Young, Healthy & Unafraid of COVID-19? Stay Home Anyways

A few weeks ago, I hardly knew what the word “pandemic” meant. It was some obscure thing that doesn’t happen. Something people make games about. It was not a word that came up in day-to-day conversation. Today, that has of course changed. The only thing that anyone can talk about, it seems, is the global pandemic. The Coronavirus may or may not be everywhere at all times. But talk about it certainly is.

As fears over what the virus means for us grow, so do the restrictions around what we can do. A few days ago, I read the headline news. American life overturned! But it didn’t seem that way at first. The sun was shining. People were out walking their dogs. Life was going on mostly the same. Even school was still in session. But that’s all different now. In California, we’re feeling the burden of this disease. Schools are shuttered. College students from home and abroad are returning — classes moved to online. The remote workers at Starbucks are ushered home. I walked downtown and there was a guy with an eye-patch and a bag walking around. That’s the kind of people that are out and about now. Nobody else wants to risk it. The disease could be anywhere.

And yet, even as the San Francisco Bay Area initiates “Shelter in Place” rules, and fully enforced quarantine looms as an actual possibility, at the moment, we have a lot of…