I may not survive COVID-19, but it won’t be for lack of trying

Next Tuesday will mark 60 days since my last visit to a public place, an eye doctor appointment in the afternoon followed by a late night trip to the supermarket. A couple of days later, the governor issued a “stay home” directive for West Virginia, and I quit going where the people are.

It feels like a lot longer, but before I complain about the inconvenience of having to stay home for two months, I remember that my parents lived through both the Great Depression and World War II and came out okay on the other side. My dad was even alive – although very young – during the flu epidemic of 1918 and all of WWI, so the fact that I have to shop for essentials at Amazon, buy groceries online and use the drive-up window at CVS seems insignificant compared to what his generation went through.

That’s why it puzzles me to see people losing their minds because they can’t get a haircut, work out at the gym or go bowling. I’m astonished to see photos of people jamming into restaurants in Colorado or bars in Wisconsin without masks and ignoring social distancing guidelines, and don’t even get me started with those public officials who are pushing to reopen schools. I think that everybody who wants to reopen our classrooms in the fall should have to report to one every day, interact with as many students as possible, eat in the cafeteria and see how long it takes before they get sick.

I understand what’s happening to the nation’s economy and I truly feel bad for the millions of people who have lost their jobs. I do. I’m retired, so I don’t have to worry about going to work. Every month, money just shows up in my bank account. But if I were to weigh making a premature fix to the economy versus keeping millions of people from getting sick and thousands of people from dying, the economy would come in second on my list.

I believe that Georgia was the first state to officially reopen for business and immediately they saw a 40% spike in coronavirus cases. In Michigan, armed hoodlums protesting against lockdown orders from their governor staged rallies at the state capitol, then went home and infected friends and family throughout rural areas of the state that the virus previously had spared. Texas reopened recently and suffered the largest single day of death since the pandemic began.

I don’t know what part of “stay home, stay alive” was confusing for these people.

Now the governor of West Virginia – who it seemed was doing the right thing throughout the past few weeks – is phasing out his stay home order and opening portions of the state’s business a little at a time. I’ve been contacted by not one but two dentists asking me to make an appointment (no thanks), stores downtown are starting to advertise their new hours and gyms will be allowed to reopen starting Monday. Thank god for that, because panting and sweating through aerobic exercises with 50 of my closest friends or pumping iron or riding the stationary bikes are certainly among my top priorities during a pandemic that has killed more than 85,000 Americans in a little over two months.

(Here’s an idea: Instead of risking your life at a gym, try doing pushups or situps in your living room, running in place in the garage or lifting two milk jugs full of water on the patio out back.)

I drove to the Post Office a little while ago to mail my absentee ballots. It was my big road trip for the day. I slipped the envelopes into the neck of the big blue mailbox outside on the curb and drove away. I saw no one and never left my car. I did, however, observe maybe 20 people riding bicycles, walking the city streets, exiting stores and otherwise hanging out. Of the 20, only one was wearing a mask. I’m afraid that no one can help them if they refuse to help themselves.

Next week, I have to make a decision. I have two doctor appointments, one of which will be conducted by tele-health and one that may require me to drive to Morgantown. Ironically, it’s the same ophthalmologist I saw the last time I went out. His office has been closed and I’m waiting to see if it even opens back up next week.

Beyond that, I’m happy to keep on keeping on, or, more accurately, to keep on not keeping on. I’m not required to go to the dentist or the gym or the bowling alley just because they’re open and I’ve never been one to get a lot of haircuts. If I want one, we have clippers, so if the mood strikes me I’ll get my wife to shave it all off and I can start over again from scratch. I never go anywhere, so what does it matter how I look? Besides, I’ve got a lot of hats.

In summary, we have a long way to go before there’s a vaccine to prevent this virus or even an effective way to treat it, and we have a president who seems to oppose even testing for it because the number of victims makes him look bad in an election year. That tells me that we’ll be staying home and avoiding crowds for a lot longer than 60 days.

So in the meantime, I’m doing what I’m supposed to do to survive in the age of COVID-19, even if those around me aren’t. I’m not going out of my way to risk my life for some stupid reason, and I can’t understand why other people are willing to do that. I don’t know what will happen in the future or whether life will ever return to normal, and frankly, I don’t know if I will survive this pandemic or not, but if I don’t, it won’t be for a lack of trying.

That’s about that all any of us can do...and I encourage my friends to do the same.