Tag: COVId

Lessons from the Pandemic

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

The pandemic is never completely ended, but most of us have returned to normal life, knowing that getting Covid is now more like getting the flu and for most of us, It’s not likely to be fatal. However, the pandemic has taught us some important lessons.

  1. Things go better when we cooperate.  Getting shots and wearing masks don’t just protect me, they also protect everyone else from me. We are all in this together.Sometimes teh government is a useful way of facilitating cooperation, and that’s not a bad thing.
  2. Electronic communication is very useful, but it is a complement, not a substitute, for in-person presence.  We have five senses.  Zoom gives us two, hearing and sight.  We don’t expect to smell or taste each other, at least not in public, but there is something meaningful about touch, even if it’s only an elbow bump.  Being physically present is a very different experience form seeing people online.  Body language is clearer and communication is more direct. It’s easier to break up into subgroups, and to move from one group to another. Groups that have resumed meeting in person seemed much more appreciative of the company of others whether it was at work, play, church, school, or social gatherings.
  3. Having said that, Zoom and Google Meet have become an important part of our lives, and remain very useful for gathering people together from disparate spaces from short periods of time. Other software like Slack also enables speedy and focused communications via the internet.
  4. The workplace will never be the same.  While some jobs always did and always will require physical presence, there is a whole lot work from home at least a few days a week that is especially helpful for people who have lives—spouses, children, community involvement.  Flexibility and hybrid work situations save commuting costs, make workers happier, and reduce the need for so much expensive office space.
  5. We learned to appreciate essential workers—nurses, caregivers, first responders, teachers.  Hopefully we will remember how essential they were and are when it comes time to consider they wages and working conditions.
  6. Some of us may have learned to appreciate the value of solitude, which is different from loneliness.  Spending time alone or at least at home can help us get better acquainted with ourselves and family members and encourage us to try out new experiences.
  7. Science doesn’t have all the answers, but it does know how to look for them.  Science is something we learn as we go.  The speed with which the vaccine was developed and distributed is mind-boggling. The investments we make in scientific research can have big payoffs in terms of human flourishing.

If we are mindful, or lucky, or reflective, maybe we can take those lessons with us on the next stages of our life journeys.

When Hope Is Hard to Find

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

Do you ever feel that your personal life is going fine, but the outside world is going to hell in a handbasket?  I was feeling that way already—climate change, COVID, political polarization and deadlock, frequent mass shootings—when I watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix last night.  Along with depressing me with the presentation of the widespread addiction to exploitative and divisive social media sites, this documentary affirmed my decision almost a year ago to divorce Facebook.

As a born activist, my response was, what can I do?  And the answer is, not enough. I can make my tiny contributions to slowing climate change, but they are not enough, and it may already be too late.  I can protect myself from COVID, and encourage others to do the same, but I can’t get through the noise about the vaccine and the refusal to take responsibility that make it hard to get back to anything we would consider normal life. I am trying to engage in dialogue across boundaries, but I am not a very effective little progressive wave against a Tucker Carlson ocean.

Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy describes the merely muscular Christian as one who attempts to continuously ladle from a bowl that is never replenished. So, after watching the climate disaster play out in Germany and the Western US (in the southeast, we are enjoying an unusually mild summer), after watching The Social Dilemma and then news of shootings and political fighting, how do I refill the bowl with healthier thoughts?  

I am not a Buddhist, but Buddhism does offer good advice for hard times.  Take refuge in the sangha, which I translate as community. Family, friends, congregation, voluntary associations (the League of Women Voters at the local level, in my case).  Take refuge in the dharma (which I translate as wisdom—the teachings of faith traditions and philosophers). Take refuge in the Buddha (which I translate as the presence of the sacred, by whatever name you may call it.)  And go for long walks in the woods.

May you find ways to refill your bowl and go forth with your ladle to save the world.

