Six Months...Why We are Still Staying Home:

Our family formally started self-quarantining due to COVID-19 on March 10, six months ago today. I wrote about our reasons for self-quarantining the next day. In that post, I estimated that we would be self-quarantining for a couple of weeks and then reassessing. We have reassessed continually for the past six months and each time, we agree that we should continue to stay at home except for essential outings.

Six months in, and I want to address two questions:

     1. How are we doing??

     2. Why are we still self-quarantining??

 Our family is doing great! We have entertained ourselves quite successfully through the pandemic. In June, when our town celebration usually happens, we held our own mini-carnival, complete with homemade funnel cakes and snow cones. In July, we celebrated the Fourth with a backyard waterslide, a shaving cream war, and paint fireworks (there being a ban on all fires and fireworks due to fire danger).

We have learned bike tricks on the driveway, taken several socially-distanced kayak trips, and gone hiking. We have gotten confident in taking the children to a state park just off the reservation where we can kayak and hike without encountering anyone close-up. The kids have gotten good at wearing their masks around their necks or attached to their hats so they can flip them on in a second or two.
 Our backyard ninja line has gotten lots of use, as have our swings and zip line. We really have used this quieter time to spend quality time with our family.





So why are we still self-quarantining? 

Because, really, nothing has changed since March. We are still facing a virus for which almost no one has immunity. The CDC estimates that ten times as many people have had COVID19 as the official positive count. So, as we are officially just over 6,000,000 positive cases, probably 60,000,000 people in the US have had coronavirus. That still leaves approximately 268,000,000 vulnerable people. Yes, really.

We've had about 190,000 deaths from COVID19 in the US. That's about a 0.3% death rate if we use the total estimated case count (60,000,000). Hopefully, as we learn more about how to treat this disease, the death rate will drop. Even so, I don't want to be among the statistics, nor do I want my family among them.

So, we are self-quarantining to protect the hospital systems that serve our area. We are self-quarantining to avoid being a transmission route to our family and our community. We are self-quarantining to be part of the solution.

We are, however, expanding our horizons a bit as time goes on. The hiking and kayaking mentioned above are things we didn't do in the early spring. We have taken the kids to the zoo (COVID-safe practices in place) recently. We even picked up fast food yesterday for the first time! We are simply adding safety measures to these activities: mask-wearing, hand-sanitizing, etc.

We aren't, though, traveling to see our extended families at this time. We miss them and love them a lot! But we don't want to bring this disease to our 80+ year old parents, nor do we want to contract it from our less-quarantined grandchildren. So for now, we are mostly staying home. And we don't regret it a bit!