With a flurry of headlines and fear, the big Rona arrived with a bang in our house in the first weeks of March. As the markets began crashing and cases rose in NYC, we snuck in one last fling of recreation with a wellness trip to Tahoe.
The conference was allowed to go forward as planned, with the change that the 1500 attendees (doctors and their families) couldn’t serve themselves from a buffet line and touch common-use spoon handles and hand sanitizer was everywhere. No masks required or recommended— just a general level of anxiety about the impending pandemic.
In the middle of March we had planned an overnight in Napa Valley at Calistoga’s Indian Hot Springs, with our good friends the Moore family. As the virus arrived, it turned out that our stay happened the day before the first California statewide “stay at home” order, and while our friends decided to cancel we stuck it out alone. It felt like a last gasp of relaxation before the slow-moving car wreck of SARS-CoV2, floating on the warm pools and playing shuffleboard.
Anxiety was high in dad’s ER doc community, reading stories from Italy and NYC of overwhelmed hospitals and healthcare workers falling ill. Having seen how PPE was done well in China with full-body Tyvek suits, Dad took the opportunity of the drive home to stop at all the Home Depots and paint stores he could find and buy out their suit supplies.
The girls just rolled with it, transitioning to Zoom-based online schooling and workouts fairly quickly.
Postscript:
In hindsight: What we didn’t know then, huh? In Tahoe essentially no one had masks on, and we were all crammed indoors into these hotel hallways shoulder to shoulder for the buffets. 1500 of us eating in the grand ballroom eating and attending lectures for hours straight, unaware that the virus (if it were present) would mostly be in the air. Fortunately, the virus apparently didn’t check in with any of us.
