While it's perhaps a bit of a stretch, this is the second epidemic that has impacted my life, though certainly much more profoundly than the AIDS epidemic. Or at least it has a much deeper impact on my life, though my life was changed in several small ways by the AIDS epidemic.
I can't speak for all Gen X'ers, but certainly many of us had childhoods that were somewhat haunted by the spectre of nuclear annihilation (always waiting for Reagan in particular to make some unbelievably stupid move and set off the Soviets). Then just as we were coming into adulthood, the Cold War ended (yea!) but AIDS was running pretty rampant, bringing lots of fear and misery and largely doing away with the era of free sex that had lasted into the mid 1970s. But kids think they are immortal (particularly all the people partying on the beaches in Florida this week -- so foolish). And common sense doesn't always prevail in the bedroom...
While I thought the odds were extremely, extremely low that I had caught anything, I wasn't entirely sure I hadn't caught anything either. I then came to Toronto and fell in with a group of grad students, many of whom were gay and who generally heavily promoted safe sex. In fact, one of my class projects was to talk about media narratives around the AIDS crisis. I actually managed to get a couple of huge posters for the movie Zero Patience (which just I saw again recently at the Paradise Theatre), though eventually I got rid of them as it was too hard to explain why I had them in my dorm room... Anyway, through all this research, I found out that it was free to get AIDS testing done in Toronto, so I went ahead and tested negative. Not really a surprise, but still a huge relief!
I probably should mention that my mother was working for a social service agency in Detroit that specialized in helping people with AIDS, though this didn't impact me that much on a personal level. I admired what my mother did of course, but we didn't really talk a lot about her work. In short, while AIDS created a lot of anxiety as I was growing up, it only brushed me in the most superficial way. (In what must surely be a bitter irony, there was so much ostracism directed at early AIDS patients, and they had to create posters about how you wouldn't get AIDS just from touching someone (assuming they didn't have open sores), and now this advice is no longer true and is actually dangerous. We absolutely can get the coronovirus from touching or just generally being too close to someone who has it, which absolutely sucks! And you can catch it from touching something someone else has touched like a door handle and probably even a toilet seat, which sucks even harder!)
I wasn't actually in Toronto during the SARS crisis of 2003, as I was back in Chicago at that point. I've talked to a couple of people who were in school in Toronto at the time, and they said it was extremely localized (mostly in Chinatown), and that once the carriers were identified it was fairly simple to shut down the outbreak. Day-to-day life wasn't really impacted.
As I believe I mentioned previously, coronavirus is quite different in that a person can be infectious for many, many days before showing any symptoms. Indeed, there is a such a wide range of outcomes for the people infected, with the vast majority only suffering as if it were a bad case of the flu, but then some people developing lung disorders and pneumonia, and of course a death rate that far exceeds the flu for anyone with a pre-existing condition or older than 65.
While I have been taking care of myself and doing a lot of cardio, I often forget that I had very bad asthma throughout childhood into my early teens, and I've had pneumonia a couple of times. So I might not be one of the lucky ones if I do catch this. Something that I need to think about a bit more when I weigh the benefits of going out (to the park or the grocery store) versus just staying in. What is interesting in this case is that because the symptoms are generally manageable for most people, again with some key exceptions, it truly is asking a lot of people to be altruistic and to give up a lot for the vulnerable people they don't know. And it would be one thing if we could stay home and keep the economy going, but 20% or more people will be unemployed at some point during the crisis, which at best will peak in two months, but could keep going for over a year! People being people, they are going to reject this call to social-distancing and all the economic pain that is coming down on them, for a very abstract benefit to "society." I know it's hard enough for me to stay in, and I have gone out to the grocery store when I probably didn't strictly need to. It's possible that in another two weeks we'll be like France where even outdoor exercise is more or less banned. I'm hoping not, and it does look like the new infection rate has bent down ever so slightly compared to last week, though of course this might be false optimism. (It does appear that Canada's death rate is below the curve, so that's something anyway.)
I was almost certain I was going to get it if we all continued working at Union Station, but this week almost all office employees were sent home to discover the joys of home-working, particularly with all the kids on their aborted spring break, so my odds have gotten a lot better. Next week and the week after will be tougher. I'm hoping that they have decided on some sort of a distance learning approach by that point, or the entire spring will be lost and the kids might well have to repeat half a year, with no idea how this would play out in real life.
My work is pretty technical, and I was able to get through a lot this week. The people that are really suffering are the extroverts and/or the people that love to show their stuff at the endless meetings at work... But I'm pretty sure that the next few weeks will really be fundamentally more difficult, as this new (largely joyless) reality sinks in.
I'm debating just going ahead and growing out a beard, but it is pretty itchy, and it is impossible to not scratch my proto-beard and generally keep my hands off of my face (at least while I am at home). So I may lose it. On the other hand, I might try one more time to grow one of those Van Dyke beards that Lenin sported.
I'll probably go ahead and finish this jigsaw puzzle that I started in the summer! (It was much, much harder than I thought and I ran out of space when the family returned from vacation, so it is all sort of shoved into a corner.) I'm trying not to do too much binge shopping, though with time on my hands there is always something that catches my eye, and probably the time to buy is now before the on-line prices reflect the fact that the Canadian dollar is dropping steadily. There still is a short time to take advantage of the arbitrage, but again there is no point in overdoing it.
Fortunately, I do have an almost endless supply of books to read, to say nothing of all the DVDs and CDs I've stockpiled. I have three books from the UT library and one book out from Toronto Public Library, and the due dates have been suspended until the summer. (I picked them up just under the wire!) I was kind of kicking myself for not picking up Hartley's The Go-Between while I was at the library a week ago last Thursday, since there was a copy right on the shelves, but I did find an online copy at the Internet Archive, so I'm basically good to go for a while. I suppose the other thing I will do, aside from riding my bike around on the mostly empty streets of Toronto (as I don't have any other meaningful exercise outlets), is catch up on my book review posts...
Stay indoors if you can and stay safe!
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