Axel getting creative to keep his BJJ skills up during lockdown

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Our stay-at-home order has been extended to April 26th (end of Week Six for us). Social distancing appears to be working and we are bending the curve.

I’m locked down with my family => it’s never boring and we are a good mix of personalities. Aside from the lack of cardio, I’m having a pretty good time and getting stuff done.

Some of the quarantine-exit discussion, centers around locking down at-risk populations. I understand the rationale but it doesn’t feel right to me.

Here’s why.

My grandparents were pretty much done living by ~85 years old.

If I was 80 and you were trying to “help” me by asking me to self-isolate until a vaccine was deployed then you would be taking the rest of my life away from me.

Here’s another thought… You don’t need to be 80 for this one… my family tree has addiction and mental illness running through it => both conditions are made more difficult by self-isolation.

I spent decades making my addictions positive and creating a mental health team around me. My mental health team is called my wife and kids. 🙂

Solitary confinement is a tactic used to break people down.

I imagine there is tremendous silent suffering happening in all of our communities => seniors, confined to their rooms, for their own “protection”.

They deserve better.

How about something like this…

Small-group isolation => five people with a single person supporting, while maintaining social distancing. Seems tighter than (top left) single nodes trying to figure it out on their own.

In the Bill Gates interview with CBS, he mentioned people he didn’t see dropping food.

That comment got me thinking about a small group, working together to limit the risk of infection entering their bubble. Using precautions inside their bubble, while maintaining their humanity with each other.

Seems much more viable, and healthy, than 18-months (best case?) self-imposed solitary confinement.

We need a viable strategies until the vaccine is deployed.

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One other thought was to avoid places that are burning with new infections.

I track my home county (325,000 peeps) as well as my state (5,800,000). Our neighbor has an app that lets her see data on positives by postal code.

We are going to have widely available testing at some stage. With that information, we can make informed choices about where we go, and where we shop.