So we have now followed our state's "Stay Home" order for 100 days.
Jim had worked from home for 14 years and had been planning to retire in mid-April 2020 anyway. I have not worked regularly in years. While I was hoping to be doing some extra work, with all productions shut down that wasn't going to happen.
So when it was clear we wouldn't be spending much time in public in the future, we made one last trip to Wahlburger's, went to the grocery store (which was a mob scene) and went home.
I woke up on Friday, March 13 with a severe headache and body aches. I crawled into my chair and watched TV. I took my temperature regularly and it didn't go anywhere so I doubted it was COVID19. Some friends had reported a similar flu a few weeks before, and people had gotten over it in about a week, which I did.
Over the next few weeks, we got used to shopping in the morning during "geezer hours," buying and cooking odd cuts of pork, and, by early April, figuring out how to jury-rig a facemask. I made some out of odd bits of cloth then figured out how to make some clingy-facemasks out of an old jersey. We have since been able to buy actual facemasks.
We basically did #StayHome, other than visiting our daughter, whose company wisely went to work-from-home mode. As the weather got more spring-like, we also started doing more hiking on the local trails. Between the Montour Trail and the Panhandle Trail, southwestern Pennsylvania has the longest rails-to-trails area in the country.
So now it's been 100 days. We wear masks in public, go out mostly to walk or for quick stops for groceries. We connect with people online and are busy with some volunteer activities. We lost one person from COVID-19 we knew slightly early in the pandemic, we know a few people who were sick and recovered.
We won't get to go on a long-planned trip to New Zealand. This is the second time we'd planned a trip to New Zealand that we had to cancel. The first time was in 2010. We were going to the Worldcon in Melbourne Australia and planned to visit New Zealand after the conference. We were planning to go to Christchurch, as it's near the part of NZ we particularly wanted to visit. But then the first Christcurch earthquake hit so we had to cancel that (not that spending more days in Australia was a chore!). Due to other plans we had tentatively made for 2021 (if travel is a possibility), we may never get to go to New Zealand.
Being baby boomers meant that COVID-19 is our first experience with anything approaching a quarantine. Compared to the very restrictive quarantines in some places during the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, we really don't have it that bad. We can leave our house without being arrested so long as we wear our masks. From studying disease spread during earlier epidemics, staying home more and using masks matters.
I had all the usual kid diseases that kids had before the MMR, chicken pox and flu vaccines. Between November 1962 and April 1964, I was sick frequently. I had four stays in the hospital - three times with nephritis (a reoccuring kidney infection) and once with tonsilitis. But in that same period, I also had rubella, chicken pox and at least one severe case of the flu. Spent the rest of my childhood and adolescence being pretty healthy, and much as I hated getting shots, I realized the new vaccines that came out in the '60s were good for me.
I don't really remember any big flu epidemics growing up. There had been a major flu epidemic in 1957, the winter I was born. In January 1971, there was something approaching a flu epidemic in our school. The absentee list went from its usual 1 sheet to 2 sheets for at least a week. No quanrantine though and the flu breakout in our area was gone by February.
Since 1976, there were more threats of flu - swine flu that year and various other diseases since then. SARS and MERS were both frightening but never really spread much in the US. Always felt fear of Ebola was utterly overblown unless you were a healthcare worker. Even the year H1N1 broke out, there was sometimes talk of quarantine, but nothing happened (though we had a young friend hospitalized with it for 5 weeks - luckily, he recovered).
I know, we're lucky. Retirement means if you've saved money and can be frugal, you can get through pandemics without much worry. Many people we know have been able to work from home, and more businesses are finally understanding that working from home can be a really good thing. Southwestern Pennsylvania has been a mostly low-spread area - we're back around .84% which is good. So we plan to mostly stay home for "the duration," where "the duration" is until there is a widespread, safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine. Much as the movie Contagion really captured what would happen if a highly contagious, more deadly flu spread around the world, it was overly fantastic about the speed in which a vaccine was developed. A COVID-19 vaccine probably isn't months away - it's likely years away. [[Note from 2022.12.16 Luckily, I was wrong about this. Some vaccines were available by early 2021.]]
