It's been a weird week. I came back to work last Monday, and promptly my oldest got his first ear infection combined with a croupy (sp?) cough; the baby got RSV bronchiolitis (sp?!); my husband got some version of all that, and I'm doing my best to play healthy.
It was all pretty scary, actually, but fortunately everyone is now well enough that I can sit here and write about it. I don't even know how to feel about it: guilty? relieved? horrified? So I'll just stick with "extremely grateful everyone is okay, and a little bit exhausted." And: relieved for modern medicine.
So I was thinking a lot about how everyone got sick, and how I might keep myself and my mom and the babysitter from also getting sick. It made for an interesting juxtaposition with the spread of coronavirus. I admit to feeling nonplussed about the sickness when word first spread, only to get more and more unsettled about it as the casualty toll has mounted.
There's still so much we don't know, and having to rely on the Chinese for information is hardly reassuring. We talked to Michelle Caruso-Cabrera about Bill Bishop's suggestion that this "is as close to an existential crisis for Xi and the Party that I think we have seen since 1989." Kyle Bass exchanged some heated words with Hu Xijin about this over the weekend on Twitter.
We do know the economic disruptions will be pretty large. Not in the "stocks are panicking" way, because investors shrug at one-time earnings hits. But in the longer-term, this can only reinforce the sense that American business cannot rely exclusively on Chinese suppliers.
And I found this suggestion from Balaji Srinivasan interesting: will "toxicity kits" become the new DNA kits? We know the latter have fallen out of fashion lately (to wit, the layoffs at Ancestry and 23andme), so here, perhaps is a new opportunity. "Detect the presence of 10 common household toxins in your body"...and marry that with your personal DNA to reveal your particular immuno-vulnerabilities to catching things like coronavirus, maybe.
If nothing else, I guess I should have loaded up on some face masks. And as much as I hate to ponder it, it's quite possible these will become a new wardrobe staple after all. Given that I'm still not feeling 100%, I probably owe it to everyone around me to wear one on-air today--Eunice Yoon style.
See you at 1 p.m...
Kelly
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