The End of the World News

Shelter-In-Place Involuntary Quarantine, Day 10:  Finished cleaning the fourth of seven sections of the house - the living room.  I thought this would be the easiest section, it even occurred to me that maybe I should combine it with the fifth section just to be fair and equitable.  But it turns out that it was one of the hardest for the very reason that I had always thought it was so easy in the past - when I've gone about house cleaning on big day-long binges in the past, I rushed through the living room, vacuuming the carpet, sure, but that was about it.  Today, I discovered something like 15 years worth of dust bunnies and cobwebs behind the reading chair and dust thick enough to build sand castles on the top ledge of the fireplace mantle.  Not to mention nature was reestablishing a whole little micro ecosystem in the pile of firewood by the fireplace. 

But anyway, it's all clean now - took several hours, but I got behind and beneath every bit of furniture, dusted and polished every flat surface,  vacuumed all the cat hair and dander off of the sofa pillows on which they like to sleep.  Remind me not to wait 15 years before doing all that again.

I learned today that one of my earliest boyhood friends - I think we go back to the fourth grade - came down with the coronavirus way back on February 21.  He lives in Brooklyn, which is now an epicenter of the contagion.  He was in and out of the emergency room several times with a partially collapsed lung and the doctors even gave him a prescription for a coveted covid-19 test, but he still couldn't find one available.  He said the body pains were unbearable and he spent the better part of 10 days sleeping when he wasn't crying.  But he's been getting better now and the past week was actually pretty good.  He's even gone walking with friends (while maintaining six feet separation) and shopping at a Home Depot.  It looks like he's recovered and a survivor, although it wasn't so obvious at times.

The coronavirus can last on paper and cardboard surfaces for up to 24 hours, so the incoming mail is a potential vector of infection.  The postman's touched it, employees at the post office have touched it, there's no telling who else has touched it.  I've come up, though, with a way of disinfecting my mail that doesn't involve microwaves, alcohol vapor baths, or baking in the oven.  Each day, I put on a pair of nitrile gloves, get the mail from the box, and then place it on a table in my (formerly filthy) living room, where it sits in quarantine for 24 hours.  I remove the gloves before I touch anything else in the house, pulling the one off my right hand first and turning it inside out as I do, and ball it up in the palm of my left hand.  The other  glove then comes off the left hand, turned inside out as well with the first glove inside it.  Finally, touching only the formerly interior side of the gloves, the side that's only touched my own skin and not the mail, I drop them both into the trash.  

The next day, after 24 hours have passed and any lingering coronavirus should have died, I open the mail.  So basically, I'm opening Monday's mail on Tuesday, Tuesday's mail on Wednesday, and so on, but it's almost all spam direct mail and bills at this point anyway and I can easily wait another day. It's only a temptation when a book or something like that arrives from Amazon.

Which happened Saturday.  I'm now reading a book by television journalist and Harvard instructor David Ropeik titled, How Risky Is It, Really?, subtitled Why Our Fears Don't Always Match the Facts, which seems pretty timely right now (even though it was written in 2010).  So far, it seems that Ropeik's premise is that we overreact to some threats, like terrorism, and underreact to others, like climate  change.  Regarding terrorism, he notes that many people stopped flying after 9/11 and drove to other cities instead, even though the probability of dying in a car accident far exceeded that of being killed by a terrorist.  

I haven't finished the book yet, but so far I would guess that Ropeik thinks that it anything, after months of delay, we're only just now starting to react appropriately to the threat posed by coronavirus.  Social distancing and sheltering-in-place will break the person-to-person chain of virus transmission, and don't have greater health risks in and of themselves.

Speaking of television journalists, I've been told that one for a broadcast that called itself The World News used to end each segment by announcing "And that's the end of The World News."  How appropriate.  Because for today, this is the end-of-the-world news.