So let’s talk a little more about Coronavirus and travel.

Though first, I am like super curious where everyone is falling on the fear scale here?

I can’t decide if I’m underreacting or the stage manager who fights the panic in me is just so strong, but I feel vaguely fatalistic that it may likely happen no matter what and that it’s just ideal to have a balance of moving forward as planned while I wash my hands more often than usual until told otherwise by some form of administration/government and developing backup plans for when everything just goes to hell.

…but developing the backup plans very calmly.

One of my co-workers has been… I jokingly refer to him (to his face before he went fully online and cut off face to face contact with folks) as “down the well.” He has been super freaked out for the last week and a half.

He is directing our spring show at the university we work at and I sat in on their last stumble through and after time two performers touched, he called a hold and ran around the cast sanitizing the students hands.

Maybe he’s the only one who is going to get through this ok?

But also, I wonder if he’s totally lost it a little bit too. I also sometimes wonder if I’m swinging too far into the “we’re all ok” lane in a reactionary way to balance out his deependedness, because I think scaring the crap out of the students is maybe not the way to go.

But again, I have literally no idea. We had a phone meeting today and he said he was so glad to have a cool and collected head leading the charge on this and internally I laughed so hard and thought “leading the charge!?!? I have literally no idea what I’m doing. Does anyone with this virus?”

So. The point of all that rambling is that here are the things I acknowledge about the virus:

• It does have a higher than usual fatality rate, but also that we’re still not talking The Stand here. Though we are talking the plot of The Leftovers.
• I do genuinely believe it may crash our medical system if everyone gets sick at once.
• I do believe washing our hands like crazy may actually help. Hand sanitizing, if you can find any, is also a great tool. And these are things we can personally control and do.
• I had no problem with my university extending schooling to online only for two weeks after spring break, which is also the incubation period for the virus without possible visible effects, so that’s quite brilliant since I also think people are definitely coming back from spring break with this thing.
• I am worried about my dad and older family members and I don’t want to be the one who brings this virus into their lives.
• I also have no problem meeting students in person like usual until spring break because I think it’s coming one way or another, are we actually going to hunker down in proper quarantines and let it pass over us? No. I don’t think there’s a world in which that happens. So when it comes, we deal with it.
• I am also really concerned about the students at my school who really need to be working to pay their bills and I’m glad our housing and food service is still open, but it also defeats the point of a quarantine so again, these things add to my feeling of when it comes, we deal with it.

And what does this have to do with travel?

Well, I’m totally going to Brazil during spring break, assuming they are still accepting Americans.

I’ve been watching the travel bans and quarantines and as of writing this, I’m still good to go. Brazil is actually a few hundred cases less than the States so maybe this will work in my favor?

Though I definitely saw today that there is now an outbreak in Rio.

I read a great post about a family that had travel plans to go to Japan and were definitely going to go… until they changed their mind.

I’ve definitely thought a lot about the issue the last two weeks or so. I’m not hugely worried about me and I’m not super worried about passing it on to the friend I’m going to visit (sorry, Diogo – though I’m also not worried about catching it from you either).

I have a slight fear of getting stuck in Brazil for longer than the week I planned to be there. Enough of a fear that as I started packing today, I threw in an extra week of contacts, just in case.

I also am a little scared of the plane because I catch freaking everything on a plane. I had the most ridiculous chronic cough/sinus infection/cold from September to January this last year because I was constantly flying. I’d start to get better, get on a place, and be right back at square one.

So, I’m curious what other folks might do in the same situation?

Updated: So, sometimes I write posts and then they get pushed a little for this reason or that and this post was actually written about two weeks ago. As it so happens, I did go to Rio. It was a delightful, if not exceptionally weird trip, that largely involved a lot of social distancing in a foreign country with a good friend and two alarming airplane rides that were probably chock full-o-coronavirus, especially the trip home. If the trip had been planned for even a few days later, I don’t think I would’ve gone. Things escalated super quickly and I feel like I sort of left on the last day where it seemed like things might be ok and maybe this was all a little overhyped. Spoiler – nothing was overhyped and while I do think everything will be ok, I think thing new weirdness is going to be our regular lives here in the U.S. for the next few weeks. I am now in a hardcore social distancing/quarantine mode to make sure that if I did pick this thing up on an airplane, no one else gets it because of me.