Self-Isolation

I have been taking immune-suppressing medication for almost 25 years. For the first ten years, I saw a slow decline in my body's ability to fight infections. Then, that decline increased over the next five years. For the last almost ten years it has been fairly stable at, I'm guessing, between 60% and 75% of where it was pre-medications.

So, because of that, I have been practicing self-isolation for a long time. I don't go out to concerts, movies, or other large gatherings nearly as often as I used to. I ask my friends and family to stay away if they are sick or think they might be contagious. I wash my hands regularly. I clean the things I touch regularly (like keyboards, screens, pc mouse, telephones, etc.). Basically, I do most of the requirements for COVID-19 already because I have a weakened immune system. And my immune system isn't, really, all that bad; there are people with HIV/AIDS, who take cancer drugs, etc. who have it worse than I do.

As of this writing, I haven't actually left the house at all most days and haven't gone farther than my property line in 25 days. But that started before and will continue long after the current pandemic. It's just what I feel I have to do in order to stay healthy since so few people are conscious of just how sick or contagious they may be. I'm hopeful that this pandemic will teach people that they may be contagious without having symptoms of an illness, or may harm people if they don't stay at home when they do have symptoms, and that they should stay home and use those sick days their company provides. I'm hopeful that companies will start to realize they need to provide all workers with some amount of paid sick days to use going forward.

The end result being that I am amused when I read my friends and family being bored, having cabin fever, with the whole self-isolation deal we all must survive now. I've been practicing it for 15 years now! I play video games, so there's a big time sink. I like to both read and write, so there's more time. I enjoy movies and TV, so there's more time. When I'm feeling healthy enough, I like to ride my stationary bicycle. I play with the cats. I clean. I make meals. I play roleplaying games, including gamemastering for them (which takes a lot of preparation time). I've been exclusively working from home for over ten years now. If my wife doesn't remind me (or, rather, FORCE me) to leave the house every now and then, I can find that I haven't left it in literally months. It's just the way I'm built to stay as healthy as I can be.

Basically, I'm hoping this pandemic tells the world that we should be cognizant of and compassionate toward those who can't protect themselves from disease AND STAY HOME when we are sick. When you have the least bit of illness coming on, you should assume you are contagious and do what you have to in order to keep from making others sick. And businesses should encourage this behavior with time off and other policies -- the fewer people who are sick, the more productive they are. But Americans are taught to gut it out, to work through it, that if you aren't working 60+ hours a week, you are somehow doing less than you should be. The rest of the world has figured out that all this mentality means is a quick trip to the morgue, but Western culture insists on it. I'm hoping that changes.