Day 12: 2020 Pandemic. We’re STILL Underestimating Everything About COVID-19. Also, How Long Does It Last On Surface.

23 March 2020

We canceled our home delivery of the NY Times 2 weeks ago. My morning ritual used to be to walk down to the mailbox with Scout, our rescue dog, and get the paper. Pull of the plastic bag it was in and then scan the front page as I walked back to the house, then I gave it to my wife who read the entire thing, every word. But I’d been tracking this thing people were calling Coronavirus and officially SARS-CoV-2. I viewed getting the paper as one more thing we’re bringing into the house that we don’t have to because we can read it on-line. After that, I checked my standard preparation stocks and refined it a bit based on an of a Pandemic, which is a bit different that many other disasters. A long isolation in our home was not high on the last of possibilities even though I knew a pandemic was inevitable. No one was quite sure how it would play out.

Now we’re learning first hand.

To the right is an image of the parking garage at Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville where they’ve set up beds for what they know is coming. I can’t emphasize this enough. I’m on Day 12 of this blog and I just don’t feel the sense of urgency from most people.

I’m still seeing people comparing it to the flu, talking about how Obama handled H1N1 years ago, etcetera, all of which is a waste of time and also, most dangerously, misleading about the current…