Coronavirus Pressure

For quite a while my home state of Nevada was seeing less than 200 new coronavirus cases per day. Then the casinos, bars, and many other local businesses were allowed to reopen. I soon saw the stats creeping up to 300-400 new cases per day… then to 500-1000 per day. Now we’re around 1400 new cases per day. Hospitals are filling up and getting close to capacity. We’re also seeing more days with double-digit deaths from the virus.

This isn’t too surprising, especially given what Rachelle and I saw when the Vegas Strip started to reopen. Nevada’s infection rate has gone up 10x in the past 5-6 weeks.

I think it will continue to get worse. The trends are showing continued increases in the infection rate in many parts of the USA as well as in many other countries.

Recently it seemed like a big deal when the USA passed 50K new infections per day. Now we’re holding at more than 70K per day… and very likely still rising.

The coronavirus situation began getting my attention in February, and I started blogging about it in early March. On March 15, I wrote a post called This Will Not Be Over Quickly. Unfortunately that’s still my prediction going forward. The leadership void is clearly making this worse, so we’re going to be here for a lot longer still.

While the past four months have been rough for a lot of people, we’re really not close to the end of this situation. I’d say many more months at least – well into 2021.

In the months ahead, I predict we’re going to see different waves of after-effects from the virus situation. I think we’ll see more issues arising from financial and political pressures competing with health and social pressures.

Initially a lot of short-term measures were put into place, but the virus is likely to outlast those. Giving people extra money, suspending foreclosures and evictions, and doling out loans are all temporary measures, more reactive than proactive. They punt various problems to the future.

How are people supposed to recover from losing their incomes and not being able to pay rent again? Many businesses have seen their revenues decline during this time as well.

What to do about schools is a hot-button issue that needs to be decided very soon.

Somehow even the mask issue is still controversial in some areas, such as Georgia. You’d think people would have sufficient education on that by now, but no.

In the USA it seems predictable that we aren’t going to see any significant federal leadership effort within the next six months, which means that many of the upcoming problems will simply go without intelligent or coordinated solutions, except to the extent that states and local governments step up to do more. Unfortunately that means the response will be inconsistent, which means a lot longer till we see the end of the tunnel.

There’s a lot more disruption still coming up, probably way more disruption in the months ahead than in the months behind us.

I share this to invite you to mentally and emotionally prepare yourself for an extended period of disruption. While it would be lovely if we could wrap this up sometime in the Fall, I think it’s more realistic to frame this as a much longer period of rising disruption. Imagine having at least a year to go instead of 3-4 months to go. And imagine much of the chaos increasing during that time.

Moreover, there won’t be just one disruption. I think we can expect compounding and overlapping waves of disruption from various pressures interacting for the next several months at least. I expect that the second half of this year will be significantly more chaotic than the first half – the rest of the year may even make the past four months seem tame by comparison.

I find that accepting this is helpful. It enables me to see the interesting invitations behind the surface chaos. As I say yes to the craziness, there’s a calmness that eases in afterwards. Within that calmness I see a host of opportunities to invest in different modes of living, different experiences, and different explorations.

At this time it doesn’t make much sense to invest in areas of life that are chaos afraid, chaos resistant, or chaos denying. When you make an effort to be chaos aware, chaos accepting, and chaos adaptive instead, you’ll see that reality isn’t being so terrible after all. It’s shifting the game of life to invite you to explore differently than before.