Those of you who read my post on visiting Shanghai last month might have noted my expressed hope that the coronavirus, which had sent my daughter stateside when her English school closed, would not follow us home. Though both of us, currently living in my home in Redding, CA, are healthy and hope to stay that way, we now see the scenes from Wuhan beginning to repeat themselves here, with a rapidity that no one would have imagined even two to three weeks ago. When the stock market began its free fall days after my Shanghai post, the reactions I received from my school districts when I advised them to prepare for a recession at least as severe as 2008 were mixed at best, with a number of people explicitly downplaying the severity of the situation. With California schools now shut down to in-person instruction and every non-essential business following suit after the governor’s order, I will now have the unfortunate duty to inform them that my seemingly alarmist predictions were in fact optimistic. This is uncharted territory for all of us, and there seems to be no limit to how bad the news may get in the coming months.
As for myself, I will paraphrase Lou Gehrig and state that I am one of the luckiest men on the face of the earth, because due to the nature of my employment I have about as much assurance as is currently possible that my paychecks won’t stop anytime soon. When I see images of shuttered restaurants and know that virtually every business that depends on in-person patronage will be non-existent for the duration of the crisis, I can hardly begin to fathom the suffering that will follow as people become increasingly desperate to find ways to maintain the necessities of life. Our government appears to be responding accordingly, but it’s hard for me to believe that anything within its capacity will be anywhere close to meeting the unprecedented need, the scale of which could exceed even the Great Depression.
My office was in the process of establishing a work-at-home protocol when the governor’s shelter-in-place order came out, so by Friday I had packed up my PCs from both my offices and set up my home work station, making sure my network connections worked before severing my physical ties to my workplace. Since then, I’ve been at home, cooking and freezing, house cleaning and venturing out to Turtle Bay Park by the Sacramento River for exercise, keeping the required distance from other park patrons. Visits to the grocery store have been exercises in infection avoidance, hitting hand sanitizer stations whenever possible and exercising heightened diligence in handwashing and the like. My supplies are good, including TP, but I’ve heard stories from friends who happened to be caught short of vital items having to drive all over town to find them, reminding me of stories of Soviet Russia where consumer items that we took for granted were unavailable except after long waits in line or at exorbitant prices on the black market. In addition to TP and any product that disinfects, eggs and fresh chicken are hard to find locally, and much of the canned goods aisles are pretty picked over apart from the more obscure items. Fresh produce is still plentiful, and bread seems to be reasonably available if picked over in places. My hope is that much of the shortages are due to the recent panic buying and may subside as people reach some level of mental equilibrium, but whether that will be the case is anyone’s guess.
My daughter has been performing online instruction for her school near Shanghai, and since she has needed to work according to their time zone, her schedule has been akin to a graveyard shift worker, up during the night when needed and sleeping during the day. Amazingly, she is still getting paid, and we at least get to spend time together in the evenings, a significant bright spot for both of us. From time to time, she has expressed frustration at feeling like a refugee, unable to go back and retrieve the items she left in China when we decided to have her fly home on short notice. Now she knows that virtually everyone else in the world is a refugee of the crisis in one way or another, and I think she has learned to appreciate what good fortune she’s had so far.
I also have another daughter who is in her last quarter at UC Davis, which has also shut down in-person instruction. Fortunately, UCD is well equipped to go online, so our current hope is that she can finish her degree even if the joy of a graduation ceremony will need to be relinquished. It would be far too much to hope that she will find any kind of a favorable job market in the foreseeable future, but we are at least equipped to keep body and soul together in the meantime, thanks largely to my own personal good fortune.
I am also doing my part to support fact-based journalism, with subscriptions to the NY Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic. I find at the moment that a once-daily check of headlines is pretty much sufficient to keep abreast of the crisis, and it is striking, though understandable, to see the almost universal dominance of the crisis in the content of each publication. It was one thing to see coverage of sports and other leisure pursuits virtually disappear for obvious reasons, but it has been something else altogether to see other areas that would normally be a focus of serious attention, such as politics, fade into the background to an extent that none of us have seen in our lifetimes. I’m not sure that even World War II demanded this singular a focus, and none of us were alive to know whether the 1918 pandemic had a similar impact.
The weather here in the North State is beautiful, so it’s time I got out for my daily exercise for purposes of both mental and physical health. For those of you who read this, take this crisis seriously, and follow all the instructions you receive from reputable sources to stay safe and healthy. As a reminder of what we have to live for, I attach a few pictures of the scenery that I’ve been privileged to behold each day.
– Chuck Strom
