COVID-19 brain dump

Hi, thanks for stopping by. Today I’m writing about COVID-19 to document and process my thoughts.

Timeline

Late-January / February - As regular readers may know, I am a primary school teacher. I have a vivid recollection of an incident that occurred on the first day back at school. The school bell went at the usual time (9am for the start of the first day back after the Summer holidays). As per usual, students lined up in their usual areas (at my school on the first day back, students first go to their class from the previous year in the morning before dispersing to their new classes for the last hour of the day). A student of mine, who is very animated and expressive stood a few metres behind where all the other kids were lined up. I asked him to move forward and he cried out ‘I don’t wanna get the Chinese virus!’. I thought how ridiculous and talked to him later about it, reassuring him that the Chinese virus had not (and will not) come to our shores. Maybe we all should have listened to this kid?

Mid-February - Supermarket aisles where you would normally find toilet paper are completely bare! We think the world has gone mad and think it’s funny.

Mid-March - You still can’t get toilet paper ... and pasta, rice, oats, flour, all the stuff preppers hoard. We start to take it more seriously. WHO upgrades the epidemic to pandemic. Financial markets crash. Everyone panics.

I start to get angry and feel depressed. What is wrong with people?! Isn’t it just like the flu? I learn that it’s not like the flu. I become hungry and thirsty for more information. Every podcast I listen to, every news article I read is about it. It depresses me but I just can’t stop following. Every day I look to see how much the number of cases and deaths have risen.

Things get messy at school. The kids become more unsettled by the day. We wonder what’s going to happen. ‘Non-essential’ services shut down. On Monday March 16 - just 9 (out of 19) of my students come to school. The next day it rises to 10, then 12, then 14, then 16. By the end of that week - on Friday afternoon - I came down with a cold. Usually when I get a cold, it’s on Friday afternoon - after a hard week. My immune system decides - that’s it, I’ve had it. I stay home Monday and Tuesday to recover.

Our prime minister insists that schools stay open, but some states overrule him and shut down early for the term. NSW schools stay open, but on March 22nd (I think) the PM has a change of heart - he effectively comes out and says school is not compulsory - or, if a parent is home we want your child(ren) to stay home with you. Or, unless both parents (or one in single parent households) are ‘essential’ workers’ your child shouldn’t go to school. When I return on Wednesday, school is like a ghost town. About 30 kids in total (out of a student population of almost 600) come to school. Social distancing wasn’t a problem that day. The next day, the numbers drop drastically again ... and again. Now we get between two and five kids a day!

We’ve switched to ‘home learning’. There still needs to be staff on-site but with two to five kids there’s no need for all staff to be there every day anymore. So we switch to a flexible roster. It feels so weird. Because I’m not able to monitor and supervise the students, engagement rates are low. There’s not much I can do except to call home every few days and check in with the families. They usually say they have moved house and haven’t got internet set up.

April - Now it’s Easter and school holidays, but a lot of the kids are confused thinking they’ve just been on holidays! Home learning will continue at least for another two months after the holidays - after that we’re not sure.

Narratives

It’s been very difficult to process the information and misinformation, knowing who to believe. These have been some of the challenges to contend with.

It’s just like the flu

Oh wait, no it’s not

Wear a mask

Don’t wear a mask

Wear a mask

Don’t wear a mask

Nobody knows if you should wear a mask or not!

Stay at home

We need to get back to work

The market has bottomed. BUY!

The market has priced in all the doom and gloom

Are you kidding me? We’re just getting started!

This changes everything

Support local businesses

On getting back to work - I noticed on Twitter last weekend that the narrative started to shift from stay at home to get back to work if you’re healthy. Questions were being asked - what’s more important? - millions of people stuck at home (or not if they’re now homeless!) for months, jobless, depressed, our economy at a standstill, alcoholism and domestic violence rising? OR we accept that 1% of our population won’t get through it and get on with our lives? All it takes is for one person to come out and question things on social media, then all of a sudden the silent majority comes out and backs them up and this becomes a crowd thought en masse. For what it’s worth, I think this is very dangerous!

