Weekend Musings – two new Coronavirus quarantine videos and a few thoughts on why I’m so impressed with China, South Korea, and Japan

Hello, happy Sunday, and welcome to my weekend musings. I’m going to keep this short and sweet since I’ve been working and studying Japanese for most of the day and I’m ready to make some dinner and wind things down. For those who have been following along, we decided to test out what it would be like to quarantine ourselves in our apartment in San Francisco.

We almost made it through a full three days but I broke quarantine last night to get dinner with my cousins who are visiting from Los Angeles. Still, it was a lot of fun putting these videos together, I’ve embedded them both here if you want to get a little comic relief and see my iMovie skills in action (not I’m being sarcastic here, I’m a total newbie at iMove as you’ll easily see when you watch these!).

Okay, now for a few thoughts about the Coronavirus. Like the title of my post says, I’m really impressed with how China, South Korea, and Japan have dealt with the Coronavirus. All three countries have ramped up testing quickly, managed complex quarantines, and in the process likely saved a lot of lives and prevented tons of people from getting sick.

In the US, I think we all know now that the CDC really botched the process of getting tests out and as such we are way behind other developed countries when it comes to testing.

With little-to-no testing most people in the US have assumed that what’s happening in Europe and Asia isn’t happening here. As I’ve said for a while now, I think that the Coronavirus has been spreading across the US a lot more than most people thought and as we finally get tests out we’ll see the numbers rise.

I’ve heard a few people say things like, “well I’m not going to change anything” or “what’s the big deal.” And I guess you can have that attitude if you want, hey it’s your life, your family, your friends. I don’t know about you but I try hard every year not to get the flu. I wash my hands, I stay away from coughing people, I take vitamins to boost my immune system, the flu sucks, and I don’t want to get it.

From what I think we’ve all seen it looks like COVID-19 sucks even more and it’s particularly dangerous for older people, especially those with pre-existing conditions. While I personally don’t want to be super sick for 1-2 weeks and miss work, I also don’t want to get other people sick who could die from it.

I think a lot is going to change over the coming weeks and like most people I know, I’m not panicked in any way, but I am prepared. More than anything I want to take a page out of China, South Korea, and Japan’s book and do everything I can to not be a part of spreading this deadly disease.

So let’s all join together and do a few simple things:

  1. Wash your damn hands (honestly – you should already be doing this)
  2. If you’re sick, don’t infect everyone else, just stay home
  3. Don’t buy all the toilet paper, I mean seriously, why are people buying so much toilet paper, is there something I don’t know?

If you want to try a little test quarantine like we did, give it a go. I enjoyed it and we’re still going to continue to limit our exposure and do our best to avoid getting the Coronavirus and spreading it to people who could be at risk of dying from the virus. The US has a lot of catching-up to do when it comes to testing for and preventing the spread of a virus like this, and I think we’ll all see just how far behind we are over the next few weeks.

Stay safe, stay healthy, and just think to yourself, do you really want to be sick for a week or two? Do you really want to miss work and possibly get your family and friends sick? The answer to those questions should be no which means just take the time to wash your hands and if you do feel sick, stay home and don’t get the rest of us sick. And with that, it’s time for dinner.

Thanks for reading, thanks for watching and stay-tuned tomorrow for an update on my weekend WordPress development adventures!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton