Post 217 - October 14, 2020

Day 217…

My facial hair has rounded the corner where rather than looking like I haven’t shaved in a while it now actually looks like a beard. At least that’s what it looks like to me.

When I announced that to Michael, he looked at me carefully and took a moment before saying, “Well… sort of…?”

Wearing a mask with facial hair is a little annoying. Admittedly, there is always a point at which when you are growing out a beard when it gets a bit scratchy. I am there now. Wearing a mask on top of it is making my face itch. It’s not all bad, though. One of the advantages of a mask on colder days like these is that it keeps your face warm.

It looks like mask wearing is with us for the whole winter.

Despite the fact that the President keeps announcing that we are “rounding the final turn” of the pandemic, it appears that we have merely rounded the first turn in a race that is going to continue on for much longer than our President keeps promising.

As of this morning, there are no states at all that are seeing a decrease in their number of virus cases. None at all are currently trending down. New cases of COVID-19 are actually climbing in 36 states. There were over 50 thousand new cases in the US reported yesterday. 13 states are showing a positivity rate of over 10%.

Hospitalizations are spiking. We are heading back to where we were in the spring when hospitals were forced to create satellite treatment areas in convention centers and schools. The difference now is that it isn’t going to be just happening in New York City and San Francisco, it’s potentially about to start happening nation-wide. Field hospitals are, indeed, being set up in Wisconsin, as I write this, where the infection rate currently stands at 1 in 5 people testing positive.

The President is out campaigning again, claiming that having pulled through the virus that he is now immune to it.

In a recent interview on Fox News he said, “I have to tell you, I feel fantastically. I really feel good. And I even feel good by the fact that, you know, the word immunity means something — having really a protective glow means something. I think it's very important to have that, to have that is a very important thing,”

At a Florida rally, he shouted out, “They say I’m immune. I feel so powerful. I’ll kiss the guys and the beautiful women!”

He later tweeted, “A total and complete sign off from White House Doctors yesterday. That means I can’t get it (immune), and can’t give it. Very nice to know!!!”

Twitter flagged that as “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information”.

The truth is still in question. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control published their risk assessment for reinfection late last month.

There are now six reported cases of people who have had the virus, recovered and become re-infected again. The first two, a man in Hong Kong and another in Nevada have now been joined by a woman from Belgium, a man in Ecuador and a man and a woman in India.

All of these people were relatively young (between the ages of 25 and 52) and all had strong immune systems before the onset of their infections. Four of them were mildly symptomatic during their first case - the two from India were not. They only knew that they had it from their test results.

During their second time around three of them were asymptomatic. One of them experienced mild symptoms, and another experienced moderate symptoms. The man from Nevada experienced more severe symptoms the second time than he did the first time. He needed to be briefly hospitalized for breathing difficulties. All six have survived.

We still have only spotty and conflicting information out of the White House about the true state of the President’s health. We may never know the truth about it all. Whatever the truth really is, kissing the President at this point in time is not something that any sane person is going to want to do.

After seeing classified intelligence reports that indicated likely Russian collusion with the President’s campaign prior to the 2016 election, Obama-era officials requested that the redacted names of some of the people involved in the investigation be “un-masked.” The intelligence agency complied and that’s how Michael Flynn, the current President’s first National Security Advisor’s name came to the fore.

In the intervening years, our, now, President has continually railed against this “unmasking” as being a Democratic misadventure of “Watergate scandal” proportions. Barr, the US Attorney General, even appointed a special prosecutor named John Bash to investigate the scandal.

Today it was announced that, following a thorough investigation, there will be no report and no charges filed.

Against anyone.

John Bash, who left the Department of Justice last week, found no evidence whatsoever that there had been any wrongdoing in requesting the unmasking by the previous administration at all.

The President is already irked at the Attorney General. This latest embarrassment is likely to send him over the edge. Yet again.

After several days of clouds and rain here in the city, it is beautiful outside today. It looks like a perfect day to take a walk in the park.

Being set free after my two weeks in quarantine has had the interesting effect of making it even clearer to me just how unfree we all are these days.

Michael and I chatted with friends of ours in California last night. They both work in TV and, in normal times, travel as much as we do. They have a house overseas that they can’t get to because none of us are allowed into Europe.

During my road trip to North Dakota I couldn’t stay anywhere for longer than a few hours. During my road trip down south where I did actually stay in one place for a few days, I then had to isolate myself for two weeks when I got home.

I have suffered from wanderlust ever since I can remember. My first trip overseas was when I was five and I’ve been on the move ever since. I don’t know if I can point to a single year after that first trip where I didn’t leave the country at least once.

There are some places where we might be able to go these days, but we would need to isolate before we go, isolate when we got there and then isolate again once we’ve returned. It’s a commitment.

Our friends have started working again, but they are obviously under fairly strict on-set restrictions about how that work happens. Other friends of ours, who also work in TV, are up in Vancouver in a work bubble trying to produce a show.

All of the COVID-19 guidelines that are in place to guide television production are not making the sets safe. At best, they are making the sets somewhat safer.

Television, like all performing arts, is a collaborative medium. Staggering who can be on the set at any one time may only be lessening the likelihood of virus transmission but it's certainly dramatically hampering the transmission of creativity.

I have an in-person streaming event coming up in the next two weeks and the possibility of an out-of-town show coming up in the spring. It is unlikely that those events are going to have a social aspect to them at all.

During the tech of a show, all of us, the creatives, the designers, the crew and the cast work very closely to pull it all together. Tensions can run high. At the end of each day, we disperse and then regroup at the hotel bar, or at a place nearby.

Even though work is rarely discussed during those evenings, that’s where a lot of the real work gets done. That’s where we all get to really know each other and build the relationships that allow us all to collaborate.

We can all adjust to get through the crisis that we now find ourselves in the middle of. We have adjusted.

In the last few days I have really become aware of just how restrictive all of our restrictions really are.

It is safer to get together in places where the virus transmission rate is extremely low - that’s just common sense. I will encounter fewer people likely to be infected while walking around New York City than I would while walking around Madison, Wisconsin.

With better (or even some) national leadership, we could get the entire country’s infection rate down and make it safer to walk everywhere. If we could do that, then maybe the rest of the world would stop grabbing a hold of a cross and a string of garlic at just the mention of us.

If we had acted properly back in March, we could be traveling now and experiencing a semblance of our former lives. But we didn’t and I don’t see any indication that we will any time soon.

We have an unnecessarily long winter in front of us. Oh well. I guess we’re stuck with that.

Not.

We have a choice. We can choose some people to get us out of this.

Let’s make that choice next month.

In the meantime, I guess I have a beard to grow.