Page 27 - Sonoma County Gazette April 2020

How to Survive a Pandemic
Sooner or later, the novel coronavirus will run its course, and the pandemic will subside. But how well we weather it — as individuals, as families, as a county, as a country — is up to you.
Eighty years and four generations ago, young men and women went to war. The vast majority of them were fighting and serving not for their own personal interests, not to protect their immediate families, nor even to protect their own communities, but for the sake of society.
They fought against genocide. They fought for global stability. And, at tremendous personal cost, they won.
If you are a worker in an “essential business,” your job is actually the same as it was a week ago — but now you find yourself on
the front lines keeping our community safe and our society functioning.
We are all relying on you in order to fill our prescriptions, purchase our groceries, receive our mail, and keep our government running. While your responsibilities have not changed, your level of responsibility has. Because of this, and because you are some of the few people who will come into regular contact with other people, remember that your own health is paramount.
If you become ill, do not go to work. If you miss work due to illness, your community, employer, or government must support you so that you can recover without worrying about how to pay the bills.
In 2020 we are again being called to duty. And we must again think beyond ourselves and our own narrowly-defined self interest to a broader goal: the health and well-being of the entire community. We must define community not as ourselves, our family, and our friends, but as our County, our State, and our Country.
If you are a parent, of course, you have also suddenly become a teacher. (You are realizing, probably, that our teachers really do deserve to be paid more.) In this moment, it’s your job not only to parent your children, not only to teach them the subjects they are missing in school, but also to teach them how to respond to a crisis. You can show them through your own actions
Luckily for us, this time around we are not being called to storm beaches or dodge bullets. What we are being asked to do is simple. We must do our jobs. Period. But we all have to remember that our jobs today are different from what our jobs were just one short week ago.
how to care for the most vulnerable, how to take personal responsibility for the needs of society, how to remain tender and compassionate in an anxious world. Show them that social distancing doesn’t mean emotional distancing. Let them see you turn your attention outward, rather than inward; show them selflessness rather than selfishness.
If you are a member of a vulnerable population — a senior,
an immunocompromised resident, someone with an existing medical condition — your job is to protect your own health. Your job is to self-isolate, to dramatically reduce or eliminate any possible exposure to the novel coronavirus. Because you are at highest risk for severe complications of COVID-19, you must be a security guard for your own well-being: not only for your own sake, but also to avoid overwhelming the local healthcare system with acute cases.
If you are someone who is young and at lower risk of death from COVID-19, your job is to follow shelter-in-place orders. Your job is to remember that you are not invincible, and that younger people are still winding up in the hospital requiring intensive care. (In the United States, recent data shows that 38% of hospitalized patients are aged 20 to 54.)
As a parent, it is also your job to remember that while children are less likely to become sickened by COVID-19, they can serve as vectors for the disease. Protect your personal childcare providers, especially if they are vulnerable due to age or medical conditions. Keep your kids home, and if you can afford to, pay your childcare providers anyway.
Similarly, if you are an employer or employee of a “nonessential business,” it is your job to shutter your business’ doors, stay home, and follow shelter-in-place orders. It is your
job to take this seriously, and not
The rest of us must stand up and demand access to adequate personal protective equipment, testing, and safety protocols for healthcare workers. The rest of us must stay home to minimize the spread of the pandemic in order to
Finally, if you are a doctor, nurse, or physician’s assistant, we need you now more than ever. You are our front-line soldiers in this crisis, but you shouldn’t stand alone. Just like in World War II, it is the job of everyone in the community to support our soldiers.
attempt to skirt the rules. This means sacrificing your personal finances to prevent the collapse
of our healthcare system, which would result in entirely preventable deaths of fellow community members. Critically, government must recognize your sacrifice and provide federal relief for workers, small business owners, and the self-employed. As we “flatten the curve,” the curve will extend longer, increasing economic impacts. We must take care of those in our community who are financially vulnerable as well as those who are medically vulnerable.
prevent healthcare workers from being overwhelmed.
We will get through this pandemic.
But we will survive and thrive as a community only if we value one another equally. From the youngest to the eldest, from the most vulnerable to the most healthy, let’s take care of one another by throwing ourselves into our new jobs — and showing the world the tough, compassionate stuff that Sonoma County is made of.
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