HAS COVID-19 CANCELLED OUR SOCIAL LIFE?
GOING TO RESTAURANTS AT A TIME LIKE THIS CAN LOOK LIKE ARROGANCE
On Saturday night I went to a bar and a restaurant and a local comedy show and felt distinctly weird about it. Everyone else at the bar and the restaurant and the local comedy show seemed to feel weird about it, too — as if we had collectively made a grievous social gaffe, blundered into some serious faux pas. I was aware that many people, fearing COVID-19, were preferring to spend their weekend indoors, languishing in self-imposed quarantine rather than risking infection in a dangerous crowd. But that night it seemed like more than a preference. It was as if staying at home had become compulsory, and that spending time on a Saturday night at a bar or a restaurant or a local comedy show had become an unforgivable taboo.
Of course the situation is not currently as bad here in Canada as it is in, say, Italy, where citizens are sequestered under state-mandated lockdown and the healthcare system is crumbling beneath the deluge. Fewer than 100 people have tested positive for the disease throughout Ontario as of this weekend; another four Torontonians confirmed to have it have already recovered. In a city of nearly three-million people, the odds of running into someone who happens to have contracted COVID-19 and not exhibited symptoms is still rather low — so low, in fact, that one might be tempted to conclude there’s no real danger. With numbers this slight, what’s the risk? Of all the gin joints in the city, one feels, surely coronavirus won’t choose mine.
But preventive action is exactly that — preventive, as in pre-emptive, implemented before it becomes necessary. In Italy and other countries where COVID-19 has already wreaked havoc, we have an urgent vision of how our own country might look, if we don’t take drastic measures now to stop it from happening. What the experts advise is simple: cancel plans, stay home, self-isolate. Make popcorn and grab a blanket and binge-watch something on Netflix. Just do it alone, and stop gathering at bars and restaurants and other places where groups congregate. It doesn’t matter if you feel well and if everybody around you seems free of symptoms. It’s a radical preventive measure. It’s called social distancing, and we’re all supposed to do it with conviction right now.
The goal is what’s been called flattening the curve. The curve represents the number of new cases of infection every day; the idea is to reduce that number, thereby dropping the curve, by limiting interactions between unwitting COVID-19 hosts. Research has made clear that flattening the curve is the only way to alleviate the advance of the disease before it overwhelms our capacity to handle it. If we practice social distancing now we might avoid an intensive-care crisis that we are otherwise on track to face harrowingly soon.
“The ideal goal in fighting an epidemic or pandemic is to completely halt the spread,” Drew Harris, a population health analyst at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, told the New York Times recently about social distancing and the importance of flattening the curve. “But merely slowing it — mitigation — is critical. This reduces the number of cases that are active at any given time, which in turn gives doctors, hospitals, police, schools, and vaccine manufacturers time to prepare and respond, without becoming overwhelmed.” In other words, social distancing represents an effort to get out in front of the coronavirus, impeding its progress before it gets entirely out of hand. It’s not about the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus in your vicinity right now. It’s about what that number might be in a week, or a month, and acting to redirect that course.
When it comes to emergency situations, I like to think I am level-headed and calm — the sort of person my more anxious friends turn to in times of crisis for confident reassurance. And in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak I did relieve a lot of apprehensive peers and colleagues, fielding frantic calls from a hypochondriac ex-girlfriend on the brink of a panic attack, promising my mom that her holiday in Spain wouldn’t be spoiled. This was when the disease was still relegated to China, and therefore seemed remote and vaguely insubstantial — a looming threat, perhaps, but one that loomed distantly. But COVID-19 is our reality now, and it’s become increasingly difficult to play the figure of the cool, unruffled pragmatist. What reassurance can I offer? I’m not sure of anything.
There is a threshold over which confidence starts to look like arrogance, beyond which a blithe and cavalier attitude begins to look foolish and reckless. The world needs level heads, but what it also needs is prudence and caution, wariness of danger and good judgment in the face of imminent catastrophe. Going about our lives as if nothing were the matter — proceeding as if we were immune to infection, refusing to adopt the range of precautionary measures that have been urged upon us by health care professionals and experts in disease prevention — is also a kind of denial, which may be even more dangerous than panic. What distinguishes circumspection from exaggerated alarm? And am I even qualified to know the difference? I’m too equable by nature to treat COVID-19 like the apocalypse. But perhaps I could stand to feel a little more dread.
Or at the very least, avoid bars or restaurants or local comedy shows.