Self Isolation

Natural20 is mad with me right now!  She wants me to self isolate when I am not at work.  I work retail, so I am the least isolated person in her household.  Her husband works at a tech firm and has been isolating for a week, and that has been strenuous because he has not been self isolating.  More like he has been self isolating because his dates have been isolating so he has not been dating.  He goes out to get Tim Hortons and has his coffee and reads the internet from the refuge of that establishment.  He has been using the excuse of self isolating to not do the things he doesn’t want to do, but still does the things he wants to do. 

The kids are adolescents.  Jake has been self isolating for months now, immersing himself in computer games and only arriving at the dinner table when he is starving and then submerging back again.  Jenny wakes at noon and then reads until 2 am.  She has a social life but is introverted keeping to one or two friends at a time and that is it.  She has a girlfriend, but she has not been socializing much with her.  It seems like a social experiment with the two of them, possibly a means to ward off attention of others but still not see much of each other.  They are in different grades have different classes and see very little of each other in school.  Interesting.  But more to the facts at hand, she is socially isolated.  She texts to people she has never met all over the world and speaks about them as friends.

Natural20 runs her business out of her home, and although people come there to see her, she has an easy online option so, most people she works with are at their homes. 

Me I work with the public, but I have very little contact with them, lately I have been disinfecting everything as part of my job to the point that I mostly wash my hands to get the disinfectant off my hands.  They, my hands, are cracking, from washing too much.  I take public transit.  I go to Tim Horton’s.  when I get home, I go to my room and turn my computer on and watch Netflix or play a computer game.  I don’t write, because I have those other distractions and I admit, I am not that disciplined.  So, if I want to work, I go out.  If I want to write, I go out.

Part of the problem is something that has been hanging in the background since I moved into the house almost a year ago; I have no space.  Natural20 moved from her spacious king bed and spacious closet space and her spacious room near her beloved Jake and Jenny to the basement where the spare bedroom is to live with me.  Jake and Jenny shared an ‘office’ in the basement which Jake took over because he was being very loud all the time and Jenny could not work and she moved her stuff to the library and then chose to work everywhere else except there, but does her sewing there so . . ..  Husband has the master bedroom, associated walking closet, and two bathrooms, (really there is much to be said about the people that did the planning for the house that there are three bedrooms on the top floor with two in the master bedroom) and an office in the basement.  A very large office at that, almost as big as the bedroom I share with Natural20.  Natural20 has an office that she works from on the top floor.  She has all her business there, conducts office hours there and meets clients there.  It is the tiniest of all the personal workspaces in the house and the most used and the highest traffic. But that leads to my personal workspace, it is at the local Tim Horton’s.

So Natural20 wants me to Self Isolate.  In my bedroom, effectively.  That is where all my stuff is, and it is where I do the least amount of work and the most non-productive time, I sleep there, watch tv there, have sex there, play computer games there.  I looked at all the spaces.  I am not going to deprive Jenny of her space even if she doesn’t use it.  There is no other place that has the light that I need to work.  I need natural light and I have never felt at home deprived of it.  The only time that I had a lack of light was the places I lived in my twenties when I was deeply depressed; is there a correlation?  Depression and the lack of natural light?  I am willing to conceded that there is.

Anyways, why do I need to Self Isolate?  It is March 16, 2020, the Novel Corona Virus-19 is spreading around the world.  People are dying, but moreover, people are getting sick and clogging the health system, well not yet, and we hope not ever.  I am not at risk to die.  I don’t have any co-morbidities, and I am healthy, and I work outside—never discount the production of vitamin D.  I am very active and when it gets warmer, I will be much more active.  Self Isolating is a health precaution to slow the inevitable spread of the virus so that the people that need the hospital beds will have the hospital beds when they need them because the serious cases will be recovered or dead before they get to the hospital.  The serious cases need the hospital beds, or they will die.  Self Isolating is supposed work be decreasing to transmission of the disease from the infected to the uninfected.  I understand that, but because of where I work, I can’t Self Isolate completely unless I just stop going to work.

