My emotions are still going back and forth about this pandemic.
My chances of getting terminally ill with COVID-19 soon aren’t high. But it would be pretty disastrous if both my wife would catch it simultaneously—who’d be willing to care for our lovely but likely contagious kids?
Most people contracting the virus don’t even get sick. But I do have relatives who are at a higher risk level.
The measures seem to work; it looks like we’re flattening the curve in Germany. But we’re in a much worse state than on Day 1 with around 200 people dying now each day.
There’s this quote going around on Twitter: “You are not working from home. You’re at home, during a crisis, trying to work.” But I still don’t like myself for being less productive, especially with my amazing coworkers doing all kinds of quick COVID-19-response stuff.
Being a fan of stoicism, I know: when you can’t change a situation, it doesn’t make sense to worry about it. But I still worry daily about what the disease and what it does to society.
We should be careful and stay at least 1,5 m away from other people. But the weather was super nice and there just happened to be so many people who decided to use the same cycling paths that we took. And isn’t the chance that even among hundreds of them, the chance of someone being contagious is still small and the chance of this person infecting us outside minimal?
Wearing a face masks in public is not part of the German policy and described as unnecessary. But in Asia and the United States it’s considered helpful to reduce spread. I’ll just do what’s in between: I ordered some washable cotton masks (not to add to the scarcity that hospitals face) and they should still capture a large portion of particles.
I’m listening to this You Are Not So Smart episode. It describes several psychological phenomena and biases that make epidemics possible. And based on what I heard so far, my internal division is apparently not uncommon.