Great Lessons You Can Learn From Quarantine - 2020 Coronavirus (COVID-19) Edition - Part 1

Lessons Learnt From Quarantine (And hope to remember)

Chances are, if you are a human on the planet Earth, you've recently spent four to six weeks (or more) in some type of quarantine — self-imposed, government-mandated or a combination of both. Unless, of course, you're a health care worker, essential employee or have other extenuating circumstances that meant you couldn't safely lock yourself away at home while figuring out what household textile to use as makeshift toilet paper or whether to binge Tiger King or Love Is Blind first.

So why has the entire world come to a collective halt? Because we have no immunity to the novel coronavirus COVID-19, a highly contagious and what seems to be highly deadly (to certain people) respiratory illness that has overwhelmed hospitals across the world, infecting more than 4.4 million people and killing more than 302,000 since January, according to Johns Hopkins University. There's no real treatment (no, you cannot inject yourself with disinfectant or beams of light, despite the president's suspicions) and no vaccine, although scientists, medical professionals, researchers and Bill Gates are scrambling to find both.

In the meantime, social distancing has been a stop-gap measure to help contain the spread of COVID-19 and "flatten the curve," everyone's favorite phrase for using isolation to decrease the amount of humans infected with the virus to avoid inundating the health care system and killing everyone.

So, yes, we did acquire a new viral vocabulary during quarantine, but what else have we learned in the midst of this global pause? And what meaningful lessons about empathy, resilience and our shared humanity will we take with us as we move forward — masked and hand-sanitized — into the future? Other than to be a better person and never take restaurants for granted again...

1. What six feet apart actually looks like.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends people practice social distancing to help stop the spread of COVID-19, which basically means standing six feet apart from each other so you can't spew infected goo droplets onto other people. But "six feet" is a difficult concept to understand for those with no spatial awareness. So here are things that take up six feet: two normal dogs standing nose to tail, two grocery carts, a dude in a top hat laying on the ground, a dining room table, a bathtub, three arm spans and six-fifths Danny DeVitos.

2. There are multiple names for the same disease.

The novel coronavirus, in the same family as SARS and MERS, goes by COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2. And it went by a third name — the "Chinese virus" — but President Trump decided to stop using the term, which he coined, in late March after many pointed out it was pretty racist. Although, to be fair, the 1918 flu pandemic is still called the "Spanish flu," and one can imagine several Spanish people took issue with that.

3. We should all be very grateful for all that we have in life.

Even if you get COVID-19, if you have access to any kind of health care you are already doing better than much of the world.

4. What a pangolin is.

These cute-ass scaly anteaters are thought to have been an intermediate host for COVID-19, which may have jumped from bat to pangolin to human in a wet market in Wuhan, China — where the virus originated. In light of the pandemic, the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture recently released a list of approved terrestrial animals that can be used for food; pangolins did not make an appearance. So it seems best to avoid eating them. Or bats. Or humans.

5. How to not touch our faces.

Don't. That's how germs get into your body.

6. Every song with a 20-second chorus.

"Keeping hands clean is one of the most important steps we can take to avoid getting sick and spreading germs to others," says the CDC. And the best way to keep your digits disease free is to wash your hands with soap and water for 20 seconds — or the time it takes to sing the "Happy Birthday" song twice — over and over and over again throughout the day. So while the public was discovering the importance of timed hygiene, and the mind-numbing repetition of singing happy birthday to themselves, they also uncovered every other song with a 20-second chorus to break up the monotony of bathroom karaoke. The next time you wash your hands, trying singing the chorus to Dolly Parton's "Jolene," "Queen's We Will Rock You," Beyonce's "Love on Top," Prince's "Raspberry Beret," Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide," Toto's "Africa," Lizzo's "Truth Hurts," or The Knack's "My Sharona (corona)."

7. All of our friends' streaming passwords.

Hahahaha.. yes, i did this. I Whats app messaged all my friends and got their username and password for all the streaming Apps and Sites that i did not have access to.

8. How to kill a man using a tiger and sardine oil.

Carole B. if you know what i mean..... TIGER KING - NETFLIX fame.....

9. Tigers can catch the coronavirus.

So can lions. Eight big cats at the Bronx Zoo tested positive for COVID-19 after contracting it from a zoo staffer.

10. What the inside of every late night show host and TV anchor's house looks like.

Jimmy Fallon has a slide. Trevor Noah has books and fake awards on his shelf....

11. WTF Zoom is.

And that backgrounds stick around for your next call. (Not that we found that out in a super embarrassing way or anything.)

12. That we will never complain about having to wait two hours for a table at a restaurant again.

Remember eating at restaurants?

13. How to make our own cocktails.

YES..... I now know what a Dirty Russian is and I also learnt how to layer cocktails expertly just like a Bartender would in your favorite Bar... 

14. Grocery delivery services are extremely convenient until everyone else also learns they are extremely convenient.

Here's hoping you can survive on peanut butter and cans of tuna until 4 p.m. three weeks from now. This is so true. At the beginning of this quarantine sometime at the end of March, i started ordering groceries online with Carrefour & LULU Hypermarket smartphone Apps. The first deliveries were within 24 hours. the next week when i tried to place an order for deliveries the wait time said 3 weeks...... WHAT??!!?! 3 WEEKS for groceries to be delivered home????!!!! Now i just walk up to my nearest grocery store and buy whatever i need and carry the bags home with me... Of course maintaining Social Distancing all the while.......

15. Essential workers are heroes.

Delivery drivers are heroes. Mail people are heroes. Grocery store employees are heroes. Nurses are heroes. Transit workers are heroes. Frontline workers are heroes. Any essential employee that continued to go to work to make America move when the rest of us were afraid or hunkered down in our homes is a hero. Thank you.

16. Sweatpants can also just be called "pants."

I've been saying this for years now. Finally everyone listened....

17. Teachers should be paid ten times more money for dealing with our unteachable heathen offspring.

Oh, so you thought teaching was easy, huh? Wrangling a bunch of snot-nosed, mouth-breathing beasts, animals restrained in their behaviors only by their relatively small size, uncaring creatures hellbent on refusing to learn and continuing to eat crayons? What a fool you were. Now you are the one who rations the crayons, you are the one whose lesson plan has devolved to "Please leave mommy alone for a moment for a little cry" and "Oh, no, don't drink the 'juice' out of mommy's glass for god's sake." Not so easy now, is it? And get this: You even love your children! Imagine if you had to deal with these monsters without the requisite emotional connection. Now, don't you think teachers should be paid more?

18. The benefit of outdoor activity.

Whether it be backyard gardening, a walk with your dog or a solo hike, we've never appreciated our "outside time" more.

19. This is what our dogs/cats feel like cooped up in the house all the time.

Now we humans feel the same way they do when we get a chance to go outside for a walk.. How the tables have turned. My dog keeps staring at me while I'm working out of my bedroom in my PJs. I swear, the look he gives me, i feel he's telling "You got Fired, didn't you?"

20. How to exercise with wine bottles instead of weights.

Or your cat, or your dog, a stack of books, a cinder block you found in the backyard ...

To be Continued..........