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Work From Home and the Environment

I should start by making this much clear: we are not in a post-COVID world. Far from it. For all of the talk of reopening things right now, COVID is still very much a factor. We are losing hundreds of Americans per day.

However, at some point we are going to be looking at the other side of this virus, and at that point, we are going to need to think about what different workplaces look like after the virus. Granted, many workplaces are already thinking about this.

Some workplaces cannot function virtually and therefore may end up looking the same as they were before the virus. There are many professions, such as many service industries, manufacturing, construction, and much more, that must be done on site and cannot be done virtually. There are other workplaces that have tried to function virtually, but with significant problems since the pandemic began—teaching comes to mind as one such profession.

However, some workplaces have discovered that they can function virtually quite well, and in some cases as well as they did before the virus. In such cases, it would be best from an environmental standpoint if work from home became a long-term condition.

In many countries, including the United States, transport is the number one cause of greenhouse gas emissions.[1] Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of said transport comes from the car,[2] which is the vehicle of choice for many to head to work. What this means is that if fewer people needed to go to a workplace, fewer people would need to drive. And if fewer people need to drive, there’s less pollution coming into the air, contributing to the problems of dirty air and global warming.

Basically, work from home is environmentally friendly.

Now, the question of whether continuing to work from home after COVID (in industries that have been able to work from home during COVID) is going to be, in many cases, an office-by-office decision, depending on how well different offices felt they were able to function during the pandemic. Some offices may decide that they didn’t function well when they worked virtually, and therefore will head back to their offices after COVID. Other offices may feel on the fence about this question. Other offices yet may feel that they have functioned quite well from home during the pandemic and will be more than happy to work from home after the pandemic. Other offices yet may feel that they have functioned relatively well during the pandemic but would find it useful to have a combination of a combination of in-person work and working at home. However, especially for offices that are on the fence—particularly offices that are in areas where the only way to get to the location (or by far the easiest/most convenient way to get to the office) is by car, perhaps environmental considerations could also play into the thought process in such a decision.

For as much as some of us may like to think of key decisions on the environment as some far-away thing for people in some distant land to deal with, the reality is that all of us as individuals, as well as our bosses as individuals, have a role to play in taking care of the environment. And, perhaps in cases where offices functioned well while working virtually during the pandemic, the decision to continue working from home after the pandemic can be more than an office functionality decision, but an environmental one, too.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions

[2] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200317-climate-change-cut-carbon-emissions-from-your-commute

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Coronavirus Update From New York City: May 20, 2021

This week, there is some big news within my family. My younger brother graduated from college! I am so incredibly proud of him and all the other students who overcame the challenges of education during COVID in order to graduate from college.

A major part of that graduation weekend involved doing some things that I had not done since before COVID, and as such was a little terrifying at first.

For example, the festivities surrounding the graduation itself made me a little nervous at first, I must admit. In particular, the large gathering of people out and about (with the graduates and their families) after the ceremony. I acknowledge that said nerves were not the most rational, for there were a combination of factors that made my catching COVID remote–not a single student present at the graduation festivities has tested positive for COVID symptoms (my brother’s college did COVID testing twice a week), not a single person present would be present if they had tested positive for COVID, the activities were all outdoors, I was wearing my mask, and I am fully vaccinated. However, sometimes nerves are not rational.

Walking through a rather busy diner after my brother’s ceremony in order to use a restroom also made me a little nervous. Between the number of people in the diner and the fact that I’m not sure the diner had good ventilation, my fears related to being in that diner (if even for a brief time) might be somewhat more rational than being at the graduation festivities. Still, between my mask-wearing, my being fully vaccinated, and the fact that I was only in the diner for a short time (only for a couple of minutes), I’m still one to think that my chances of catching COVID in that diner were extremely low.

I guess the moral of these two stories from last weekend is that it is not abnormal for us to struggle with fears, even fears that might not make the most sense, due to what we’ve been through with COVID-19 in the past year. It may feel freakish to struggle with some of those basic activities, especially if we have friends or family members who aren’t freaking out about similar activities. However, we are anything but freakish.

In other good news, COVID in my part of New York City continues to be on the decline–now down to under 3% in my zip code.[1] Most of all, a much smaller percentage of both hospital beds and ICU beds are being taken up by COVID patients in the hospital near where I live–15% of adult hospital beds and 31% of ICU beds.[2] Hopefully COVID will continue to go in the right direction where I am.

I hope others are well and safe!

[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/09/944379919/new-data-reveal-which-hospitals-are-dangerously-full-is-yours

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Mental Health and the Coronavirus

As some readers might happen to know, May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Given that fact, I think it is time for me to talk about something that I probably should’ve covered on my blog long ago: the topic of mental health and the Coronavirus.

That being said, given the trauma that some of us have experienced and may be continuing to experience from the sicknesses and losses of family members, coworkers, neighbors, and or/friends, the topic of mental health and the coronavirus is still very relevant, I think.

