Post 29 - April 9, 2020
Day 29…
When do we go back to the way it was?
The short answer is that we probably don’t.
We aren’t going back but we will go forward.
Every crisis that we have faced in the past has changed us. Just think about how travel changed after 9/11. Taking off our shoes at the airport and not being able to bring bottles of water through security only started after.
We accept that as normal now.
To be fair, the shoe thing happened right after 9/11 in December when some terrorist tried to ignite explosives in his shoes on a flight from Paris to Miami and the water thing happened after an attempted attack in 2006 when some terrorist tried to mix two chemicals together on a flight out of the Philippines, but they were both still a result of our War on Terror.
And we accept it. Those restrictions are an unremarkable and normal part of our lives.
What will our lives be like after COVID-19?
Who knows? The entire world has radically changed its’ behavior in a very short period of time. We are starting to instinctively recoil from each other on the street.
How long will it take us to unlearn that?
Reports coming out today are now suggesting that most New York coronavirus cases came from Europe rather than Asia.
The first case reported in the US was on January 21. The President imposed travel restrictions against China on Feb 2. 10 days later. The restrictions were geared toward non-US Chinese nationals only. Americans and permanent residents were allowed to continue to travel freely. In other words, the restrictions did absolutely nothing whatsoever.
A friend of mine who lives on the west coast was working in China at the end of January and flew home.
He got sick. He thought it was just a particularly bad case of the flu.
He recovered and it was only later that he realized what it was that he’d probably had.
I flew to London on February 28. On March 1, I flew to the Isle of Jersey then back to London on March 2. I was in London until March 8 when I flew back to NY. During that week, I was on four flights, involving eight airports. We auditioned over 100 people in London that week for the NCL Bliss and I saw 6 performances of West End plays that were either sold out or very close to it.
On March 9, the day I got back, Michael and I went to a Gala dinner. Packed with people.
On the 10th, Michael developed a cough and aches. By the 11th, he had a fever.
I was in auditions in New York on the 9th, 10th, and 11th. The night of the 11th, I sent an email to the folks I was doing the auditions with saying that I didn’t feel great (sore throat, flushed and achy) but that I’d come in if people were comfortable with me possibly being ill.
The immediate response was that we should continue and that I should come in.
By later that evening we made the decision to postpone my part of auditions on the 12th but continue with the music sessions.
My first of these posts was on the 12th.
We were scheduled to do Off-Broadway auditions on March 13th but cancelled those as well. My body aches were bad enough at that point that I was having trouble sleeping.
Michael was still feeling ill and by then he had lost his sense of smell.
Travel restrictions from Europe went into effect on the 13th but, like the Chinese travel restrictions, exempted US nationals and permanent residents rendering the restrictions pointless.
When I returned from Europe on March 8, I wasn’t stopped or questioned about anything when I landed. During SARS I remember landing in Hong Kong and going through a monitor that was there to detect people with fevers. Nothing like that was anywhere in evidence.
I was one of thousands of people who came in to NY from Europe during that period.
Hundreds of thousands.
And not one of us was monitored or tested.
As late as March 25, a friend of mine’s mother flew into San Francisco from Singapore and she, too, went through the airport with absolutely no screenings and no questions.
Michael and I were both basically fully recovered by about March 16th or 17th but we were never able to actually get tested.
The failure of this Administration to institute wide-spread testing early on will go down in history as one of the greatest governmental failures of all time.
Yesterday, it was announced that Federal support for COVID-19 testing sites is ending as of tomorrow.
How are we going to be able to responsibly start to reopen the US economy without really knowing where the virus is and how many of us have had it or have it?
We have to keep firm in our resolve to outlast this thing.
It is really not going to be easy as things improve, numbers go down and the weather gets better.
We HAVE to be smart or this thing will last even longer.
16.8 million people have filed for unemployment in the last 3 weeks.
That pressure is going to make everyone want to get back to business as usual long before we should.
This is going to be hard.
This IS hard, but I fear it is going to get even more challenging especially for those hardest hit economically.
This will change us. How doesn’t really matter, we’ll know when it happens.
Let’s focus on now and doing our part to stop the spread.
Honestly, what else can we really do?