Making the Right Mistakes Revisited

~ purplesage41 ~ 1 Comment

One of my earlier blogs was called making the right mistakes. It was about one of the few life lessons I learned from the study of statistics. When someone says, “statistics show…”  that is really a statement about what is most likely to be true, not what is certain.  It is certain that it is raining at my house right now. I can see it on the road and hear it on the roof, and it is definitely  not snow or hail. Snow is white, and hail is noisy.  But how much of the neighborhood is being rained on, and which ones, and for how long is it going to keep raining?  The weather forecast is a probability statement, not a fact.  (In this case my understanding of statistics was buttressed by being married to a meteorologist, or more precisely an atmospheric physicist.)

The reason I feel a need to revisit this topic is the current controversy over how safe we are or feel a need to be during the hopefully waning days of the coronavirus pandemic, how much we want to go outside without a mask, send the kids back to school, go to a party or a theater,  or sunbathe on a crowded beach. (Yes, I do know it is only March as I write this, but sunny beaches come early here in South Carolina.)

Somehow reawakening the sleeping economy and the less Zoom-dependent social life has become a partisan issue.  It’s not just about personal freedom and the economy (Republicans) or about safety and protecting others from harm (Democrats), although all of these things are important.  Somehow, we need to address both the emotions (fear, frustration, anger, isolation) and the facts (positive tests, cases, hospitalizations, deaths, vaccines administered) and come to an agreement about how fast and in what order our nation, and the world, return to normal—whatever the new normal turns out to be.

Science is not about facts; it is about probabilities. Statistics , a major tool of scientific research, is about weighing the risk of declaring something to be more or less a fact and being wrong, as opposed to declaring something not to be a fact when it turns out that it is actually true.  Is the vaccine really safe and effective? One of my friends pointed out that even 95 percent efficacy of the vaccine does not guarantee you will not get COVID, because 5 percent of the people still will. At that point I knew for sure that Michael was much more risk -averse than I am.

Life is risky. Sunny optimists will point to all the benefits of speeding up the opening process—children back in school, adults back at work, firms saved from bankruptcy, summer vacations back on the calendar, and eventually actually seeing other people’s entire faces.   I tend to fall into that sunny optimist category and keep having to extricate myself. I also have to remind myself that people have different degrees of tolerance for risk,  and I am not the person who gets to make that decision about an acceptable level of risk for everyone else.

For months we have been treating the idea of herd immunity as  a closed door that would suddenly open and usher us into the wonderful world of Tomorrowland. It is not.  Clearly, more of the herd has immunity than just a couple of months ago, a combination of those who have at least short-term immunity from surviving the disease and the many, many of us who have been vaccinated.  But there are still a lot of people who refuse to be vaccinated, or to take precautions that protect themselves and others from an unacceptable degree of risk. 

Science errs on the side of caution, requiring very high levels of probability to treat a statement as true.  There are lots of people willing to take risks—they take boats out during a thunderstorm, have unprotected sex with strangers, hang-glide off mountain sides, and give their credit card numbers to strangers on the phone. But when their risk is inflicted on other people, they shouldn’t get to decide how much risk is acceptable for us.

The fundamental question is, how much can we reopen with an acceptable degree of safety for the most vulnerable?  Which reopenings offer the most benefit at the least risk? I can’t answer that for anyone but myself, and even then I wrestle with how much, how fast.  Bars at midnight have never been a big draw for me, but live performances, parties with friends, dinner in restaurants, travel, hugs—I miss those encounters with people, places and ideas and I want them back. Your list is different and so is your risk tolerance.

Our democracy has not been very successful in the last decade or so in working through differences to arrive at a widely acceptable outcome.  Perhaps we ought to step back from arguing over facts and start examining how we feel—what makes us feel safe, what makes us feel hopeful, what makes us willing to take into consideration the hopes and fears of our fellow citizens.  Be honest with yourself.  Be willing to listen.  In the end, that kind of honest conversation might do more good for humanity than just beating the COVID virus into submission.