Thursday, April 3
NO PHOTO TODAY.
MY HEART CANNOT TAKE IT.
Yesterday I forwarded myself a page from the Washington Post, a series of news highlights that I didn’t want to forget. It seems like yesterday there was news that was more than just another day of numbers. I paste it here for myself to remember all that is going on and as a record of history.
I think of my dad as I write that. He was a historian.
I am fighting the urge to justify that. To explain it. But he was. He was an attorney and a sports fan and a dad and a colleague and a friend and a smoker and a curmudgeon and a coffee drinker and a white-haired intimidating person to my friends.
And he was a historian. I wish I could talk to him about all of these bulleted points, taken directly from yesterday’s digital Washington Post:
The White House is expected to urge Americans to begin wearing cloth masks or face coverings in public to help prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, in a reversal of its earlier recommendations, according to a federal official involved in the response.
President Trump announced he signed the Defense Production Act to compel 3M to provide more N95 face masks for health-care workers.
The Navy removed the captain of an aircraft carrier crippled by the coronavirus from his job on Thursday, two days after the officer’s unusually blunt letter warned that if the service did not remove sailors from the vessel more quickly, it would fail them.
A record 6.6 million Americans applied for unemployment last week, a stunning sign of an economic collapse triggered by the pandemic.
Experts and Trump’s advisers doubt the accuracy of the task force’s projection that 240,000 deaths are possible in the U.S., because it has not provided the underlying data so others can assess its reliability.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the creation of a select bipartisan committee to oversee the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, and its management of the new $2 trillion economic rescue package. Trump decried it as a “witch hunt” at the Thursday task force briefing.
So what does this all mean? Should I be making myself a face mask? For when I go to the grocery store next? Should I believe anything that I am reading? Is the work to understand the science of this disease moving so quickly (or, so slowly) that just as we think we understand it (6 feet away, 14 days at home, immunocompromised) the information and recommendations change? Was the first case of this virus REALLY just last November? Was that illness that my partner had in early December REALLY just “possibly pneumonia, probably bronchitis”? Am I reading so much news and looking for answers so constantly that I am now becoming a conspiracy theorist?
I am not a historian. But I am a person who likes to understand. I look for the information I need to understand something. Right now I want to know where I can go to get the information I need to survive this time and to protect my family. I want to know when this will be over. I want to know how to prevent this from happening again. I want to know if there is another Twitter thread, a different podcast, an additional newspaper I should be reading where I can find this information. So that I can understand. I want to know if my friends are OK and if the walks I take each day are safe enough. I want to know that my kids will be able to return to a life where they can spend time with their friends, just hanging out. Where they can go to the gym and play basketball. Where they can stay late at ballet rehearsal and help with the younger kids. Where they can come with me to the grocery store and where we can go shop for sneakers to replace the ones that are far too small.
We all want to know these things. Some of us want to know, right now, right this very minute, if their mother, father, sister, brother-in-law, cousin, boss, neighbor, ex-wife, ex-roommate, postal worker will live or die. This is a unifying fact. And it’s nothing but grim. This is not the truth I want to have learned.
The numbers:
More than 1,000,000 cases worldwide. That’s the only number I want to record here right now. It’s enough.
It’s hard to type this today.
Stay safe, everyone.