As alternatives emerge ...

Looks like we're entering the "You Are All on Your Own" phase of how to live with coronavirus risk.

As ever, there's zero effective guidance from the Feds -- Trump has quit even pretending to lead against illness and death, wishfully celebrating a non-existent normalcy.

Many states and cities, including California and San Francisco, have done rather more during the lock-down phase of living with COVID, issuing fairly clear rules and enjoying wide-spread cooperation. But now any unified official guidance is splintering.

“You have 50 different governors doing 50 different things,” said Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of public health at the University of California, Irvine. ...

“Everyone wants us to talk about policy, but in fact personal behavior still matters a lot here,” said Kent Smetters, the faculty director at the Penn Wharton Budget Model.

New York Times

As we try to pick up the threads of our lives, we again face choices.

I think I know the limits for myself: lock-down has not been difficult for me. I've been tiptoeing around the edges of the restrictions, visiting widely spaced areas of this city while Walking San Francisco, running in empty streets at dawn, but avoiding all close contact with other people from outside our household except for grocery shopping. I wear scarves and masks. I can live much like this for a long time. I feel absurdly lucky. One of these days I'll write a post about what I yearn for that's no longer available. But this is okay for now.

But, underlying it all, COVID has made it abundantly clear that I have to think of myself as an elder at 72. In the early days of the shut-down when younger friends checked in on us, we were pleasantly amused. But they were right to do so and we learn to gladly accept it.

I think the next phase is likely to be confusing for a lot of old people. The San Francisco Chronicle took up this topic yesterday.

Those who are 65 years and older account for 80% of coronavirus-related deaths in the United States. That’s not just a matter of hypertension — though the chances of having a comorbidity increase with age.

“Aging itself affects virtually every organ system in our body,” said Laura Carstensen, the founding director of Stanford University’s Center on Longevity. “We don’t regulate temperature as well as we get older. Our lungs don’t function quite as well as we get older. They’re considered ‘normal changes’ with age. . . . But normal, by definition, means it happens to virtually all people.”

... Still, a 65-year-old is no more like a 90-year-old than they are a 45-year-old. “If you look at the curve anywhere, the risk is not equally distributed,” [Louise Aronson, a professor of medicine at UCSF] said. “The death rate starts going up in the 50s. It goes up more in the 60s. It gets pretty bad in the 70s. It looks god-awful after 80. So we’re sort of lumping them. But more importantly than that is we’re stripping them of their agency.”

Aronson seems to lean toward the risk-taking end of the curve. She describes an 85 year old friend whose sheltering-in-place behavior sounds a lot like mine: that women has been taking advantage of the early morning hours when streets are empty to go outside.

“The same guidelines,” Aronson said, “the same restrictions should apply to everybody who is a competent adult.”

I think I agree. But I also appreciate that smart research scientists are trying to give us some parameters to help us make the many choices we'll all face in what looks to be another year of pandemic living.