The idea of staying home goes against the ethos of this newspaper. Creative Loafing Tampa Bay—along with hundreds of other 100% free alt-weeklies across the country—revolves around the community being able to gather in public. We write about events, host them, and do all we can do to shine a light on the doers who make the Bay area such a beautiful place to live.
My life is better when I’m around all of you. Our paper’s revenue comes from those events, and that stream violently dried up over the last week.
Seven days ago, our parent company Euclid Media Group (EMG) asked CL to lay off seven of 12 staffers (plus part-timers) in order to keep the paper afloat. Six other EMG papers in Orlando, San Antonio, St. Louis, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Detroit are also running skeleton crews. Having to say goodbye to my friends and coworkers—who all love Tampa Bay as much as I do, perhaps more—made for the worst day of work I’ve ever had. The remaining five staffers are doing everything we can to bring our friends back to CL all while keeping the public up-to-date on a coronavirus pandemic that is the scariest thing we’ve collectively seen in our lifetimes.
We’re also being asked to do it while working from home. We’re sequestered next to dirty piles of laundry and living among bowls with baked-on black beans on them because we’d like to do our part in the community’s collective effort to practice social distancing.
Public health officials define social distancing as measures taken to restrict when and where people can gather to stop or slow the spread of infectious diseases like COVID-19 (which is what you get when you contract the highly-contagious novel coronavirus). Social distancing measures include limiting large groups of people coming together, closing buildings and canceling events.
We wish our elected officials would order an official stay-at-home mandate, too. Because staying home will save lives.
Social distancing does that by flattening a curve which lives on a chart that shows when a surge of new coronavirus cases are expected to strike. The chart explains why slowing the spread of the infection is nearly as important as stopping it.
The high-peaked curve represents a wave of coronavirus outbreaks in the near term; the flatter one shows a gradual rate of infection (the latter is possible when you stay home.) Our healthcare system cannot handle a high-peaked curve. That system is currently powered by the healthcare workers without proper protection, all risking their lives to care for coronavirus patients. Doctors, nurses and caregivers will contract COVID-19 and be unable to help. If the situation gets dire (read: not enough healthcare workers to care for the sick), choices about which patients die, and which ones live, will have to be made.
We don’t want that to happen.
On Monday, the number of coronavirus cases in Florida climbed over 1,000. By the time you read this in print, that number will be much higher. Next week, it’ll climb some more.
For many, the idea of staying home is emotional. Isolation sucks. Social distancing is hard. It can lead to depression. This paper is currently a shell of what it was because of social distancing. Thanks to social distancing, my friends are going to bed thinking about stories for a rag they don’t work for anymore.
I fucking hate social distancing.
But empathy is hard, too.
Merriam-Webster defines empathy as “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.”
In our current situation, empathy involves thinking about all the lives you’re hurting—and the lives we’ll lose—by not social distancing. Think of how irresponsible it is to suggest that now is not the time for drastic action to help keep people at home.
As I sent this to our printer, CL’s Digital Editor Colin Wolf published a very healthy argument for why the government needs to tell us to stay at home (read it by flipping a few pages). His editorial is a little shouty, and it has to be, because too few elected officials—and not enough of our community—are listening to science right now.
In a Facebook Live press conference on Monday, Tampa Mayor Jane Castor showed frustration in Hillsborough County opting to delay a countywide stay-at-home order, and said “the longer you wait, the longer it’s going to take to recover.” She added that “if we don’t act now, people are going to die. We’ve seen it already happen in other countries.”
She’s right, and that’s why her team spent their weekend working together with officials on a stay-at-home policy. On Monday, St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman said he’d issue a citywide stay-at-home order if the governor fails to act. Both leaders are working to protect their constituents.
Castor and Kriseman are doing so because they can imagine what it’s going to be like for us to watch our friends, family and neighbors get sick—and possibly die—as a result of their elected officials not acting quickly enough.
After we sent this note to the printer, the inevitability of stay-at-home orders for Tampa and St. Petersburg became even more clear.
For so many, life is so social. Empathy—imagining what it feels like to be someone else navigating this coronavirus mess—takes energy, because everyone feels like you.
But that’s life, and we must preserve it. So stay home.
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