We desperately need to avoid a COVID-19 catastrophe.
The good news is, we can.
Besides washing our hands and not touching our faces, we need to take seriously social distancing.
Those two words have come with a lot of confusion – it doesn’t mean hitting the beach with a few hundred of your new best mates.
To show why social distancing was so important, I have spent the past week trying to do it seriously – and in turn came into close contact with more than 250 people.
Last Monday I started recording how many people I came into enough contact with, and how many people those people had been with.
There were some parameters – they needed to have touched or been in close physical proximity to them.
In other words, close enough to pass on a deadly virus.
The odds were stacked against me.
There are five of us at my place, and two of those have partners.
It’s a big place, but seven people are regularly sharing the space.
Day one I didn’t leave the house, or really the couch if I’m being honest.
We were working from home now. I did some washing, went for a run.
I was doing well until one had a friend over for dinner – the friend had worked all day at a cafe.
I had woken up thinking my social distancing number would hit five.
When I went to bed it was already 25 (potentially more).
Fine, I’ll go to the country, I thought.
Just me, two mates and a whole heap of non-coronavirus-infected surfaces.
Tuesday they picked me up. One had been with five people, the other with one – 33.
It wasn’t going well.
But the clean air proved good for my building coronavirus anxiety and good for my number.
Include the fix-the-gas guy who visited briefly, I stayed on 34.
On the way back to Melbourne on Friday, I met my parents for lunch in a small town cafe.
They were about to sneak over the border to Tasmania, and depending on how this all goes, I might not see them for a while.
So lunch was a risk I was willing to eat.
Our waitress had served roughly 75 people before us.
Chuck in the 13 people my three family members came in close contact with on that day, and the four people my housemates saw, and I hit 129.
I started to feel a bit embarrassed.
Taking social distancing seriously was harder than I thought.
My hand sanitiser started to make squelching noises. It was running out.
Saturday my housemates went to their partners places and came back having made contact with six people and potentially bring a fresh wave of coronavirus with them. Great.
Up my number went. Squelch the hand sanitiser went, as did my anxiety.
On Sunday I caught public transport to Sunbury to panic-buy a PlayStation.
I applied my refilled bottle liberally.
I met two people, and their newborn baby, and headed back to my house.
I hoped I wasn’t carrying it.
‘Corona and a baby won’t be fun,’ I thought.
Then I went for a walk with a mate.
Before seeing me she had served more than 100 people at Bunnings.
We didn’t hug, we tried not to touch at all, to embrace the new no-contact world instead.
But like an extrovert in hermit’s clothing, I made some mistakes.
I got too excited. Too close.
Her housemate invited me up for dinner and – never one to turn down a free meal – I accepted, and thus my number grew to 238.
I may as well just start licking things, I thought.
I had one more day.
But my housemates had seen some friends (though they answered my slightly-too-high-pitched questioning with reassurances they had all stayed 1.5 metres away) and I finished the week on 251.
I wanted Valium. I wanted a liedown. I wanted to take up smoking again.
Then I read in The New York Times that if everyone in the world stood 1.5 metres away from each other for two weeks, this would all be over.
I wanted to scream.
Because this, here and now in Australia, has only just started.
And if we don’t act immediately, it could go on for months.
“We know what will happen if we don’t take this seriously,” said Paul Komesaroff, professor of medicine and director, Centre for Ethics at Monash University.
“We’ve seen in China and in Italy where one thing leads to another.
“So many people became ill simultaneously, the system is overwhelmed. In some cases, people are left to die.
“You can’t even have funerals. People are locked down in their homes.”
We need to start thinking about social distancing as an act of care, he said.
“We need to maintain a physical distance, but we also need to retain the important connections.”
It’s hard because it’s the opposite of what we naturally do, but we need to get good at it immediately, he said.
“Normally, you would give someone a hug, but as a gesture of warmth and loyalty you have to keep physically away from them,” Professor Komesaroff said.
Instead of risking it for a biscuit, don’t go over to your friends for dinner, skip the lunch date – and please for the love of God avoid the beach.
Call your mates instead. Ring Gran, text mum, FaceTime Karen.
Panic-buy a PlayStation (but have it delivered).
Re-arrange your bookshelf. Get your housemate to cut you a mullet.
“We need to maintain a physical distance from each other without losing the important connection we have. That enables society to function as it does,” Professor Komesaroff said.
“It might even bring us close together.”
The post I got serious about social distancing, and still came into contact with 250 people appeared first on The New Daily.
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