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Ninety-five percent of my time is spent at home. No meetings to attend in Boston. No dinners out, nor any movies or shows. Not even the occasional trip to the supermarket, the pharmacy, or Starbucks. When I get out at all, I take an afternoon walk that usually lasts about 45 minutes with my wife, who has become my sole companion and, wonderfully to report, still my best friend. On foot rather than in the car, we have discovered neighborhoods in Newton, full of marvelous old houses, that we barely ever knew existed, that is, until we decided to walk on pleasant, uncrowded streets where distancing is not an issue at all.
Even at home, there’s no live sports to watch on TV—although I must admit that as a sports junkie I have sunk to new low’s for what I’ll watch. I have re-familiarized myself with the 1984 champion Celtics (led by Larry Bird, of course, but with such luminaries as Greg Kite on the bench), enjoyed the 2007 World Series (I had actually forgotten that it was a four-game sweep of the Rockies), and when truly desperate for a fix, have watched American Ninja Warrior and live horse racing, which, strangely enough, is happening daily, sans fans, in Arkansas.
Although one hears frightening statistics about numbers of new cases, daily hospitalizations, and a mounting death toll in the state and across the nation, it hadn’t quite hit home till a friend of my wife’s reported yesterday that her brother had just died of the virus, and until a friend had to cancel a Zoom meeting this morning because of a conflicting Zoom funeral for a member of his family who had also succumbed to this menace.
I’ve thought about and heard this pandemic described in so many terms. It’s Noah’s flood, but this time each of us is allowed to navigate the storm in our own little dinghies, even if some of them overturn. It’s like a year-long jail sentence, or more accurately, 12 months under house arrest. Someone on TV described it as an active shooter situation, with an armed madman trying to take out as many sick and elderly people as possible, but killing everyone and anyone in his path.
Some states are beginning to open up, and even Massachusetts, where almost 2,000 new cases pop up daily, is considering ways of loosening restrictions so that people can revert to some semblance of their old lives. As a natural-born chicken, I am planning on taking the conservative route, staying caged up at home and accepting that I am under house arrest till the all-clear signal is heard.
The all-clear signal, what will it be like? The definitive answer, of course, is a safe and effective vaccine. But for me, something akin to an all-clear signal would come in the form of an effective treatment. Hydoxychloriquine, touted by our beloved President as the magic pill, so far has looked to be as toxic as its endorser. I’m rooting for the drug Remdesivir to be the first part of the answer. So far clinical trials have provided promising evidence of its effectiveness, and while it does make sense to give this drug to the sickest of people, medications typically stand their best chance of showing effectiveness if the disease is not far advanced. So maybe, if widely used when people test positive and report symptoms, the impact of this virus might be minimized. If we could come up with a truly effective treatment, a drug that was available to all and had no major side effects, then COVID-19 would be more an annoyance than a possible death sentence.
When a safe and effective vaccine becomes available, I’ll be one of the first in line for it (and for a meal at my favorite restaurant). Until then, I will await a treatment proven to be safe and effective before I venture out into the real world at all, and even then with extreme caution. In the meantime, I’ll be shopping online and avoiding all humans other than my spouse. But this new life isn’t that bad. This afternoon, for instance, I’m planning to watch, for the fourth time, the Patriots miraculous Super Bowl comeback over the Falcons. Then, in response to all that excitement, I’ll probably take a little afternoon nap.
Normality, come back. I miss you. A lot.
enjoyed your musings very much, Ed.