Coronavirus day 1

Of course it's not actually day 1 of coronavirus, but it feels close enough to the beginning of our personal mini-Armageddon that I have decided to call it day 1: school is officially closed as of yesterday, and so la p'tite and I are now holed up at home, shunning contact with the plague-ridden outside world as best we can (sort of). Next week starts home-schooling, or something approximating it; for now it is a question of embracing our cabin fever and making the most of it.
I am secretly looking forward to the home-schooling aspect of things - madam, it should be said is most definitively _not_, but we have at least managed to make a list of 'things we want to learn about while at home together next week': we are going to
- do a report about volcanoes,
- do a calligraphy project
- learn about the American revolution, and
- write a story each. Her writing prompt is, 'what if a kid found a bomb under the teacher's desk?' prompted by an exhaustive, disorganized, gleeful, improbable search for bombs throughout the house this morning, mainly, we suspect, in an effort to avoid the family meeting. Trophy BF attended the meeting remotely (note to self: buy stock in Zoom; it will be the only stock not in freefall at the moment) and was very game: he too was given a writing prompt ('what if a sorbet jumped into the pool while crying?' which he will doubtless manage to do something brilliant with), participated in the long-distance gym lesson organized (I use the term loosely) by madam, and suggested a science project for us to do, which we may or may not get to (we are currently reading a book while hiding inside the massive furniture-and-blanket fort that dominates the living room, and have shown no interest in coming out). I am not totally sure how exactly I'm going to convince her that we should sit up at the table Learning About Volcanoes, but this feels like an opportunity to try out what home schooling would be like, so I'm tentatively excited. We have gotten as far as making ourselves a plaster of Paris volcano, which needs painting before we do the vinegar and baking soda trick on it; the kit came with a geode (which we dutifully cracked open) and a pumice stone (which I will use to scrub my feet in the bath tonight).

The interesting thing is that as long as I leave her alone to get on with her projects, she's perfectly content: she's been reading in her fort (quote: "I love books! the reason books are better than screens is that the batteries never give out") in her pyjamas most of the day, and has been quite lovely, without apparently any need for external input. She has come up several times requesting food, hugs, or, twice, 'a tango competition,' but otherwise she's been quite self-entertaining.

(As have I: I have dug out a monster load of crabgrass and oxalis from the front garden, cooked meals for the next three days, and re-read the first half of La Sombra del Viento, actually looking up the words I don't know this time round; the majority of the vocabulary I am pleased to report is gratifyingly obscure and I am learning some English words along with the Spanish. Google gave me 'groyne' as the English translation for 'espigon,' for example, which turns out to be a low sea wall constructed to check erosion; likewise 'sortilegio' is 'sortilege,' which (duh, if you didn't know) is the historical practice of fortunetelling by drawing a random card. So there.) I should also say it's been chucking it down rain all day today; it's not just coronavirus.
Anyway. A moment to reflect on the whole coronavirus thing: I understand that the point currently is to slow down transmission so that we can avoid overwhelming the health care system's capacity with a huge dramatic peak in cases and possibly, maybe, give the CDC time to develop a vaccine for this thing before too many people die of it, but given that the healthcare system can't actually do much about it except for Tylenol, oxygen and a ventilator if it gets really bad, it's hard not to wonder whether we should be concentrating our efforts on getting everyone in the country a home O2 sat monitor and a thermometer so that they can just call the oxygen delivery company when they are ready for home O2, and 911 when the home O2 isn't enough and a ventilator is in order; ditto Tylenol. Likewise, despite all the efforts to develop a PCR test for viral RNA to figure who has live virus, a test for COVID19 antibodies - which would identify both who has an ongoing infection plus who has recovered from it and therefore can go out into the world and do their work - might ultimately be of more utility.  
The situation at work feels ludicrous: the official word on Friday was 'phone triage all patients; if there is anyone you can't rule out COVID19 by phone, then refer them to public health,' which is deeply, deeply nonsensical on several levels. (The only way, given that we know there is community transmission in asymptomatic people, to 'rule out' COVID19 is with a lab test, not a phone call, ergo if we followed this policy, we would be sending literally every patient to Public Health, and Public Health would be sending them right back to us because they are still completely overwhelmed and therefore only testing people with known exposures plus symptoms; therefore the policy makes zero sense, but all the administrators keep repeating it as if it does make sense and I am apparently just being difficult and unhelpful). It is very, very tempting to just quit my job and sit at home and wait this whole thing out, except for I need to go out there and pretend there is something we can do about COVID19 in order to earn money to pay for the house to which I would dearly love to just retreat).
We do not (no surprise) have anywhere near enough N-95 masks at work (five, at last count; they are technically meant to be disposed of between patients, ha, no news on when more will be forthcoming), and the fit-testing didn't happen until yesterday (finally organized by the medical assistant, NOT the administration), so our pants are well and truly down. What I have done is filch one N95 from each place I work thus far plus a small one for la p'tite should the need arise, seal each one in a ziploc bag labelled with each day of the week, and I will reuse each mask weekly for the whole day at work, covered with a surgical mask (or a plastic face shield, if I can get one, since there's limited evidence to suggest that this might prolong the life of an N95, but of course these are also not available for love or money in any of the places I work), and then reseal them in their ziploc baggies, leaving 7 days for the virus to hopefully die until the next time I need to reuse the mask. It's a faff, and it's far from perfect, and I will doubtless get sick with this eventually, but hopefully I will not take anyone down with me. On the plus side, the lack of air travel is probably brilliant for the environment...