New School

#1

3/24/2020

An Epic Scale

Writing about what you are most interested in always makes the best writing. And while I could choose to write about my new life, my new temporary normal, I'm most interested in the magnitude of the pandemic we are living through. I heard about CV19 at a dinner several weeks back. It was something our friend was going on about, and I just thought to myself, "She is a little paranoid talking about no manicures and pedicures anymore!" Mark my words: just like I did that night, you will never forget the moment in your life when you first registered the CV19 in your conscious thinking. After that dinner, it quickly snowballed from a disease in far away China to an imminent threat to Americans.

I spent the next several weeks trying to process and absorb what was happening to us and around us. I focused on the smaller picture: teaching, Gianluca and the townhome we were in escrow on. It wasn't until I watched 60 Minutes last Sunday that the pandemic - in every sense - took hold in my mind and something clicked. The realization that what we are living through is massive in scope, that no one alive today has ever experienced one (how many things can we say that about?), and that we are literally making this up as we go along....

But not the biotech industry. They've been waiting for this moment it would seem. One company, featured on 60 Minutes, built an entire machine that had never been used to help react to the novel corona virus. Talk about the idea of build a bridge and they will come! Another biotech company on the show is already scaling up their vaccination. When asked if he was gunning for a competitive advantage, he response was an emphatic no. That all the biotech industries are sharing for the greater good. That's when it hit me: we are all human, we are all fighting world war III and our enemy is a germ. We will make the history books and we will never forget this time, as long as we live.