On markets have bottomed - again, no-one knows. You tune in to what you want to believe. I was just thinking today about impacts of this crisis. I was thinking about investing - why do people invest? To build wealth. Why do people want wealth? For the future, so they can comfortably retire at a certain age and live a fulfilling life. So if I look to the future, my investments can make X% each year on average over X years, I can retire at X. If this year is a write-off, that’s OK I can just retire at X+1, right? Except that just after I had these thoughts I read a doom-and-gloom piece that was saying the impacts of this crisis go way deeper and we’re all fooling ourselves that if we believe everything will just go back to normal quickly.

People write what they want to believe. And people read what they want to read and believe what they want to believe. The trouble is I read both and don’t know what or who to believe. Sigh.

On this changes everything - so many people are working from home. Slack, Zoom, etc have become market darlings. How many people working from home now that weren’t before this will go back to working in a centralised office? I think less than half. What do you think?

What about school? State schools were one of the pillars of the Industrial Age - mum and dad can go and work, the kids will go to school. Now mum and dad aren’t going to work, now kids are learning from home, it’s obvious some kids are better suited to home schooling. The one size fits all model doesn’t work for everyone. With mum and dad working from home, I’m picturing close knit communities forming their own mini-schools where parents from these families take turns to work with the kids a day a week to support them with their learning, either with or without the help of the teachers who could also be working at the other end of the Zoom (or whatever the latest and greatest is) from home.

On support local businesses - I’ve started to think more about what I spend my money on and where I spend it. I used to feel guilty about buying a take-away coffee. Now I feel good. Since the beginning of the year we’ve started buying our fruit and vegetables from the local farmers’ market.

Recent flatlay of our swag from the farmers’ market

Last week we walked to where the markets are held only to nothing there. The organisers of the market decided that they didn’t have the capacity to continue with all the adjustments necessary to sustain their operations. Shame for them. Shame for the farmers too!

Oh no! The farmers’ markets have gone! What are we going to do? Buy fruit and veg from the supermarket of course! This was last weekend’s swag

Our favourite stall - Rita’s - has started delivering boxes. We got one today. The process of ordering and delivery was very smooth. It cost $65.

Today’s delivery swag

When we got everything out of the box and compared what we got with one of our previous flatlays and what we paid for both, we concluded that we were getting a lot less value with this box than what we’d get from them at the market. So then we thought - we’re paying a premium for delivery. But their stallholder’s fee at the market wouldn’t come cheap. We’re paying for the driver’s time. But they pay staff to work at the market. It takes them time to pack the boxes. But it takes time to set up a market stall. So basically we’re paying to prop their business up during this challenging time (we called it CVT - COVID19 tax). mrshill and I were talking about this today. It was - ahem - an interesting conversation. She challenged - “We’re supporting them by remaining loyal as customers. They’re not supporting us by making us pay close to double the farmers’ market rate”. I retorted, “OK but - how many customers do they get at the market? A lot. How many online orders in our area do you think they get? I think less than half.” So although it might not necessarily be fair that we’re paying to keep their business afloat, do we want them to go out of business? No! We certainly don’t. There’s an online-only seller that seems much better value - but they are really just middle-men. They’re giving better value to their customers but they would be taking a cut from the farmers to keep their business afloat too. It’s tricky though.

Here’s what I did today

So it’s holidays, but we can’t go anywhere. I’d been looking forward to another trip in the van. Sigh. Still we made a TODO list for stuff around the home these holidays. If I can accomplish half the things on my list, I will feel a sense of achievement. So I am feeling good about the next couple of weeks.

Today we:

• put some sealant around the bath - can’t wash for a few days now. Oh well!
• did a bit of work in the garden.
• I ground lots of egg shells into a powder with the pestle and mortar for the garden. This was very satisfying!

Grinding egg shells!

Thank you for reading. I found the process of writing this post very healing!