COVID-19 odds & ends

• Further to a previous post which mentioned cancelled IVF cycles because of COVID-19 -- The Globe & Mail had an article this past weekend about planning for pregnancy -- including postponing IVF -- during this pandemic. I found it curious/interesting that -- although it does begin with the postponement of an IVF cycle, and the emotional impact of that -- the article is actually more focused on the medical & safety aspects of pregnancy during a pandemic, as well as the impact on already-scarce medical resources.  On the one hand, it does cover all the bases, but... 
• I was (text) chatting with a group of other CNBCers, and several people were commenting about how suddenly -- now that we're in the middle of a global crisis, and everyone is at home, and presumably has more time on their hands -- people are coming out of the woodwork & wanting to connect and chat. (See my previous post -- since I wrote it, I had a cousin of my mother's call me on the phone... I feel relatively close to her, and we are connected on social media, etc., -- but she NEVER calls me!!) 
• Of course, more often than not, these conversations will turn to the caller's kids...!  More than one CNBCer commented something along the lines of "Where were all these people when *I* really could have used a sympathetic chat??"  
• Another great point/observation: is it possible that dealing with infertility, loss and childlessness, and all the grief and chaos and anxiety and uncertainty that comes along with that, has better prepared us to deal with current events than some of our peers?? 
• Great article (recommended by Jody Day of Gateway Women) from The Guardian on coping with radical uncertainty, including some practical tips and helpful podcast recommendations. Opening paragraph: 

In 1939, in a sermon preached at Oxford University in the midst of a different global crisis, CS Lewis made a distinction that’s worth revisiting today. It wasn’t the case, he pointed out, that the outbreak of war had rendered human life suddenly fragile; rather, it was that people were suddenly realising it always had been. “The war creates no absolutely new situation,” Lewis said. “It simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice… We are mistaken when we compare war with ‘normal life’. Life has never been normal.” 

• Margaret Atwood wrote an interesting essay for The Globe & Mail about "Growing up in Quarantineland" during the 1950s & 60s, before vaccines were developed for things like polio. 
• Even when I was a child in the 1960s, most kids got chicken pox, mumps and measles -- things children are routinely vaccinated for now. I remember chicken pox decimating my Grade 1 class in the spring of 1968 -- an entire row of my classmates sat empty at one point! -- and then the mumps later that fall. Most kids these days will never have to deal with any of these once-common (mostly survivable) childhood illnesses. 
• My mother had hepatitis when I was a toddler, and wound up in the local hospital (the same one where I was born). We lived just down the street (the main street in town), and one of my earliest memories is of my grandmother holding me up to a window (the hospital window) & my mother being inside, waving at me. I seem to remember my sister was in the stroller. I must have been 2, because my sister & I are 21 months apart, and we moved to Saskatchewan before I turned 3.