Coronavirus: Keeping Perspective

The coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, has now reached pandemic levels.  Starting in China and quickly spreading across Asia, Europe, and now into the United States.  What was only affecting the elderly and weak has now become a lot less discriminatory.  Thousands of people are infected worldwide, overwhelming hospitals and healthcare professionals.  Accurate testing is not even readily available yet.  And the threat of the person next to you having it and not knowing has sent people into an absolute and illogical panic.

The first step was restricted travel, especially to countries with identified infection.  Then, many schools and businesses started to shut down or go online only to reduce the spread of the disease through large, assembled crowds.  The sports world has ceased to exist with the NBA, NHL, PGA, and MLS all suspending their seasons.  The men's and women's NCAA basketball tournaments have both been cancelled.  Boxing, UFC, and wrestling are still active, but they're performing in front of empty arenas.  Both my wife and my offices have effectively closed, forcing both of us to try to work from home for now.  Our daycare is still open, but we haven't been consistently sending Troy there, as we don't know who he might come into contact with.

This hermit, isolated lifestyle is strange.  It feels like the zombie apocalypse that you see in movies, where streets and stores are barren, and a handful of humans are struggling for survival, boarded up inside of their house and subsisting on Gatorade and Twinkies.  But the worst part is that the panic and fear of either stores running out of supplies or having to risk exposure to go out and get them, has caused people to flood into stores in a buying frenzy.  People are stockpiling everything they can get their hands on, from milk and eggs to produce to can goods.  It's as if they assume that they'll need to survive inside their houses for the next six months or more.  The shelves are completely empty in every store.  And it's not just food, but paper towels, facial tissues, toilet paper, soap, cleaning supplies, baby wipes, and diapers too!

As our supplies have dwindled, we have taken to making a pass by each store each day to see if they've gotten a new shipment in.  But apparently, in their sickness and unreasonable madness, people are actually lining up at stores at 6:00-7:00 a.m. to be there when the trucks arrive, so they can buy up anything that's put out.  And these aren't just the people that actually need the supplies, but the people that already have them and are purchasing more!  For example, my wife was trying to buy one gallon of milk, which the store was in the process of restocking.  And this woman in front of her was taking every one that was put out the moment the dairy guy let go of it.  What could she possibly need with ten gallons of milk?!  

Stores are having to ration out and limit things like water and toilet paper per customer.  I actually saw a sign at Academy the other day that said ammunition was limited to three boxes per customer.  So, I guess either people are gearing up to start shooting their own food (lock up your pets), or to start shooting the person in front of you grabbing for the last roll of toilet paper or the last gallon of milk.  We can’t even order them online because all of those places are out of stock too.  Apparently, hundreds of entrepreneurial people at the beginning of the outbreak had gone around cities buying up supplies and loading up entire U-Haul trucks full of stuff with the intent of reselling it at an elevated price.  Amazon had to cut off several of them that were trying to price-gouge people and take advantage of a pandemic situation.  But people have been successfully jacking up prices on Ebay, selling packs of toilet paper for over $70.  And people are paying it, because they feel like there's no other option. 

We’re trying not to panic, but now everyone else’s panic is causing us to run short on essentials.  Our biggest concern is what we’re going to do for our baby.  Trying to make light of the situation, I jokingly told my wife that we’ll have to start rationing things out.  Troy only gets three diapers a day, so we have to make them count.  If that doesn’t work, then we’ll have to wash them and reuse.  I also told her that it’s a good time to start potty training.  Or maybe we'll have to go old school with cloth diapers and wet towels!  Based on the dwindling supply of toilet paper, we may all have to switch to cloth diapers soon.

The daycare has been sending out messages that they might close in the next few days, which means we’ll have to figure out how to keep working and be home with Troy every day. We’re going to see if we can hire one of our daycare teachers as a private nanny while the school is closed. They need to get paid too, right?  My office has switched to video conferencing for all of our meetings, which means that even though I'm working from home, I still have to get up each day, bathe, and put on pants before "going to work."  Which is a real bummer, because I was looking forward to some naked customer calls with my bed-head hair sticking up on one side, eating instead of listening, and rolling my eyes whenever that one guy says something stupid.

And even though it didn't immediately occur to me, we found out that due to the ban of people gathering into large crowds, our church is no longer meeting anymore either.  We’ve gone to an online service only.  So on Sunday, we watched church online with Troy.  He was really getting into it, lifting his hands up in worship whenever the pastor said “Jesus” and “hope.”  All this to say, that it’s a crazy time right now.  It definitely could be scary if we didn’t trust in the Lord to watch over us, to keep us safe, and to provide for us.  It’s sad to think that so many people don’t have that belief or security.  And it’s sadder to think that many Christians are forgetting the Lord and getting swept right along in the public panic.  It's awesome to see my one-year old keeping perspective and worshiping the Lord.  He knows that we can't lose hope, nor should we, if we have Jesus.  God will take care of the lilies of the field and the birds of the air.  And God will find us some toilet paper and diapers.