Plague Diaries, Issue 2: 14 March 2020

It's a rainy day today. Spring still creeps up on us, outside; there's a jarring cognitive dissonance in all of this. Human existence is screeching to a temporary halt in some places; yet the trees are still budding, and the birds are still singing, and the seasons march on. It's comforting, actually.

While it's the weekend right now, and half the time my weekends are freeform, scattershot days of unstructured times, very soon the week will begin, and all the things that usually structure my week--work, meetings, desk shifts, appointments, social engagements--have been cancelled. I'm going to need to find ways to keep order to my life or I'll go nuts. It's a PLANDEMIC!

Total number of confirmed cases here in Indiana went up from 12 yesterday to 15 today; the closest case to Monroe County is in Johnson County.

I wonder, will this fundamentally change things in society? Kind of like, how the Great War ultimately resulted in women in many countries being given the right to vote. So will this pandemic, and the ways that it's interrupted our economies, our jobs, our day-to-day lives, somehow fundamentally alter something? Perhaps big subjects, like employers' openness and willingness to permit employees to telecommute or work remotely, or attitudes to health care, sick leave, or so forth. Or smaller things, like with Sephora suspending their in-store services, due to how they run counter to social distancing--will this indelibly change the industry standard for how these services are delivered, and their tester cosmetics are offered, even during times of normalcy?

Let's end things on a positive, or at least humorous note: some of the best COVID-19 memes I stumbled across in the past 24 hours: