1. I know I shouldn't immerse myself in news of something that worries me, but I'm beginning to see stories that suggest many of the cases of COVID-19 are actually fairly "mild" in the sense of it being like a very bad flu, and then you recover, and that's hopeful. Also it seems to be that "bilateral pneumonia" is what the killer is in most cases, and I wonder what the causative agent of that is, and if people who have had the pneumococcal pneumonia vaccine have some protection there. (My mom has had the vaccine; that is why I am hanging on to the hope that that vaccination might protect her if she caught it).
And, yes, I realize now that that's exactly the nucleus my worry and unhappiness is forming around: "you just lost your dad, what if you lose your mom too?" and yes, I realize that will be SOMEDAY but I also don't want it to be THIS YEAR, and not of a disease that might move so fast I couldn't get up there in time.
She is being careful about not going out, washing hands, etc., but....I still worry. And I think this past year has just left me more sensitized to things; everything seems very big and very bad and the world feels like a much scarier place than it once did. Maybe I'll get back to feeling safer some day; I hope I do.
2. I heard a news report this morning that we may be farther toward a vaccine than originally thought. Apparently back around 2004, a SARS vaccine was being researched, but - this is how the news story went - "the funding went dry and the pandemic abated and the samples were frozen" (I presume in a -80 freezer, and thank goodness their electrical system was more reliable than some places - we had some stuff lost out of our freezer after an extended power outage). And because SARS *is* a coronavirus, they are apparently similar enough that the antibodies might work on both.
Apparently some of the cruise-ship passengers have vounteered for testing?
But anyway. This feels like the plot for a movie that (hopefully) works out as an Aristotelian comedy ("comedy" not in the sense that it's so very funny, other than maybe in cosmic sense, but "comedy" in the sense that "everyone lives in the end"): some packrat scientist, almost 20 years ago, goes, "Well, dang, my grant is up, but I have this vaccine nearly synthesized. Guess I'll just bung all the stuff in the back of the freezer, then" and fast forward to 2020, and it's that packrat scientist who maybe saves us all...
I mean that is really not good for my tendency to be a packrat for useless stuff, but...
3. So maybe, maybe, it's just gonna be a few months of disruptions and big changes, and maybe we all wash our hands a lot more from now on, and maybe, hopefully, a lot of service industries get a lot better about sick leave policies....but then a vaccine comes out and we can once again go to baseball games and don't have to worry about crowded stores or classrooms. (I would still like to see people be better about handwashing - I have probably gone overboard these days, washing my hands about a dozen times a day instead of previously just after I used the loo or before I ate or after I had worked with chemicals - and also would like to see the worker protection things stay in place)
Maybe I even get to go visit my mom in May? I hope?
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But yeah. I am very tired. This has been a tiring week (and it's not even half over yet). I got home around 7:30 last night after doing the interviews, and we have three more on Thursday, and then we meet on Friday to make our top picks to see who we bring in for an in person interview (if we can do that, if things don't get worse). I haven't done any knitting at all or even really read anything. And it's wearing on me. How do people in jobs where they never have any free time manage? Am I just weaker than other people?
I am not sleeping well, either. Both last night and the night before I woke up in the middle of the night and could not get back to sleep and again this is something that bothers me a lot. I can't make my brain shut up, or I can't get the comfort I once did.
And I feel very dull and very stupid. I don't know if that's from not having slept, or having been low-level anxious for at least a week, or from not having had much time to do things that are not-work, but I want the feeling to go away.
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