Why Social Distancing Matters

This week on social media everyone has taken a break from being a recreational political pundit and shifted to their part-time gig as armchair epidemiologists and prepper-come-lately, trying to stay ahead of the internet snark with their hot takes about who is buying too much toilet paper and exaggerated concern about how little other people have been washing their hands up until now. I find myself in a never-ending cycle of closing individual apps due to virus fatigue, then logging back in minutes later to see if there are any updates I should know about. I am constantly torn between pulling my oldest out of school and just choosing to remain calm and stay the course (and, if we’re being honest, weighing the realities of being with two kids 24/7 vs the likelihood of him being a disease vector). My family lives in a whole new world now, thanks to cancer. For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re stocking up on Charmin. If it keeps your sick self out of the stores, go for it.

I am equal parts embarrassed and proud about my preparedness—I am not now, nor have I ever been a Doomsday Prepper. I have, however, mostly since becoming a widow, begun to stock up on extras around the house, in the event of an unforeseen emergency. I like knowing that I have backups of not only food to last a few extra days but knowing that we have luxury items like wine and chocolate to tide us over in the event we’re homebound. I think of it as responsible pet ownership to have an extra bag of dog food on hand, in case we’re snowed in, or the zombies come. I think it’s responsible parenting to keep extra meds on hand so we’re not in a position to decide which member of a household with a sick kid has to go get Tylenol in the middle of the night. When I was alone in parenting, the choice was even more dire—take a sick kid with me? Wait until morning when someone can deliver? I am also of the opinion that it’s responsible partnership to ensure that you and your spouse have enough vodka to spread out over a two-week lockdown with three children and a dog that you might eventually be forced to feed to the zombies. Our household love language is “mixers.” So, yeah, I stay ready. When the panic over COVID-19 began to hit Twitter, I knew that all I needed to do was shore up some supplies like frozen meats and make sure we have enough diapers for the toddler, a backup supply of boxed wine and, yes, toilet paper, because I don’t know what is wrong with you people, but if I am stuck at home for half a month, I absolutely want to be able to wipe. I cannot speak on anyone else’s take, but... I have a decent supply of TP.

Joking aside, I have the space for a toilet paper shelf and a wine shelf. I have practice in making sure my household is prepared for minor emergencies like an ice storm or something of that nature, where going out is inconvenient and somewhat dangerous but not life threatening. Now, however, something as simple as needing to run to Wegmans for toilet paper and mixers could, indeed, endanger actual lives in this household. Vivian doesn’t go anywhere but the hospital. So that’s awesome—zero contact with the outside world, except for the one place that people with the highly contagious novel virus are certain to be. She doesn’t really interact with people outside of our family—just her brother who is in public school, a place that, by his own admission, is “really gross sometimes, and not great at washing hands,”; her younger sister who is in daycare, so…snot. Her stepfather works outside the home, and me, the one who takes her to and from that same hospital, the one who pushes the elevator buttons and the wheelchair. The one who signs us in and pays the parking garage fees. Outside the home she has contact with her grandparents, one set of which care for elderly great-grandparents, and another grandmother who works with cancer patients--a literal herd of immunocompromised people-- every day. Our bubble is small, but it is fragile in some very key areas.

While we may mock the simplicity of advice like “wash your hands” with the retort “are people not washing their hands?” I am here to tell you: people are NOT washing their hands. Viv got an E-Coli infection in January. You can look it up, but I’ll give you the basics—it’s a gastrointestinal bug. It’s a poop germ. People don’t wash their hands. And you know who else doesn’t wash their hands enough? Probably you! I have a very sick kid, for goodness sake, and I would like to think that I went from a “normal” amount of hand washing to a more serious and conscious regime upon her diagnosis. We have sanitizer around the house and are always reminding the kids to wash, and to wash well. Now that we’re all hyper conscious of washing and keeping our hands away from our faces, the extent to which we may not have been washing properly in the past is pretty clear. Did I always wash my hands when I entered the house? Was I always vigilant about who sneezes and how close to me they were? Certainly not. Pretending that we have all, individually been the paragon of hygiene while the rest of the unwashed world have been blissfully blowing their noses into their hands is not helpful. You have almost certainly given someone else a virus in your life, almost certainly without intending to. Likely it happened before you knew you were sick. That time you mentioned to your co-worker that you “felt like you might be coming down with something” while you made coffee? You exposed them to your “something.” When you stopped by the drugstore on the way home to pick up chicken soup and tissues? You put your lil germs on things. Sorry, I know you were content to hide behind the strength of your memes, but you, too, have carried and transmitted viruses. You are not an evil person for having sneezed on the train or coughed on the elevator, and those who contract COVID-19 are not bad people either. We’re human and disease is something that comes with the territory.

Here’s a scenario that is real for us, because it happened two weeks ago, a little mini-glimpse into the decisions we are faced with: There was a chance Vivian needed to be admitted to the hospital overnight for a non-emergency, but there were no beds available. Luckily, we didn’t have to stay, and the issue resolved itself. The floor that Vivian stays on is for kids with blood cancers and related disorders. They all have low immunity. So, hypothetically, when little Kennedy in room 6 is admitted for an infection, and Xander in room 7 is admitted because he was just diagnosed yesterday and has to be in the hospital for a month, and Lily in room 8 has chest congestion, while Brendan in 9 is here for Interim Maintenance, which involves 4 day stays for 8 weeks…and suddenly rooms 1-4 are pressed into service for children who have been exposed to COVID-19, let’s hope that room 5 stays open for Vivian should she come down with any number of the routine complications that threaten her everyday life, and that it is also available when she comes for her scheduled chemo stays. I shouldn’t have to worry that there won’t be hospital beds for her because people decided that the illness is a hoax and isn’t much worse than the flu (which, I might mention, is no walk in the park! Getting the flu is downright miserable and disruptive, even in healthy people!) Worst case scenario is that the hospital and staff are overburdened with very sick children to care for, and nowhere to put them. Best case scenario, kids like Vivian have their life-saving treatments delayed until the demands on the hospitals lessen and the medical professionals have the ability to deal with non-critical, but very essential cases. Every delay in her treatment increases the chance of relapse in her future.

In many ways, the “this is no worse or deadly than the flu” arguments are right. People get sick (which I remind you again, SUCKS! The flu is NOT fun! Stop acting like you don’t want to evaporate into the ether when you get sick. I’ve seen your Facebook pages. A sinus infection has you laid tf OUT and a minor foot injury has me looking at pictures of your black & blue toes for a month. Don’t play like you just get the flu and carry on with your regular lives)  Realistically, if you are a healthy person, wash up and try to keep yourself well fed and rested to avoid getting sick. Try and reduce the number of places you go where there are lots of people—regular advice that should be expounded upon every flu season. But aligning this outbreak with the flu is misleading, because the flu seems ordinary to us now. The reason people are panicking about COVID-19 is not because this is some horrifying flesh-eating virus—indeed, I think that is more of why people are complacent. We want our pandemics to be sexy and scary. We want them to disrupt the world order in a way that allows us to live out our Walking Dead survival fantasies. We want our outbreaks to star Gweneth Paltrow. We don’t want them to be a sneezing disease that kills grandpa! Grandpas die of lots of things! Grandpas are always dying! Wake me up when I get to hunt down the psychopathic one-eyed villain who has the weapons cache and access to fertile soil! This pandemic doesn’t star Brad Pitt, so let me put it plain: your refusal to engage in social distancing—and that’s what stockpiling toilet paper is about-- because you think it’s silly or because the stakes don’t seem high enough is selfish. You all love your kids, right? You love your dogs and your moms. You love your nieces and nephews, your students and your neighbor’s kids. You wouldn’t want your sick pupper to have life-saving treatments delayed, would you? You would be crushed if you learned that your nephew was left in agony with a broken leg because emergency departments are overrun with people experiencing shortness of breath. Do you want to rush to grandma’s deathbed because the complications from her COPD and a bout of pneumonia last year compromised her so much that one sneeze from someone who swears that the virus is “politicized” couldn’t be bothered to send someone else to pick up his prescription and stood behind MawMaw in line? Do you really want my daughter dying of an illness that could have been slowed by more people just taking it seriously and stocking up on toilet paper? Because that’s what I hear when I read people’s callous qualifiers like “only the elderly and immunocompromised will die from this.” The immunocompromised are us. If you don’t fall into the category of people who will die from this, would you please now consider yourself someone who falls into the category of people who have a duty to protect those who will?