Isolated in Seattle

Some people live in the past, with nostalgia as their favorite feeling. Some people live in the future, often with pessimistic dread or optimistic utopian glee. Times like these are a good moment to take time to live in the present.

Enjoy a sunbreak (as we call it in Seattle when a few minutes of sunshine breaks through the clouds). Enjoy making waffles with your child (which they are home from the school which is no longer operating). Enjoy a walk outside (by yourself, ideally a stone’s throw from anyone else).

One of the benefits (and drawbacks) of being a serial entrepreneur is a honed talent for seeing the near future. It takes years to build a company. To be successful you have to be able to see what the world might be in a year or two or three. Here in 2020 that is a drawback, as I see the statistics and trendlines from the pandemic, and can’t help from extrapolate to next month and this coming summer, best case and worst case, etc.

But I’m putting that on hold today. Yesterday the schools here closed. Nothing I can do about that. Last night the POTUS told us he has no plan, and no clue. There is nothing I can do about that either. This morning I called my local clinic to see if testing is finally available, and it’s not. So we sit here blindly unknowing for another day.

We’ll be sitting around for many months to come. We will soon all have plenty of time to enjoy now, for however long now lasts.

Finally, given the news of Tom Hanks and his wife Rita, a quote adapted from Sleepless in Seattle came to mind this morning:

Well, we’re gonna get out of bed every morning.. breathe in and out all day long. After a while we won’t have to be reminded to get out of bed every morning and breathe in and out.. and, then eventually, we won’t have to think about how great we all had it for a while.
– Isolated in Seattle
Purposeful misquote from Sleepless in Seattle

More in this series:

Post #1: The 2020 Epidemic: Coronavirus
Post #2: Seattle, we have a (Covid-19) Problem
Post #3: Just Three (Viral) Weeks Ago
Post #4: Isolated in Seattle
Post #5: Impossible Until it Happens
Post #6: What a mild (and moderate) case of Covid-19 feels like
The rest in #Pandemic

Two years into this global pandemic, many misguided people are still comparing Covid-19 to influenza. 1,600 death in a week in 2018 was tragic, but those influenza spikes are barely visible when compared to the tragic scale of Covid-19, and even more so given a simple cloth mask and vaccines that prevent most deaths. Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on...

Two years ago was the first known case of Covid-19 in a human being. That makes this week a very unhappy anniversary, one that we’re likely to “celebrate” for quite a few more years before this pandemic is finally history. Looking back at the 5+ million lives lost so far, despite those losses and despite the historically fast rollout of vaccines, the overall trend of cases is...

The influenza pandemic of 1918-1920 killed at least 25 million people globally. Here in the United States 675,000 people are known to have died from that massive outbreak of flu. As of this last week (middle of September 2021), more people have died of Covid-19 in this pandemic. 682,000 as of today, with another 2,000 Americans dying every single day. While 675,000 is the population of a city and...

If only people looked back into history to learn from past mistakes, the masses would stop repeating so many past mistakes. Here in 2021, it’s the ideas that vaccines are worse than the disease and that vaccines take away one’s freedom. This long tweet stream tells the story better than I could (emphasis is mine, unrolled into text and images to make it easier to read): This is a good...

Back in March 2020, when the first lockdowns hit, The Hammer and the Dance was published on Medium predicting the future of the pandemic. This is a great piece of analysis. Unfortunately, like my predictions written way back then, this author had an assumption that proved false. Specifically, that people would prioritize life. That people would behave so that the fewest number of people would die...