I’ve been looking back a lot, for the last two months. We are slowly getting back to normal in the US. It seems there’s a degree of normalcy on the horizon albeit with a thousand possible dangers beyond it. Before I lose myself in preparing for that future I want to look back at the last emergency to see what lessons I can draw and share.
In many ways, because my family was generally spared tragedy, I can look at this as a sort of dry run. I don’t want to diminish those who lost, every life lost was a tragedy for someone, and you all have my condolences. Stepping back from the personal to the societal view though this could have been far, far worse. On the continuum between the sniffles and airborne AIDS, COVID was certainly closer to the sniffles. Thank God.
For this article I want to focus on the tangible side of things. I’m dividing them into failures, successes, and jury’s out. Then the surprises that hit me from considering what I did during the pandemic. I highly suggest running your own self-audit as well as learning from mine. Readers of this blog were more ready than most but looking back I think we all have things to learn and share.
Failures
Failures teach us far more than our successes but it’s human nature to ignore our failures when nothing bad occurred as a result. If you want to be prepared you don’t have that luxury. In my view, in the context of a pandemic, these are the largest failures I have found.
- My procedures did not keep sickness from my house
In the early days of the pandemic when there was so little known and China was actively obfuscating what they knew I took my precautions seriously. For my family one of us went to work about 1 time a week and worked from home the rest of the time. One person went grocery shopping 1 time a week. If you had been outside, you stripped your clothes off in the entryway, the clothes went straight into the washing machine, the person went straight to the shower. While out I gave everyone a generous 6+ feet of personal distance, went shopping at off-peak hours, and generally avoided being around other humans. We don’t have family nearby so we didn’t try to run a “bubble” with families or neighbors. We kept very isolated.
It didn’t matter.
The procedures failed to keep sickness out of my house.
Doesn’t matter if it was covid or some other respiratory disease. We went down. Compared to what I saw others doing we were more serious about our precautions than most. How did it come in? Anybody’s guess. I didn’t disinfected the outside of each object that came into the house but if it was picked up in person that wouldn’t have mattered.
- takeaway question: how long did your procedures keep illness from your house?
Bear in…