Spread Love and Tell Dumbass Jokes: How to Survive a Pandemic

By Steven Leigh Morris

Note: Here’s a link to resources for arts organizations weathering the storm of the COVID-19 crisis by going online.

Also, Californians for the Arts is a source of help for California arts groups.

In Idyllwild where I live, it’s snowing again. It’s been snowing pretty much all day. I took my dog Ernie for a walk in it, and it was coming down as fast and heavy as the stock market. Ernie is a 100-pound mix of Lab, Pit Bull and Great Dane. As he tugged on his leash, I told him about COVID-19 and he just didn’t care. Far more urgent for him was sniffing coyote poop and bolting for one rabbit after the next, almost dislocating my shoulder in the process. A service dog he’s not.

We made it to the bottom of South Circle Drive, past the village barber shop and the hand-written note in the window “Closed for a while out of an abundance of caution.”

Like millions of people across the nation, I’m self-isolating, which I hope doesn’t last as long as One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel that’s on my re-reading list for my time of exile. Though mostly, I’m doing a lot of nothing much, like Ernie.

I’ve been brushing up on Zoom for when my university classes resume next week. We’re no longer allowed to meet in person. To receive theater from a couch via a screen is, to me at least, antithetical to everything I teach and preach about the essences of theater, about actors breathing the same air as the audience. But now the air may be toxic. May be.

Self-isolating, I’m following orders like a dutiful soldier, or employee, or citizen. But I don’t believe anything I hear, at least not in its entirety, about this crisis. Perhaps this really is the end of the world, but it sure doesn’t look like that up Idyllwild. The world looks both empty and magical today, unless one embraces the terminal perspective of James Joyce.

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

 Or unless one embraces the  terminal perspective of our public health officials enacting lock-down policies out of an abundance of caution from fear of the worst: a 21^st century Spanish Flu, or Bubonic Plague. And they may be right. I just don’t know, and neither do they.

In a March 17 essay in STAT, Stanford epidemiologist John P.A. Ioannidis writes about the “evidence fiasco” as we strive to determine what on Earth or in hell is going on.

“This evidence fiasco creates tremendous uncertainty about the risk of dying from Covid-19. Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4% rate from the World Health Organization, cause horror — and are meaningless. Patients who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2 are disproportionately those with severe symptoms and bad outcomes. As most health systems have limited testing capacity, selection bias may even worsen in the near future. 

“Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with Covid-19 would be 0.125%. But since this estimate is based on extremely thin data — there were just seven deaths among the 700 infected passengers and crew — the real death rate could stretch from five times lower (0.025%) to five times higher (0.625%). 

“That huge range markedly affects how severe the pandemic is and what should be done. A population-wide case fatality rate of 0.05% is lower than seasonal influenza. If that is the true rate, locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.”

We’re flying blind here, enacting severe, cautionary policy in a void of data. And the lock-down policy itself may exacerbate the crisis – school closures in which kids return to, and infect, their grandparents.

Add to that scenario the possible nightmare that infection by CONVID-19 may not result in sustained immunity for the survivor, as in the case of more common influenzas. With its draconian social distancing measures, China is now seeing an uptick in relapse cases. This really does point to worst-case scenario.

I don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t believe anyone who says that they do.

In the absence of reliable data, we resort to an abundance of caution, to walking in the snow with the dog, to waving back, from a safe distance, at strangers; to closing our beloved theaters, to teaching theater through Zoom.

I don’t want to offer a Luddite’s complaint: Zoom has saved my classes. But before my state university suspended all in-person classes, my intro to theater students – from the university’s general population, i.e. not theater majors – were presenting five-minute plays they’d written in concert readings.

One play, written by a Chinese-American playwright, featured a white guy at a bar, pointing at a group of “Chinese” guys for starting the pandemic, though they were nowhere near China at the time of the outbreak. One of the accused raised both hands, and took a defensive step back, “Hey, I’m Filipino!”

The class roared with laughter.

Behind the glee was a sadness on my part, that this was to be the last live performance perhaps for months to come. The remaining plays for this quarter would be turned in on-line. One student wrote me that he was “really sad” that he wouldn’t get to hear his play read by his peers. Hearing those same lines on a micro-second delay via Zoom just wouldn’t be the same.

Theaters have closed around the globe. Something important has been “suspended.”

As I write this, I’m looking through a window at snow still tumbling in front of Sequoia and Cedar tree trunks. Yet there’s a shaft of sunlight. This diminishment shall pass. It’s nature’s revenge. We don’t know how long it will take, nor how far reaching the consequences.

In the meantime, what can we do? Stay in touch. Write to or call people who are alone. Care for those who have lost their jobs, the millions of bartenders and wait-staff, and store-clerks. The short-term impact looks dire. 

Spread love, and tell dumbass jokes. That’s all we have right now that matters, all we have that we can count on.