Some thoughts on how to be a little less afraid and anxious the days of Coronavirus, from your neighborhood NFL writer/former math teacher/parent from New Jersey, now under a pretty stringent emergency.
1 Try to “tune out” the national/international numbers. Worry about your phone booth: your family, loved ones, neighborhood. Are they safe/healthy/compliant? Our brains don’t handle huge numbers, international scale and long lags between actions/results/consequences very well.
2 If the last time you thought about exponential growth was an Alg II class 20 years ago, you aren’t going to process national data well: #’s too big, too many variables, and so on. It will only scare you. Let the experts do it. Do what you can to improve NEXT week's #s
3 Avoid the terms “lockdown” and “shelter in place.” They are inaccurate and come from active school shooter protocols. Those terms scare the less informed and more marginal folks, can exacerbate panic behaviors. Let folks know they can still walk the dog, order a pizza, etc.
4 Empty store shelves are terrifying: our brains can’t process pandemic, but “ACME is out of stuff” triggers every time there are 3 inches of snow. But from what I’ve seen: stores get wiped out by panic buying when the state emergency is declared, then slowly rebound.
5 So before retweeting an "Empty Shelves" pic, ask yourself: is this good info, or something dramatic which will scare people into hoarding and making needless emergency trips.
6 Takeout and liquor stores are open in most emergency states. Walmart/Target/Petsmart are open. Information does not travel well these days, especially in a medium like this one, where dramatic statements travel faster than accurate statements.
7 Much of what even the best of us do #OnHere is counterproductive right now: dunking on potus, amplifying stupid opinions, “Thought it was a hoax” jokes, etc. Before doing so, imagine a timeline with 100s of such tweets, some 12-24hrs old, and the impact they have.
8 A lot of people will be #OnHere (Facebook, etc) more than usual, using it as a social outlet. We need to be mindful of that. I’m talking to 30K people I do not know: if I am scaring/misinforming you to make myself feel better (or for retweets), I’m being irresponsible.
9 We can take our own control of the messaging: be more encouraging, brand isolation/distancing as patriotic the way we would have in WWII. We can’t control the bad messaging coming from on high, but we can each do our part #OnHere.
10 Fear is as great an enemy as the virus. We need useful concern, productive action (and INACTION from most), & precise information about what we can/should do. And love, support, encouragement and positivity. That’s not how we usually use this website. Lets try something new.
