April 16 [Thursday]
Face masks are no longer recommended in Los Angeles County, they are now REQUIRED when entering a store. I still think this is overblown, but I don the mask when making my routine rounds to Vons and the pharmacy-post office to mail my EBay sales. I think it is overreach but I comply by means of the plain white N95 disposable mask I had in the garage from some prior long-forgotten project.
April 17 [Friday]
The stock market had taken a massive dump in February due to worldwide COVID worries, illness raging and businesses closing. The stock market [NYSE] lost 34% from late February through March 23! Huge drop, worrisome to endure. We don’t get too hung up on these wild swings, [Wife Klem] and I, but look, I’m 52 years old and we’ve got a good chunk put away in the stock market [our 401K plus two Roth IRAs] intended to fund our retirement, a hopeful seven years away. It wasn’t easy shaking off that kind of fluctuation, but we stayed in the market and it’s bounced back 29% through April 17. Anyway, hope it steadies itself out. I don’t want to have to add years of work at the end to compensate for a diminished retirement fund.
April 18 [Saturday]
We’re more than four weeks into Shelter In Place and the Groundhog Day effect has become significant. Every day is largely the same, minus small variations from one workday to the next, but every day abides by the same routine. Well, today, a bulwark has been established against the Groundhog effect. We purchased Just Dance, a video game played on the Nintendo Switch. It’s viewed on the TV with music and participants dance [follow along], mimic, the dancing image of a person on the screen. [My daughter] and I, it turns out, are the only two participants, [the boy] and momma decline. My enthusiasm for a break from the daily routine is matched by a waning confidence in my knees’ ligaments.
[Postscript: Just Dance lasted for two weeks then dropped out of the routine.]
April 25 [Saturday]
[Wife Klem] and I are of opposing positions regarding Covid and the precautionary protocols. I would like businesses to reopen, people can continue to socially distance and wear masks, and choose for themselves if they want to go out. This would allow some semblance of the economy to struggle forward, people start working again earning an income. She suggests that it’s too soon to reopen, there are still too many new cases of Corona. Shelter In Place should continue and the Federal government should issue a second wave of UBI checks. We respectfully disagree. I love [Wife Klem] and enjoy when she plays along with my silly requests of ‘Have you a Covid update for me?’ She’s immersed herself in Covid news and will rattle off the latest update.
We are probably years away from knowing if the cure will end up being worse than the disease. I understand Corona kills predominantly old people. Those deaths are tragic and sad. Conversely, the loss of jobs, businesses going bankrupt and people going into debt [because they are currently no longer earning a paycheck] will cause years of life, in economic terms, to be lost on the back end of lives. Studies show that wealth is a strong indicator of life expectancy. So, the economic question to be resolved in coming years will be a comparison of what was worse? The lives lost from the virus or the ‘years of life’ lost due to the precautionary measures.
-klem
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