So today is day 30 since I’ve been staying at home due to this coronavirus pandemic. While I’m not missing my weekday commuting up to Washington, D.C. I am getting restless. I’m not used to being restricted to staying inside my house for days on end. Especially now as we’re coming into spring weather and the best time to be getting outside for some kayaking, hiking, or just hanging out enjoying the fresh air.
It seems that right now, we have to suspect even fresh air as not being a good thing.
Forced isolation in my house for 21 days and counting has given me a lot of time to think about things. Like; how in the hell was the entire world forced into quarantine literally in a matter of days? How we did get here? How in the hell did a microscopic blob of genome popularly called “coronavirus” manage to take over the entire world so quickly? I decided I needed to build a timeline and map it out.
I took a shot at a timeline a couple of weeks ago in an earlier post, for just five days worth of events. Since then I spent some time researching and working with new web building tools, and finally put it together. What I offer below the fold is over 200 coronavirus-related events, most of which have occurred since December.
Even though this is nominally April Fools Day, I can’t help noticing how few April Fools pranks are actually being played today. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that nothing anybody could do would be disbelieved. Four months ago if you told someone an awkwardly-titled thing called “coronavirus” could cause so much chaos, they wouldn’t believe you.
Our president trump certainly didn’t.
One of my favorite quotes is an alleged Chinese Curse that states “May you be born in interesting times.” Given what’s been happening this past week, I’d say we are in fact living in interesting times. These times are not particularly the times I’d have chosen to live in, all things being equal.
The most recent interesting thing is, of course, the medically-defined “Novel Coronavirus.” Interesting to epidemiologists at least. Those folks are probably having the time of their lives studying this new and improved virus. The rest of us, not so much.