I read a tweet the other day by a historian urging folks to write how they're feeling during this time, as a boon to future historians... which is optimistic, in that we are anticipating there will be historians to review our random scribblings and blog posts in the future. Heh. Anyway, it took a novel coronavirus to get me to dust off this ole blog and I'm hoping that journaling will be another coping strategy for this ongoing relentlessly stressful time... as endlessly scrolling through Twitter or the much-hated FB (side note: a practice I've seen referred to as "doom surfing") is (oddly) not helpful.
Welp, turns out that electing an ignorant, incurious, cognitively-impaired malignant narcissist was a bad idea. We're two months into this, since the first confirmed COVID-19 case on January 20th, and everything I've read and heard about our federal response has been incredibly infuriating. Rank incompetence, active campaigns of disinformation, just... flailing. Not enough tests is the original sin, leading to a haphazard array of responses because we've been flying blind. We were probably always going to run short on PPE or vents in a pandemic, but I have no doubt in my mind that the efforts to replenish our stocks would have been much better coordinated with pretty much ANY OTHER administration to date. It's particularly disappointing to see the failings of career scientists who have served multiple administrations or just actual physicians not doing their jobs- people like Dr. Deborah Birx, the surgeon general, Dr. Redfield at the CDC. Incidentally, boy am I proud that our congressional representative Katie Porter has been able to interrogate these jokers (esp Dr. Redfield).
Meanwhile, our little family is on Day 8 of self-inflicted separation/isolation. Andy is now exclusively doing telemedicine visits and his clinic has shut down completely as of today, however he was still seeing folks up until last week including a volunteer shift at a drive-through testing site and we decided to isolate him out of an abundance of caution to try and protect my parents. So Mom and I packed up the baby and moved into my parents' house. It's been difficult and tears are shed on a nearly daily basis, but we're balancing the fear/anxiety of potentially exposing the baby and my folks to COVID-19 vs. the pain of temporary separation. The baby, on the other hand, is just loving this time when she can play with her grandpa, grandma, and auntie all day long. Babies are resilient, thank God. Dad is going on his 2nd week off work, with no clear re-start date in sight which is stressful to say the least financially but also I'm so fearful about his exposure when the office reopens. My brother is off work other than emergency extractions, and my sister-in-law is working from home. Andy's sister is at the front lines of this as a hospitalist in Florida, which makes everything that Ron DeSantis is doing or rather NOT doing that much more infuriating and frightening.
It's taken me four days just to get this much down, time to go finish notes and play with the baby and try to forget for minutes at a time the heavy dread that has descended on my mind.
Welp, turns out that electing an ignorant, incurious, cognitively-impaired malignant narcissist was a bad idea. We're two months into this, since the first confirmed COVID-19 case on January 20th, and everything I've read and heard about our federal response has been incredibly infuriating. Rank incompetence, active campaigns of disinformation, just... flailing. Not enough tests is the original sin, leading to a haphazard array of responses because we've been flying blind. We were probably always going to run short on PPE or vents in a pandemic, but I have no doubt in my mind that the efforts to replenish our stocks would have been much better coordinated with pretty much ANY OTHER administration to date. It's particularly disappointing to see the failings of career scientists who have served multiple administrations or just actual physicians not doing their jobs- people like Dr. Deborah Birx, the surgeon general, Dr. Redfield at the CDC. Incidentally, boy am I proud that our congressional representative Katie Porter has been able to interrogate these jokers (esp Dr. Redfield).
Meanwhile, our little family is on Day 8 of self-inflicted separation/isolation. Andy is now exclusively doing telemedicine visits and his clinic has shut down completely as of today, however he was still seeing folks up until last week including a volunteer shift at a drive-through testing site and we decided to isolate him out of an abundance of caution to try and protect my parents. So Mom and I packed up the baby and moved into my parents' house. It's been difficult and tears are shed on a nearly daily basis, but we're balancing the fear/anxiety of potentially exposing the baby and my folks to COVID-19 vs. the pain of temporary separation. The baby, on the other hand, is just loving this time when she can play with her grandpa, grandma, and auntie all day long. Babies are resilient, thank God. Dad is going on his 2nd week off work, with no clear re-start date in sight which is stressful to say the least financially but also I'm so fearful about his exposure when the office reopens. My brother is off work other than emergency extractions, and my sister-in-law is working from home. Andy's sister is at the front lines of this as a hospitalist in Florida, which makes everything that Ron DeSantis is doing or rather NOT doing that much more infuriating and frightening.
It's taken me four days just to get this much down, time to go finish notes and play with the baby and try to forget for minutes at a time the heavy dread that has descended on my mind.
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