing airplane factory, FunkoPop HQ, and Half-Price Books that I go to once in a while.  It was someone who’d been to Wuhan in China and got sick after returning to the US.  He went to the doctor, got quarantined, and that was it.  The system worked, the disease was contained, the guy got better.  And that was it.

Until last week.  Last week, they closed Bothell High School “out of an abundance of caution” in order to clean it, because a family member of someone who works at the school had gotten sick after returning from overseas travel.  Bothell is a smaller suburb than Everett.  It’s largely unremarkable, one of those places that takes up three exits on the freeway, but no one really understands why.  It’s also where I live, so hearing that the high school was closed was a bit unnerving, but also a bit ridiculous because it was all speculation.  It was a family member of a school worker, and that employee was staying home.  And it turned out that there was nothing to it, that family member did not have COVID-19.  But at least the high school got cleaned.

False alarm, back to your regularly scheduled--

Scoop Jackson High School in Mill Creek is closed on Friday, this time for a confirmed case.  Mill Creek is an even smaller suburb, sandwiched between Bothell and Everett, and it’s where my post office and a grocery store I go to is. A student had the “flu” earlier in the week, went to the doctor, the doctor said go home, get better.  So the student did that.  They got better and went back to school on Friday.  Unbeknownst to them, their doctor had performed a coronavirus test.  The student hadn’t been out of the country, hadn’t been around anyone who’d been out of the country, so they shouldn’t have had it, the doctor was just performing the test as part of some study.

It was positive.

They hadn’t been out of the country.  They hadn’t been around anyone who had been.  The only known case in the area had been contained.  There were a few cases in California that were mysterious, but at least those were linked to a possibly mismanaged quarantine situation.  But in Mill Creek, there wasn’t any of that.  Sure, it’s next to Everett where the first case was, but that was contained.  So what the hell?

Later that night, there was another case of “possible coronavirus” in Bellevue, the city where I work.

Then Saturday happened.  The first confirmed death, in Kirkland, Washington.  You know Kirkland as the Kirkland from “Kirkland Brand” at Costco.  I know Kirkland as the place I drive through on my commute that’s between Bothell and Bellevue.  Several more hospitalizations.  A news conference talks about the death and the hospitalizations and, almost as a side note, mentions 50+ people connected to a nursing home, also in Kirkland, as showing symptoms.  Fifty people.  I’m going to come back to that.  None of these people had been to China or Italy and I don’t think any of them knew anyone who had.  So what the hell?

Later that night, a scientist from a local research facility posts a short Twitter thread that potentially could have gone unnoticed.  It’s a Twitter thread for crying out loud, who knows what kind of crackpot this could be?  But it’s not a crackpot.  It actually is a local research scientist.  The thread kinda gets right to the point.  An analysis of a sample of the virus from the first patient genetically matches a sample of virus from the Mill Creek student, therefore it is highly likely that the virus has been circulating around the area, on the loose, for six weeks.

Oh.

That deadly disease that we’ve been watching cripple other parts of the world, killing thousands.  That’s here.  Now.  And it’s been here for weeks.

And by here, I mean HERE.  You may have noticed that all those cities I mentioned are places that I go regularly.  “Here” is literally right outside my door.  I am in the bright red bullseye of the hot zone, as this virus swirls around me.

After Saturday, it’s a bit of a blur what happened when, but the specifics really don’t matter.  More cases, more deaths, a Seattle skyscraper closes, Amazon closes, Microsoft closes, more schools close, including the entire Northshore School District (the district I live in), which closed today for the next two weeks.

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So that’s the recap.  That brings us up to now.  But you could’ve gotten all that by watching the news.  I’m really writing this post to talk about what it’s like here at the moment.

I think the scariest thing about it all is that we don’t know how scared to be.  We’re used to thinking of disasters in terms of a concrete event.  Something happened, you can see the impact.  An earthquake, a school shooting, a hurricane, a terrorist attack, a volcanic eruption, a nuclear meltdown.  Most of the time, it ends, you can count the bodies, tally up the damage, and that’s that.  Even in a longer term event, you can see the lava coming and get out of the way or look at a map of the Chernobyl or Fukushima exclusion zones and avoid those places.

But this is an invisible disaster.  It’s literally in the air around us.  It’s on door handles and shopping carts and library books.  Your coworker or neighbor or roommate could be The Thing, and you have no way of knowing.  We’re playing a dangerous game of tag against an invisible opponent, and you have no idea you’re it until way too late.  

