Pandemic in the House: What it means when the world gets sick

We are approaching a full year under the dampening haze of the COVID-19 pandemic. As much as we might like to hope its sapping chill will pass, at worst, with the winter, we aren’t likely to breathe (and gather) freely until this time next year. It’s a good time to gather resources to deal with the virus over the long haul.

Why now is critical

There are many tools, tips, and techniques already out there for coping. In this space, I aim to gather the best of those, review, summarize, and, where necessary, modify them here. Also, I will be introducing and creating some new ways to cope, especially those that help to deal with the longer term. I encourage you to share any remedies and diversions you might have found or created that have helped you survive and maybe even thrive in these difficult times.

In this first installment, I am going to focus on the unique challenges the coronavirus presents and create a frame for thinking about what coping looks like in both the short-term and long-term.

We are all newbs here. Because…

No illness in the past century has swept the globe leading to illness and death so broadly as COVID-19 has done.  Eventually, COVID will take its place alongside the other health challenges we currently immunize against (measles, mumps, polio, etc). But for now, unless you are one of the very few among us to have lived long enough to have experienced the Spanish Flu, we have had no preparation for this experience. No context. New is hard. New-Bad–twice as hard.  Tricky New-Bad…forget about it.

The aptly named Novel Coronavirus “COVID-19,” is deceptively (read double) Tricky New-Bad. It started out as just another of those troublesome flus that seem to come out of the East, particularly China, every few years.

“New virus? Oh yeah, wasn’t there that bird flu in China not long ago. Wow. I hope everyone there is going to be okay. I hope it doesn’t come here.” Those are approximately my thoughts as I first heard about COVID well after it had become a national emergency in China. It was new. It was bad, but I sifted through the categories in my brain and made room for this one amongst the other cases of flu that had popped up in my recent experience and recall.

Then, it blew up.

And then it started traveling. I remember distinctly when it reached our shores. I have a daughter living in the Seattle area. I called her. She assured me everything was fine there. Sure she was worried, but all reports were that it was contained, that public health, the government, was on the job. Until it wasn’t…and hadn’t been.

See, here’s the problem in coping with COVID. Soon after it became a virus, it went viral, then it got smeared with a coating of politics and international relations. Dare I say, New-Bad, Double-Tricky, and…slippery as a greased petri dish.

Coping is a brain exercise, even if we are doing something physical in order to cope. Stress is a “one-off” symptom. We are stressed because we cannot simply respond to a threat in the environment with an action. The fear lodges in our brain. Running might help me burn off some of my stress, but to truly cope, I need to engage the source of the stress, and where is it? Right. In my brain. The most effective coping is targeted at both the experience of and the source of the stress.

COVIDs relatively low transmission rate (around 3%), the long span between exposure and symptoms, and variable course and severity all ramp up the Trickiness factor (Triple Tricky?!). Before we knew about the existence of bacteria and viruses, we fell prey to them much more often. Even after we understood THAT they existed, we struggled to understand how they worked. And when they worked as Tricky as COVID, we died in droves. But we didn’t notice.

Until we created our current interconnected system of communication, diseases that caught three percent of us were hard to track. Even if they killed only ten percent of us that meant, if you lived in a small town of 3000 people, only ten would get the disease and only one would die. You might pass that off as a bad flu season.

But we know differently. We have access to global numbers and we can feel the weight of the total weakening and loss of humanity COVID has extracted from our species as a palpable threat to our existence. Even if, in our town, we only know a few people who got it, and maybe no one who died yet.

The brain struggles to place those experiences into a coping framework. And then we are fed spin. At the best of times, a little spin can be fun, but not when your life might depend on knowing which way to go, then getting there. Imagine riding a merry-go-round over and over…oh and over, again. Ready? Nope. Still going round and round. Now get off and walk to your car. Look it’s right over there. What’s wrong? Can’t quite seem to get where you want to go? Maybe wanna upchuck a little?

Yeah. Save the spin for the amusement park. COVID has been spun and spun until we are all dizzy. Good information, good science is out there, but it’s politically slippery and won’t sit still. That doesn’t help your mind try to cope at all.

Stop the Ride I wanna Get Off

Had enough? Yeah. Me too. If I never wear another mask or have to think twice before shaking someone’s hand again, it will still be too soon. COVID-19 has already altered all of our lives…forever. By snatching the title pandemic, the COVID virus gnawed, voracious and relentless, into the collective unconscious and shared history of humankind.

But it’s not done with us yet. With hubris and ignorance aforethought, leaders religious, political, economic, you name it, have tried to wish it away, bargain with it, deny it, rant and laugh it away, but like the death it brings, it will take its course. And that course is not over. Without an approved inoculation, we have no ability to send it on its way. And the so-called herd mentality, a concept as misunderstood and misused as social Darwinism in its time, promises nothing less than 1/4 billion infected and 8,000,000 dead before it’s through.

Two-hundred fifty million ill, many with long-term complications. Almost ten million dead worldwide. That is not an exaggeration or a shout of fire in a crowded theatre. That is pure mathematical extrapolation. At three percent infection rate and subsequent three percent death rate, both of which are almost certainly too small by maybe as much as an order of magnitude. Those figures simply reflect what may happen if cannot stop ourselves from confusing ourselves about what it actually takes to slow, and eventually stop the “natural” spread of this disease. Herd immunity is planned sacrifice, where the lucky stand close, shoulder-to-shoulder with the unlucky and step away only when they see that sad three percent begin to sweat and cough.

No. we cannot afford such foolishness, nor have we ever really considered it before. The most likely reason we hear such discussions now, the reason we war with each other over wearing masks, social distancing, preventing opportunities to gather in groups is because, as I laid out above, part of the insidious evolutionary success of COVID is its sufficiently vague course of transmission. Because we can be sure, some are cautious, others dismissive, and both sides scorn the other.

We can’t cope because we cannot figure out what, precisely, the hell is going on.

So COVID will win for a little while longer, sticking it’s figurative tongue out at us, mocking our seat at the top of the evolutionary pile of skulls. No matter what we do, COVID has a momentum that is as inexorable as an avalanche, tidal wave, or earthquake. It’s is natural, and it is a disaster—to humans.

So, while we invent a means to reverse momentum, we must cope. To cope we must learn from these past eleven months, do better at what we’ve done best at, stop what isn’t working and just plain hunker down in a wa-ay more civil manner than we have been doing.

We can survive this. Hell, that’s a numerical certainty. But to call ourselves a civil world, worthy of the claim to have progressed from the Dark Ages when the bubonic plague took its own measure of our herd immunity and laughingly knocked off a full third of all humans on the planet (by some estimates), we must cope. And I hope to take some small steps in that direction here. Please help. Comment, suggest, argue if you must, but join the Resistance.