Friday, April 29, 2022

In the penalty box

It appears that I have not mentioned that I am under quasi-quarantine at home, having driven home from RDU on Sunday night a friend and teammate of Graham's who subsequently tested positive for COVID. Sigh.

We are eating outdoors when we can -- though ironically it's pretty cool here for late April -- and Mary is sleeping downstairs in Natalie's bed while I am exiled to the upstairs. Fortunately -- thanks to the addition of the couch in my study and the presence of decent reading chairs in both study and bedroom -- there's plenty of good seating up here so I could go on for some time like this.

Still, it's rather dreary. Also Mary is wearing a mask much of the time downstairs and would prefer that Graham and I do the same. He is not having it, I am complying much but not all of the time. It's a drag. Are we going to go on like this forever, each time a little variant crops up, of however minimal serious threat to our health?

Thank God we're not China, that's all I have to say. A lot of Americans have gotten good vaccines and between that and community spread the broad threat from a variant like BA2 seems minimal. The people of Shanghai and soon -- it would appear -- Beijing are hurting. The WSJ recently published an op-ed by James Freeman about how the US and the West had erroneously imported harsh Chinese measures like strict lockdowns but it's total bullshit. Our lockdowns were never that harsh. Even in the very early days of April 2020, people weren't really forcibly locked in their homes. Though, admittedly, we did err slightly to the side of caution for a brief period while we were figuring things out.    

No comments: