sonora2sonoma

I am frankly dumbfounded by how so many of our friends are going about their lives as if we weren’t in the upswing of a deadly pandemic—planning lunches with friends and other types of social encounters, taking trips involving air flight and its attendant risk-laden delays in airport terminals, meeting for lunch, and even, in some cases, going to bars. None of these folks, to my knowledge, are under the spell of trump’s anti-masking propaganda, and all appear to be free of its associated dogma, yet they might as well be so afflicted, based on their reality-avoiding attitudes and behaviors.

“It’s ok, they say, we’re wearing masks and social-distancing,” one person said today. “We’ll meet outside if the weather’s good,” said another. What, I wonder, might they do if the weather is bad? And have they considered that mask-wearing and social-distancing are most effective when one is outside, where there is more air movement to lessen the odds of transmissibility. And then there’s the latest news on masks themselves. It turns out simple cloth masks, even ones with double layers of cloth, are not as effective as we’ve been led to believe. Medical spokespeople now say the layers must be of different materials, for instance cotton/synthetic, in order to provide needed protection.

Folks are saying that, as long as they remain within their “bubbles,” no harm will come their way. But how large are those bubbles? Music gatherings with 6 to 8 or more people included are not the same thing as household “bubbles.” For everyone outside one’s immediate family grouping, inclusion demands a certain degree of trust—not just basic trust in the person, but the added faith that each additional person is exercising the same degree of discretion and good judgment you yourself are following. The situation can become wobbly pretty quickly if not everyone is on the same page concerning safe behavior and acceptable level of risk. It only takes one person to wreak havoc.

In the absence of an appreciable reimagining of my friends’ attitudes concerning acceptable level of risk, I shudder to think how those in our circle of acquaintance will fare through the holidays, when the temptation to temp fate will be greater than usual just when the weather’s too cold to permit gathering outside and the risk of transmission will be greatest. What rationales will they invent to persuade themselves they can successfully buck the odds and be ok, to, as it were, “have their cake and eat it too?” I fear for them.

So far, no one close to us has succumbed to Covid. I pray it remains so.

Tim Konrad

November 13, 2020