COVID-19

I’ve been out of the country for almost a week. Did I miss anything?

So, my wife and I went down to Mexico last Sunday for a spring break vacation with another family and the “kids”. Never mind that we found out that our son has his spring break the following week, we still went. Not our fault his school is dumb. We certainly had some concerns about the Coronavirus but neither DFW or Mexico (Cancun) were a hotspot. The plane was the worry but we brought wipes and scrubbed everything done the best we could and hoped for the best.

In short, the resort itself was really nice and the weather perfect. The plane trip down was rather stress free and I will say it was the first time I’ve ever walked through Mexico immigration without waiting in a line. As for the news, well that was a different story. As everyone knows, things sort of blew up this past week and I have no wish to rehash that in anyway. It really seemed like every hour there was a new epic issue blasted out on Twitter. By the end of the vacation, I asked the party if our trip had been scheduled a week later would we have gone? The unanimous answer was “no”. Maybe we were dumb for going in the first place but it does seem like this past week had a once-in-a-lifetime altering news cycle, which was certainly difficult to predict.

As far as the trip back, our plane was entirely full. I suspect that we just timed this trip “right” along with a number of others. There was no panic on the flight, however, and everything was handled normally as far as I could tell. The lady next to me wore a mask, which as I understand it helped to protect me more than herself so I appreciated it. The only troubling aspect of the trip was walking to customs and passing an elderly couple. The wife was sick and it was obvious. She was struggling and coughing a lot. Unfortunately, she did not have a mask and made no effort to cover the coughs. No idea what she had but my hope is that the plane filtration system was working properly and that she, of course, will be fine.

We are back now. Are we okay? Who knows? I do know that if I had stayed home, I wouldn’t know if I was okay, either. That’s really the panic behind the pandemic, the unknown. As I wandered the grocery store’s aisles yesterday, I didn’t see meat or bread or paper products or cleaning products. Panic of the unknown. I’m told the stores get new deliveries every day and there is no issue with the supply lines. As long as the hoarders calm down this should pass.

This is, of course, a volleyball blog so maybe I should touch on that a bit. Most of us here play or played NCAA sports or know someone that does/did. The pain of losing the season ending tournaments or even most of the season as some sports did can’t be described. We can all understand the reasoning so that’s good, but it’s like never getting to live a portion of your life. A gap of memories will forever exist around this time because they were never created. I honestly think that is one of the sadder things we as a race can experience. In its place will be how we handle this crisis. I hope we can all look back and say we handled it in the same manner as we handle our everyday lives with very little panic.

In closing, stay safe everyone. Use commonsense. Try to continue to live your lives the best you can until things calm down.