Last year, I talked about how crazy the year had been for us, so I guess 2020 was like “hold my coffee.”
COVID caused a mad rush for basic goods, yet recommended health and safety practices were not emphasized by leaders and health officials until much later.
This looked the coolest but didn’t stay on my nose at all. Picture was taken before it was determined that certain masks are probably worse than no mask at all.
As anyone reading this in 2020 knows all too well, COVID-19 hit the United States and hit it hard this year. I have stayed mostly silent about the subject because it has been really hard to process how to respond. As I have said in years past, I would rather be a thermostat than a thermometer (set the temperature, not fluctuate with it). I would rather be a problem-solver than let life happen to me.
So how do we bring a productive mindset to COVID-19, a thing that has dramatically reshaped all of our lives this year? A few key things have helped me personally, some of them contradictory at first glance:
Know the facts. By the best estimates of people whose job it is to make good estimates (not that guy on Facebook who you keep thinking you should unfriend but haven’t yet), COVID-19 has killed over 300,000 people in the United States in 2020. Bear in mind that it was not in full swing until March-April, either. 2018 had an unusually-bad flu season with 60,000 deaths in the US. Though not the highest as a percentage of the population, 2019 had the highest death toll due to car accidents so far with more than 36,000 lives lost. 9/11 caused the deaths of almost 3,000 people. All of those numbers are horrible to think about. That is an enormous number of lives lost and hearts broken, on all counts.
The reason you wear a mask on your nose and mouth is that COVID-19 primarily spreads through small droplets of liquid expelled when you breathe, cough, or sneeze. We’re not trying to prevent air from getting through fabric, here.
Perspective is important. We need to simultaneously process that COVID-19 is the most lethal killer of those four events (since they are often compared to each other), yet also not get confused by big numbers. 300,000 deaths is less than 0.1% of the US population. COVID-19 will probably not kill you if you are in good health and do not have an autoimmune disease. If you are especially vulnerable, I implore you to be more communicative than usual about your health concerns with the people who need to be around you (even if you’ve already been doing that for months).
The reason US citizens get confused about wearing a mask to stop a virus that won’t kill them, in my view, is that we too often think about ourselves as individuals or as small families rather than about the collective. If there is even a modest chance that I can save a life by following reasonable health and safety practices in public places, I will wear a mask, wash my hands, and socially distance where possible.
On a similar note about the collective, both Republican President George W. Bush and Democrat President Barack Obama worked on a game plan for how the United States should operate in a pandemic while they were in office because they were professionals doing a professional job. I guess it’s in bad taste to point out that Donald Trump did not follow that game plan because he is an amateur who never held public office before becoming President, but it’s worth noting that if a more-typical President had been in office, the United States likely would have come out swinging with the plan we already had. I’m not sure I buy into American exceptionalism, but I think it’s useful to not get too down on ourselves about our unusual response, in an unusual year, with unusual leadership.
Above all, this is a very hard time for everyone. You are showing enormous personal strength and courage to get out of bed every morning and find a way to navigate through the day, every day, in 2020! Life has been exhausting because our routines have been thrown out the window, every little decision requires cognitive effort, and we’re getting far less human interaction than we otherwise would. I miss people a lot, and Zoom screens are not a replacement for them.
I haven’t been perfect at this COVID thing, and you probably haven’t been either. The point is to try, not to beat yourself up or criticize how others are coping. A bunch of the rules are objectively dumb anyway (restaurants are being forced to close at 8 PM where I live, for example), so we just need to use our best judgment. Focus on being part of the solution.
Aside from being shamed and businesses choosing not to serve you (I disagree with the former and largely agree with the latter), I think it’s an irrational fear to say that we are living under authoritarian rule. The Feds aren’t going to come fine you for failing to perfectly comply with COVID guidelines. The “rules” are guidelines, not felonies. There are often many ways to accomplish the same task, like delivery and takeout services, that can help you avoid the rules you find the most inhibiting.
Vaccines are being tested. We’re not out of the woods, but humanity is doing its best. Don’t give up on people.
As for Aarica and me in particular, we have been enormously, shockingly, fortunate. Neither of us lost a job directly because of COVID-19 (though Aarica made a career move partly in response to it - more on that later), and our friends and family are almost entirely in similar positions. We feel tremendously grateful for our relatively-comfortable livelihood this year, in spite of some of the sacrifices we had to make.
This is part 1 of our Christmas letter, the giant downer full of COVID talk, because it’s such a monumental moment in all of our lives and I think it’s hard to avoid talking about, but I don’t want it mixed in with all the other news.
And trust me, there is a lot more news.
Post number 70.