As of the time that I’m writing this, we have had two positive cases of coronavirus in my county. Both of them appear to be as a result of travelers coming back with it and then testing positive, and as soon as they realized that they might actually have it, they sought medical care and put themselves in quarantine. All of the school districts in this area announced on or around Sunday evening that they would extend their Spring Breaks for another week (for the ones that were on Spring Break from the 9th to the 13th), effectively granting another week of Spring Break from the 16th to the 20th. Some of the districts that are… a bit further away from here have chosen to go one week further out from that. The district that I am currently living in has not released any further word on that. But the state that I live in has suspended the requirement for standardized testing for all students that would normally be required to take it, as that would start to come up in a month or two. I do know that much. But they test the different students at different times depending on their grade levels, what the requirements are for each grade level, and whether or not they need to re-test to successfully “be passed up” to the next grade, so I’m wondering if this is on the heels of a bigger plan to “hunker down”, or if school for the rest of the scholastic year might actually be scrapped in the face of this.

Obviously (or, well, maybe not that obviously?), I’m in a “high risk” group, meaning that I would probably not be able to shrug off the coronavirus if I got it. I’m an asthmatic, and definitely not a mild one at that. I just came off of prednisone and am hoping that I can manage having shortened both the dose and duration of the burst that I finished taking. I may temporarily cease my inhaled steroid if we keep getting positive cases in this county, and especially if we get any in this city. So I need to take extra precautions to ensure that I do not catch this, especially if it does become extremely local, hope that others are prudent enough to do the same to protect individuals like me, and hope that I do not actually catch it. Because that would really suck…