Post 3 - March 14, 2020
Day three…
So. Both Michael and I have been sick the last couple of days. With something. Some of the coronavirus symptoms but by no means all. Cough. Bouts of feverishness. Now on day three, we’ve both woken up more or less fine. Whatever it was has been thankfully very mild.
We spend a good part of yesterday morning trying to figure out if there was any way we could get tested here in NYC.
Short answer - no, apparently not. There aren’t any.
There is an almost complete lack of communication between 311 and the NY Department of Health and Hospitals. The NY Coronavirus hotline and 311 both end you up at the same place - none of them has any reliable information. Despite what the Federal Health official said yesterday about them being free to all, you are directed in one direction if you have insurance and in another if you don’t. So much for free testing for all. If the tests do finally arrive, they will be far too late to provide any useful information.
All that drive-thru testing that will supposedly be happening in Walgreens and Walmart parking lots across the country will not really be useful to any of us here in NY, unless we go through the lines in a cab.
We can’t seem to find information about what to do if more than one person in the household has it. There’s plenty of info about what you should do if one person has it. So, what we decided to do is live our lives. Until we are completely asymptomatic (which might actually be today) we are sleeping in separate places. (we are fortunate enough to have a good sofa bed in the living room and are taking turns sleeping on it.).
Two weeks in this apartment together with no theatre and no museums and no social events is an interesting challenge. The kind of flu-y I felt yesterday was that kind when you could probably go to school but you convinced your Mom to let you stay home anyway. Just enough that it sapped my will to get anything accomplished so I watched a lot of Netflix. Today, feeling more normal, I can actually do something.
We are lucky enough to live close to Central Park. We are going to take a walk there today. I think giving ourselves some time in the sunlight is imperative.
Until there is any actual information there doesn’t seem to be anything more to do. The hardest thing to do is sit around and wait. None of us are any good at that. Try not to watch the news. Every single word out of the president’s mouth is an out and out lie, so just stop listening to him. There may be a twisted fact or half-truth in there but its not worth it trying to figure it out. The only thing he is concerned about is stopping the free fall of the stock market. If he took more actual care of the people he is meant to be serving that would actually raise confidence but he is incapable of that kind of thought. Tune him out.
Don’t look at the stock market. We aren’t looking at our retirement accounts. At all. They will rebound but there is truly nothing to be done about them now. 9-11, 2008, there’s always something. Up and down, up and down. Don’t panic. Ignore it for the moment.
NCL has halted cruising. The JB tour and the Off-Broadway production are suspended for the moment. I hope that everyone in all of those productions is safe and healthy.
The last few days have been a roller coaster ride. I think that the next few are going to be a lot of, well, nothing. We wait. Welcome to our new normal. For now. I like the occasional day of doing nothing in my bathrobe but two weeks of this is going to be endless unless we set ourselves some goals.
Be safe, be happy, be smart. Be kind. If you need something to do, animal shelters often need people to walk their dogs. That’s something you can do by yourself. The only constant is change. Let’s see what happens next.