The Six Counties (the California Bay Area counties where coronavirus is running rampant) have been in a form of lockdown called Shelter in Place for two weeks (and I've been home for about 3 weeks). It's not that we're locked into our homes, but you can only go outside for essential services. The SIP directive just got extended for us until May 1 - it's agony.
Sheltering in Place is hard when you live alone. There's this impossible-to-achieve balance between taking care of your physical health and taking care of your mental health - I certainly don't want to give or spread COVID-19, but I've discovered I'm more of a social person than I realized, and this forced isolation was driving me crazy.
Within my 'quarantine network,' another friend found himself alone when his roommates left, so he decided to move into my house (Don't worry, he tests himself regularly. He's the guy that, at age 15, invented a paper sensor for pancreatic cancer). Jack is a grad student at Stanford who studies public health - and does COVID-19 testing in water samples. He's basically the guy that got Stanford shut down a few weeks ago, when he found WAY more COVID19 in Palo Alto's wastewater than was expected.
The scary thing is that Jack, with his connections to other COVID-19 researchers and the CDC, is my go-to for news and information. And his outlook on the situation is a bit grim, so I'm keeping all expectations low. I, like many others, am worried about losing my job since teaching hospital kids is not as simple as teaching in a regular school. And it doesn't look like this pandemic is going away any time soon.
Jack and I have been making short videos for my hospital to teach kids about the coronavirus, and now we've decided to expand into teaching general STEM topics. It has been a lot of fun, but conducting random science experiments and making props requires materials, a lot of space, and a big mess. So now my living room has turned to this:
What happened?? A tornado? Earthquake? No, just a pandemic...
Jack is also an Olympic whitewater kayaker, so he trains a lot and eats a lot. So now my kitchen looks like this:
Add one Olympic athlete, stir in some stockpiling frenzy, and bake in a global pandemic…
It's going to be an interesting few months...
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