Weekend edition: May 2-3, 2020 Just Because It’s Nice Out, Does Not Mean We Should Be Out Yesterday, it was 72°F and sunny in Brooklyn (where I live), with birds chirping and a gentle breeze bringing through perhaps the cleanest air cleanest I’ve perhaps ever breathed in my lifetime here, dating back to the 1980s when I would visit my grandparents in Flatbush. I had some grocery shopping to do and thought I would take a brief detour through the park. There, if you squinted, it seemed like the perfect spring day: take away a few masks here and there, and all you’d see were families playing by the water, joggers and bikers rushing by on the throughways, friends tossing footballs and frisbees, and groups gathered on blankets drinking wine and beer and liquor out of red plastic cups. That is a serious problem. Over 4,600 people were diagnosed with COVID-19 in New York yesterday. About 160 died of the illness; another 450 died on Friday. Though there are some very early signs things are improving in New York (and in many other parts of the U.S.), going back to “normal” now would be catastrophic, as nearly any expert would tell you. Just because the weather is great does not change the facts on the ground: an extremely virulent disease is still coursing through the U.S. population. My colleague Jamie Ducharme wrote just this week about a concept called “caution fatigue,” coined by Jacqueline Gollan, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Gollan came up with it based on some 15 years of research into depression, anxiety and decision-making, and, like many of the greatest ideas it is exceedingly obvious as soon as someone smart enough points it out to you. Jamie already did a great job explaining it, so I’ll just quote her: Gollan likens social-distancing motivation to a battery. When lockdowns were first announced, many people were charged with energy and desire to flatten the curve. Now, many weeks in, the prolonged cocktail of stress, anxiety, isolation and disrupted routines has left many people feeling drained. As motivation dips, people are growing laxer about social-distancing guidelines—and potentially putting themselves and others in harm’s way. You can imagine how easy it is for someone teetering on this edge to be pushed over by the first truly lovely day of the year. It’s easy to have past-experience bias, thinking that if you haven’t gotten COVID-19 yet, you probably won’t. And who wouldn’t want to forget the societal-level facts, and instead frolic in the park with friends and family? But the U.S., and most parts of the world, are nowhere near ready for this carefree behavior. As another of my colleagues, Alice Park, wrote this week after speaking with some of the most esteemed infectious-disease experts in the U.S., we simply do not have the testing or contact-tracing protocol in place yet to be having picnics in the park. Without that, former CDC director Thomas Frieden told her, “Not only could COVID-19 come roaring back, but it could get five times or close to 10 times worse than it is now.” Read more, and get tips on how to handle “caution fatigue” here.
HOW WE LIVE Where’s the Beef? The possibility of meat shortages is as much a symbolic struggle for Americans as a nutritional one, notes TIME reporter Tara Law. But, on the bright side, there have never been more alternatives to animal proteins, from beans and tofu to high-tech meat alternatives. Read more here. The Pandemic May Change the Way We Eat Preliminary surveys do suggest Americans are cooking more during the COVID-19 pandemic, which seems positive—but, TIME senior health writer Mandy Oaklander says, “not everyone has the same resources or newfound time to prepare nutritious meals.” Read more here. I Thought I Could Handle Anything. Then My Husband Got Sick Asking for help is always hard. In a viral pandemic, where social connections are frayed and support institutions are stretched gossamer thin, asking for help might feel impossible. TIME editor-at-large Belinda Luscombe writes about grappling with this struggle when her partner came down with COVID-19. Read more here.
HOW WE WATCH Is Quarantine Changing the Way We Think About Home? TIME television critic Judy Berman analyzes the loving relationship Americans en masse seem to have with “shows about houses—buying them, selling them, designing them, building them, renovating them, redecorating them, flipping them…” The list goes on. But that might be changing during the pandemic. Read more here. Of Course We Are Streaming More These Days While much of the economy struggles, one of the few “winners” is the entertainment-streaming-service business, and the success of NBCUniversal’s decision to send Trolls: World Tour straight to video-on-demand seemed to herald a new future in how moves are released. But TIME film critic Stephanie Zacharek film critic argues it’s premature to bet the house on that as an inevitability. Read more here. During a Pandemic, are TV Doctors a Good Thing? Television personalities Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil both had viral moments in recent weeks for controversial, inaccurate comments related to COVID-19. But that doesn’t mean doctors-turned-correspondents are inherently a bad idea. Read more here.
LESSONS FROM HISTORY The 1918 Flu Shows Why We Can’t Rush Reopening You don’t need to try to read tea leaves if you want to know what will happen if officials bow to public pressure to end restrictions designed to limit public gathering. You can simply turn to the history of the so-called Spanish Flu, and to San Francisco in particular. Read more here. Loneliness is a Modern Invention It’s clear that the social distancing that characterizes the public-health response to COVID-19 is causing and exacerbating loneliness for people of all demographics. Understanding the history of “loneliness” could help you get through the pandemic. Read more here. What if This Virus Can Teach Us to Change Ourselves? Novelist Colum McCann investigates how the current pandemic is elasticizing our conception of time, and, as a result, altering how we see ourselves in relation to the wider world. Then, he asks, could this teach us a more complex and nuanced way to connect and listen to each other in the future? Read more here.
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