The Teach901 virtual job fair will happen online April 20-24. Teach901 recruits passionate and high-quality teachers to our city’s schools, and seeks to retain them. Your week will start off with a talk with a counselor about the positions which are a fit for your skill set. Your counselor will then direct you to Zoom sessions which will prepare you for your career goals, and then you will be put in touch with partner schools. Although the initial sign-up must be done online, those who don’t have an Internet connection at home can participate in the week-long fair via phone.
Former Grizzlies star Mike Conley beat Tamika Catchings in a game of HORSE in the quarterfinal round on ESPN last night. ESPN graded the participants, giving The Conductor an A. He is considered a favorite to win the tournament. The semifinals will be Thursday at 8 PM CDT on ESPN. Conley will play former Detroit Piston Chauncey Billups for a chance to punch his ticket to the finals.
So, let’s talk about this COVID-19 thing. One model, which has been the prevailing model the majority of the time we’ve been under house arrest, shows that the virus peaked in the United States two days ago and is expected to peak in Tennessee April 19 (pick Tennessee from the dropdown list at the top of the page linked above to see state information). If this model can be believed, that’s a good thing; we’ll be past the peak a week from now.
However, another model has come out showing that COVID-19 cases in Shelby County will peak sometime between late May and mid-June. If that model is accurate, that’s also a good thing, showing that recent social distancing procedures along with improved testing protocols have pushed the disease’s peak back, preventing hospitals from running out of rooms, ICU space, and ventilators.
Which model is right, or if neither is, which is closer to being right? The thing is, we don’t know. Last night I had the TV on, watching meteorologists predict the path of the storms that were moving through. They had it down to the minute: They had the heaviest band hitting Mud Island at 10:27, the University of Memphis area at 10:31, and Germantown at 10:34. The reason they’ve been able to train their forecasting models to such a high degree is that there has been lots of training data. Storms blow through here dozens of times a year. Pandemics, not so much, and thank goodness for that!
(By the way, before we continue, I’d like to tip my hat to John Bryant, meteorologist at Local 24, for the job he did last night. He was able to spell out all the scientific stuff in layman’s terms, as well as address the human side of severe weather. For example, he discussed what to do if sheltering from a tornado meant violating social distancing best practices. Very well done.)
Yesterday afternoon on Twitter, an elected official – one who I respect and on most issues agree with – made note of the model with the late June peak, said, let’s just assume we’re going to be under quarantine through August 1, and suck it up and get through it together. My reaction to that statement is below, but before I get started, Disclaimer: I am not a medically degreed professional with experience in how pandemics work. I am a guy who writes a blog.
Ideally and optimally, my opinion on fighting the coronavirus has always been, we must listen to the experts. If the doctors, if the health care professionals who know the most about the disease recommend we follow a course of action… not the talking heads on your favorite media outlet, not national politicians, but the experts… recommend a particular course of action, then that’s what we should do, if practical.
The problem is, I don’t know if extending the Safer at Home order, or the house arrest as I like to call it, until August 1 is practical. 20 to 30 percent of the population of Shelby County lost their jobs because of the virus. We’re really going to expect them to come up with April, May, June, July, and August rent/mortgage without a source of money? And pay all their other bills? It seems like we’re expecting that sector of the economy – non-athletes whose livelihood depends upon large sporting events, the servers in restaurants whose business model did not support staying open for take-out, gig economy workers, owner/proprietors of businesses deemed nonessential – to make the biggest sacrifice. It isn’t fair to them.
There’s also the fact that months of isolation from the people and routines we care about is going to lead to severe boredom, and beyond. As someone who goes out every day and writes about my experiences, I think many of my readers expected the house arrest to hit me particularly hard – however, I am an only child, and I am more of an introvert than an extrovert. It took a few days, but I adjusted to the change, and if the quarantine lasted until August, I would survive – I wouldn’t like it at all, but I’d survive. My extrovert friends, though, especially the ones who live alone, could be in for some psychological damage. Not sure if there’s a publicly traded company that offers psychiatric services, but if so, moving some of your 401(k) into that company would not be a had move right now.
I also think there’s going to be civil unrest. I already see seeds being sown on social media. If the quarantine lasts past May 1 with no end in sight, or if the quarantine lasts past June 1 whether there is an end in sight or not, there will be protests. We’ll have people violating social distancing guidelines not because they don’t know any better (which is what is happening now; listen to the Memphis police scanner for Safer at Home violations), but because they’re fed up. People hit the hardest – those driven to the brink of bankruptcy, those who had their wedding ruined by the ‘rona, those who had their dream job pulled out from underneath them – will be on the front lines. It will be less partisan than personal.
One last point I want to make – when you have your freedoms taken away, it’s natural to get angry with the entity depriving you of those freedoms. However, how do you get angry at a virus? It has no feelings. It’s not like it sat down and mapped out a plan to kill thousands of people and affect the lives of millions more. So, what do humans do when they’re angry, but for some reason it doesn’t make sense to be angry at the source of their anger? They project it onto a person or entity that did nothing to deserve that projection. I believe we’re going to see a lot of that this spring and early summer.
Those are my thoughts for now. Again, I’m just a guy with a blog, not a guy with a medical degree, so take my opinions with a grain of salt. Back later today or tomorrow with more news.