Orienting to New Normals

Yesterday I had a fairly smooth commute to the Hollywood campus, where I helped unlock the building, and then I had a fairly smooth commute to the Ft. Lauderdale campus.  But then I walked into the main room, and I thought, I've made a horrible mistake.  

The room was set up with tables that were spaced well, but we were sitting 2 to a table.  I did sit with a colleague from my campus, and I know that she's been taking precautions, but it still felt risky.  And then there was food and drink all day, also risky.  And lots of people, most of them abandoning good masking practices fairly early in the day.

At first I tried double masking, and then my face got so hot that I took it off.  I've gotten used to my single mask, my medical grade mask (and I used a fresh one for Easter and for the multi-campus meeting yesterday).  As I noticed my own feelings and behavior, I reflected on this time in our collective life in this pandemic.

We're at a time of rising rates, after a time of two months of flat or falling rates.  We're at a time when we see more people travelling.  We see more variants in the country.  Many of us are vaccinated, or partially vaccinated, but many more of us are not.  And now, as stated on yesterday's episode of the Diane Rehm podcast, the median age for people who contract the disease is 39 in many parts of the country.  

It was interesting to watch people's behavior yesterday, and it helps me to see why it's so hard to get a handle on the disease.  At first we were all so careful, and then as we got comfortable, we went back to our old ways of acting.  People gathered around one of the small tables to eat lunch together, and they weren't part of a quarantine pod; I knew that they came from different campuses.  I saw the same thing happen at the quilt retreat back in October.  At first we were careful--then we got comfortable and relaxed our defenses.

To see our friends, family, and colleagues as disease vectors goes against many of our evolutionary impulses.  I understand that.  And yet, yesterday, I felt this rising anxiety as the day went on, anxiety that sometimes bordered on panic.  I tried to keep calm by holding my own hand and by singing the lyrics of Sunday's Easter music in my head.  Judging by the behavior of those around me, some of us were feeling similarly anxious, while others of us were feeling invincible.

And I know the invincibility doesn't come from vaccination.  Very few people in the room were old enough that they could have gotten 2 doses of the vaccine in the amount of time it has been available.

I'll be interested to observe our behavior during the second set of orientation meetings today.  Time to get ready.