If You Want to Make God Laugh...

 Early on in the pandemic one of my daughters exclaimed "Covid ruins everything!" 

It became a running joke in our house, a bittersweet realization that our lives had collectively acquired a news sense of unpredictability. Whenever some minor disappointment would arise, or some expectation, dashed, we'd all exclaim "Covid ruins everything." 

As if the virus was some super villain just off screen twirling its mustache and rubbing its boney fingers together while laughing a Vincent Price laugh. It was a way of coping and accepting the strange world we woke up in -- that spring afternoon in March of 2020. 

We even used to sing it to the tune of Cyndy Lauper's Money Changes Everything. (yes, I know The Brains recorded it first, but c'mon.) 

More than two years in -- and four vaccinations for most of us -- Covid is still finding ways to ruin everything. Recently, we had big plans for the summer. 

My mother was planning a visit with her best friend from the East Coast. They would sit and visit in a rented house by the beach while children and grandchildren got the guided tour from our family on fun things to do on the far side of the country. 

Alas, just before a camping trip one daughter came down with a runny nose -- attributed at first to my older daughter's cat that had just come into the house while she was on summer break from college. 

We were camping on the Gifford Pinchot national forest by the time we realized she probably had Covid. She and my wife tested positive when we got back from the mountains. My mom -- who house sits for us while we are out of town -- tested positive just before her friend arrived from back East. 

We had made it so far into this pandemic without getting sick. We had been so cautious. Even working on the front lines with Covid patients every day, we had managed to avoid it. 

We had become a little cocky, overconfident. 

We started making plans. That was our mistake.

There is a Yiddish expression: "Der Mensch Tracht, Un Gott Lacht" -- roughly translated to "Man plans and God Laughs." I've always heard a version that says, "if you want to make God laugh, tell him about your long range plans."

The point is, our lives had been unpredictable long before Covid started laughing at our long range plans. 

Yet, the unpredictability has been enhanced and complicated to an extent that we are still struggling to adapt to -- in our personal lives, as well as in the larger economy. 

I was one week into orientation at my new job when I had to call in my positive results. 

Prior to that, I'd only had one sick day in the past 12 years. Before the pandemic, I worked more than a few days with a mask on and feeling under the weather. I even lost my voice and worked a couple shifts with my unit secretary answering my HEAR reports for me. 

However, in the age of Covid, there is no working sick -- at least not in a hospital.

Employee Health had me home for 5 days and almost out for 10. I was never so sick that I was worried -- none of us were. But even as we have learned to better manage the course of the virus, the long isolation times have challenged employers who have yet to build the more flexible staffing paradigms to cover a week long illness every time an employee tests positive.

If employers don't allow for that isolation time -- they risk getting more of their staff sick, compounding the problem while also increasing the risk to customers or patients. 

Schools and childcare settings are also still struggling to adapt to this new reality. And if your kids can't go to school or day care, that often means you can't go to work because you have to stay home to care for them. 

The US economy wasn't built for this. It prided itself on forcing workers to come in to work no matter what. It built a "work ethic" culture around sacrificing the personal life for the professional. Now a virus has forced us to rethink ... everything.  

There a reason while the global economy is still understaffed, undersupplied, overworked and anxious -- we might be a little less afraid of dying, but we still can't plan ahead.