How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Social Distancing

Originally published in the Salt Lake Tribune  

I knew for a long time that I should keep a daily journal, but it took me years to do it. My waistline keeps telling my mouth not to eat so many carbs. And my brain keeps telling itself to meditate. But my wife and mother-in-law cooked pies for Pi Day, and who knows what I’ll miss while I’m doing nothing but breathing.

New habits, I’ve found, can be hard to form, even if we now know doing so is in our best interest.

Take social distancing, for instance. With the coronavirus spreading like biological wildfire, health experts say we can help control the blaze by keeping away from each other. But social distancing seems to be a hard habit for a lot of Utahns to take on, myself included. In fact, some of us are doing the complete opposite.

Those pies my wife and mother-in-law baked? We couldn’t eat them ourselves. Too many carbs! So, we invited friends and family over to celebrate a transcendental mathematical constant. (NOT social distancing!)

My mom went for a Costco run on Saturday, but gave up when she saw hundreds of people lined up outside the store. (NOT social distancing!)

My wife went for a hike in the foothills above Salt Lake City that same day — along with hundreds of other people with the same idea. (NOT social distancing!)

I was initially skeptical of social distancing. I’m a social butterfly, and the directive to avoid other people sounded like a form of bespoke torture. While out on a walk this weekend, it seemed like everybody I met wanted to talk. So, we hung out and talked. (NOT social distancing!)

I talked with: an urban farmer about his recent divorce; a pair of millennials about “cringey” anime; an old timer about the good old days; and some neighbors about lawn aeration. People didn’t want less personal contact: they wanted more of it. And while a renewed sense of sociability would be a silver lining of this crisis, it might also be exactly what leads us into deeper trouble. Not unlike Italy.

Italians are famously social. Every evening, they gather in loud, chatty droves at the town piazzas that serve as open-air temples to gregariousness. They greet each other with a kiss on each cheek. Unfortunately, that innate sociability has been exploited by a virus that thrives in social contexts, and the results have been devastating.

As of Friday, Italy, with a population 25 times smaller than China, has more than half as many confirmed cases of COVID-19, and more deaths than the country where the virus originally broke out.

Among the Italian cities hardest hit is Bergamo, in the foothills of the Italian Alps. My wife and I visited there last summer. We strolled through the cobblestone streets of the walled Cittá Alta (the “Upper Town”), toured the historic Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, and ate the best popsicles of our lives.

Later, down in the surrounding lower city, we joined a crowd of locals for a free concert at an old soccer stadium. As our Couchsurfing host Fernando told us, the stadium was built as a quarantine site for hordes of people dying of plague in the 1500s.

Today, the situation in Bergamo is catastrophic. According to Chico Harlan and Stefano Pitrelli, Rome bureau reporters for The Washington Post, scores of people in Bergamo are dying. They are mostly elderly. They are dying alone, without family to comfort them in their final hours. The crematorium and cemetery are overwhelmed. The dead are piling up, just as they did 500 years ago.

I recently checked in with Fernando, our friend in Bergamo. Thankfully, he and his family are well. He had a simple message for us: Take social distancing seriously. Stay home.

Staying home, I realized, isn’t just protecting yourself. It’s protecting other people. It’s the socially responsible thing to do. While it might be a hard habit to form, it could help us avoid the wartime triage decisions, expansive quarantines, and skyrocketing infection rates Italy now faces. All of those outcomes sound much scarier than some short-term social distancing.

For my part, I’m staying home. We might even bake a pie!