Here is what is known.  It takes the infected up to fourteen days to show signs of the virus, but most people show signs after 8 days.  Once sick, most people, about 80% will recover in another two weeks, but some cases are serious, and they will not recover until three to five weeks and then there are critically ill people that don’t recover for five to eight weeks.  In total about three percent of all cases are fatal, but younger people almost no one dies and amongst the elderly, almost fifteen percent die—people die if they have co-morbidities: influenza, cardiovascular issues, diabetes, cancer etc.  Self Isolation is supposed to allow all those infected to show the signs that they have been infected and then to be bed ridden until they have recovered or die.  And then what?  Then they can go out again?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  The retail workers that do not have jobs that they can do at home continue to go out.  Grocery stores are required to be open, so that people can have access to food, so they can’t self isolate.  Stores that do not shut down for two weeks are not self isolating either.  So, what happens after the two weeks?  All the people infected in self isolation are still in self isolation.  All the people not in self isolation are either still not infected or are infected and are now in self isolation as they recover.  The people that have been infected but are not showing signs continue to spread the virus.  These infected transmitters are people who were in Self Isolation how needed to go out and get things to maintain their isolation, and they are people not in Isolation.  Maybe, we need to Self Isolate for two weeks and then everyone who has Isolated has to take the jobs of the people that and let the ones couldn’t Self Isolate.  Can you imagine Google Executives running the grocery store as cashiers?  What is the value of someone who can’t Self Isolate on Self Isolating when they are on their own time?  Given that they take public transit and deal with the public at work.

Should I move out for two weeks?  Get a hotel room and Self Isolate from the people that can Self Isolate?  It is not like they are truly Self Isolating if they are associating with me, a person that can’t Isolate because work is not flexible?  Remember Retail.  For the record we have a person or several people whose job it is to sanitize everything that people touch all day long and cashiers that sanitize their workstation every transaction.

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Okay update, Natural20 tried to read the post so I took it down and stole her phone so that we could talk about it before she read it.  Not very mature, but I did not want to be attacked for being wrong.  I don’t mind being wrong, I am wrong often, partially, rarely completely.  But I knew I was wrong.  By the end of the above I had already talked myself into self isolating.  By the end of the day work called and told me that shifts had changed into three sets of nine workers so that people would be limited that way and so I was not going to be working that Tuesday as planned.  I saw the writing on the wall and I went to work anyway, not to work but to say hi and buy some stuff and then never return . . . unless my shift actually made it and was still on the schedule.  And then someone from another store tested positive for the virus and all our stores in our chain closed.  That was Wednesday.  The Boss called and asked me if I had any questions and I responded to him about the state of the store and the need to get it ready for spring should that there are people left to work there and people left who want to buy things.  So, I was selected to come in and get the store ready.  It is not much, 6 hours a day five days a week, but it is not nothing. 

And Natural20 made a place for me in her home so I do not need to go to Tim Hortons and write there.  It is not as good as Tim’s because the ambiance is not the same, but the tea is free, and the bathrooms are in better shape.  I still go to Tim’s every day—it is part of that making connections with people.  you smile and ask how their day is going and they treat you better, but when things go bad in the world and they close all of their customer seating and become a take out only place it is important to keep going and letting them know, the people who still work there, that you feel for their situation.  I argued on Facebook that it is the chains that you have less to worry about.  They have company wide mandates and protocols that tell them how they must act, and the mother company will shut them down.  But the Mom and Pop stores they have more to worry about they might not have the resources to keep to the same standards.  I know, because I work in a small chain store, part of the community and big enough to have resources, I know the steps that they have gone in this new world of the Pandemic.  EI gives us 55%, but our company will boost that by another 20% for the duration of the pandemic, however that will last.

People are talking like it is going to be Our Great Depression.  We will see.  One thing that might happen, is happening is that the USA is becoming a more socialist nation by the second.  And the Virus may kill off the bulk of the most conservative people in the world.  Perhaps history will say that the disease allowed us to be green.