Even worse, we have absolutely no idea whatsoever how bad it actually is.  The latest official number I can find as of this writing is that there are 39 confirmed cases, and ten of those have died.  A significant number of those cases are associated with that nursing home I mentioned earlier.  So 39 isn’t bad at all, out of a couple million people in this region.  Even if you limit it to just the “bright red bullseye of the hotzone”, that’s several hundred thousand people.  So 39 out of that is nothing.  But you’ll remember that I mentioned that there were 50+ people connected to that nursing home that were sick, and only some of them are counted in that 39 number.  Then there’s a bunch of firefighters in the area who went to that nursing home, who are sick.  Family members who are sick.  And that student in Mill Creek and the first guy who died got it from somewhere...  And other random people just popping up here and there who had to get it from somewhere.  You add those all up, and it’s probably 100+ cases, but for some reason, they’re not yet confirmed (or even tested), so they don’t show up in the official counts yet.

They weren’t really testing people who hadn’t been overseas or been in contact with someone who had been, until this week.  It’s been here, on the loose, for six weeks.  There are probably thousands of cases that have gone undiagnosed.  For most people, it’s like the flu.  So how many cases of the “flu” were really COVID-19?  They’re retroactively discovering people who died prior to Saturday who had it.  Their deaths had been chalked up to some other respiratory disease.

So it’s here and it’s killing people.  But...  It’s been here for six weeks and we’re not all dead yet.  So what does that mean?  Is the disease not actually as bad as people feared?  Sure, it sucks if you get it and it’s really bad if you’re old or already sick, but so’s the flu, and we haven’t panicked about that since Seattle made it to the Stanley Cup.  If that’s the case then maybe this is as bad as it gets, which, frankly, isn’t that bad at all and we’re all overreacting.  Or are we just at the start of the spread and it’s about to go Beast Mode on us and lay us flat for two years?  We don’t know.

Everything’s shutting down except huge gatherings like ECCC and the Sounders games.  King County just bought a motel to use as a quarantine site.  Stay in your car on the ferry.  Awkwardly jab elbows instead of shaking hands.  But only ten people have died out of 4 million, and all of those ten had “underlying conditions”, and it hasn’t been bad enough for anyone to notice until now, so...

So what are we supposed to do about all this?  Raid every store for every last bottle of Purell and every last roll of toilet paper and hunker down in our homes like it’s the end of days?  Or do nothing in particular because enh no biggie?

It’s like we’re standing on a beach and we’ve been told that maybe a tsunami is coming.  We’ve been standing here for a month and a half, and the water is up to our ankles and we’ve just noticed our feet are wet.  Is the tsunami still coming?  Is this the tsunami?  Or is this just the tide?

It’s weird living like this.  You find yourself doing things in different ways, noticing things you never noticed.  Every morning now, I’m checking my work email before driving in, just in case we’ve been told to work from home “out of an abundance of caution”, or worse, told that we need to self-quarantine because someone in the office tested positive.  Every night, I bring my laptop home in case this is the last day I’m in the office for a while.  Everyone’s telling a lot of morbid jokes.  Traffic is amazing.  There are even spots on the second level of the parking garage and there are NEVER spots on the second level when I get in.  Every cough is treated with suspicion, and your coworkers cough a lot.  Every door handle is treated with suspicion, and there are a lot of door handles. No one from the other offices is allowed to travel to our office and we’re not allowed to go elsewhere.  I’m getting targeted ads for hand sanitizer and Windex. I had a slight tickle in my throat that might just be allergies, but I started mentally doing contact tracing of everywhere I’d been and everyone I’d talked to over the past two weeks.  I’ve never even considered that I might have allergies before.  I have a day off tomorrow, so do I risk going to the store to make sure I have at least three weeks of supplies, instead of only the two weeks I currently have, just in case?  Or do I go to the store just to see the circus of empty shelves?  Or do I go to the store to buy an Xbox One X so if I do get quarantined, at least I can be quarantined with True 4K Gaming?

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I was listening to the radio this morning, and they were interviewing musician Dave Matthews about the coronavirus.  He was talking about touring while this is going on, and how he might come home to Seattle between the legs of his tour, and he said something like “We’ve got to find a balance between panic and indifference”.  And I just felt like that’s the best possible way to describe where we are right now.

Seattle:  Somewhere between panic and indifference.