I am not a mental health expert. However, my own experiences, the experiences of family and friends over the past year, and the stories I have heard about other similarly traumatic events have taught me a few things that I think a lot of us should keep in mind going forward:

  1. Different people deal with the same challenging, even traumatic, events in different ways. Each person’s body is different, and each person’s mental health state is different. As such, each of us is going to deal with events like what happened in the past year in a different way.
  2. It is not abnormal for some of us to deal with phobias related to a traumatic event long after that event is over. On a personal level, due to terrorist attacks involving airplanes on September 11, 2001, I’ve had a fear of low-flying airplanes ever since that day. Even though we are nearly twenty years removed from that dreadful day, it is a fear that has never gone away, and it’s a fear that may very well stay with me for the rest of my life. I’m not sharing this story to freak people out, but to instead remind us that we should not be freaked out if some of us may likewise grapple with phobias after other traumatic events, including what we’ve been through with COVID during the past fourteen months or so.
  3. Because of the difficulties (even traumas) some of us went through, it may require a little bit of patience with ourselves when we struggle emotionally do certain things for the first time since before things shut down as a result of COVID-19. I remember the hesitation I had when I took public transit for the first time since things shut down as a result of COVID, for example—there was definitely a bit of a mental barrier that I had to get through. Such will be the case for others of us, I’m sure. To make it more challenging emotionally as we sort out what things we can do (in spite of any fears we have) and what things we should avoid is the fact that COVID is still very much around and deadly—as a result, unvaccinated individuals, in particular, will need to continue acting with some level of caution.
  4. Dealing with the emotional strain of difficult events from the past year is not a linear process. For me, one of the biggest emotional strains was hearing the endless noise of hospital sirens as COVID was getting bad. There are still times that I come back to that moment and feel a little (or a lot) emotional. There is sometimes this expectation that after a certain point, we should be “over” such difficult events. That expectation is, to use a favorite President Biden expression, malarkey.
  5. There is immense emotional and mental value to in-person connection with other people, even for many of us who are introverts. I’m an introvert myself, and I readily admit that the past year has shown me that, while things like Zoom and Google Hangouts are better than nothing, there is sometimes no substitute mentally and emotionally for in-person connection. Now, I am not against the precautions that needed to be done in order to protect ourselves and others from the coronavirus (if anything, I was for those precautions). But nevertheless, the past year has also shown many of us introverts that in-person connection is so important both emotionally and mentally.

These were a few of the major things that COVID-19 have taught me in terms of caring for mental health. That being said, if there are other lessons that we should learn from a mental health standpoint as a result of COVID-19, feel free to comment below!

additional advice on how to navigate through the pandemic mentally, and for learning about resources in the event that you are struggling to navigate through the challenges of COVID-19, consult the page that the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has on mental health and COVID-19. If you don’t live in the United States, please consult the mental health resources for where you live.

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Coronavirus Update From New York City: May 13, 2021

I start today’s post with another dose of good news: my younger brother is now fully vaccinated!

He got vaccinated last Friday. His side effects were in many ways similar to mine: chills, a headache, fatigue, a sore arm, and nausea (which was something I didn’t have much of, though I had little appetite). And, like me, he started getting those side effects about 12 hours or so after his second dose, and the side effects lasted for 24 hours or less (with him, it was under 24 hours, with the exception of the arm soreness that lasted longer). I share my brother’s side effects (with his permission by the way) to yet again highlight that for all the vaccine hesitancy over side effects, the side effects are very short-term (the very rare blood clots from the Johnson & Johnson notwithstanding) and are child’s play compared to getting the virus (some of whom still suffer certain symptoms for months or over a year after catching the virus).

What this means is that everyone in the household I am in is now fully vaccinated, even if one member of the household (my younger brother) is still off at college. It also means that the risk of any of us catching COVID-19, which we were already all trying to limit through wearing masks and practicing social distancing, is even lower now. It’s a relief to know that all four of us are now vaccinated.

Also a relief is the fact that the test positivity rate for COVID has plummeted both in New York City and in my part of New York City. The test positivity rate citywide is now under 2% and it is just over 3% in my zip code.[2] The days of test positivity well over 10% in my area seem so long ago and yet so short ago at the same time. I am hoping that we continue trending in that direction, and that we can get to a point with this awful pandemic that we can at least have this thing well under control.

The one piece of not-so-good news is that New York City, like many other parts of the United States, are starting to experience slowdowns in the number of people getting vaccinated. In early April, there were over 100,000 people per day getting vaccinated–that number has slowed down significantly since then.[3] My guess as to what is happening here is that many of the people who were enthusiastic about getting vaccines have now been vaccinated (me being among them, as I got my first dose around the time that daily vaccine doses distributed in New York City was about to hit its peak). Now, in many cases, I think we are to the populations that were waiting for the right time to get vaccinated (in terms of work obligations) as well as the vaccine-hesitant.

I will be interested to hear how readers are doing!

[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-goals.page#viz1607355501127

[2] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page

[3] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-vaccines.page

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Nursing Homes and the Coronavirus

As my readers know by now, the death toll from the Coronavirus in the United States has been astronomical—heading towards 600,000. Also astronomical is the fact that 182,000 of those deaths, as of April 15th, have happened in nursing homes, whether it be residents or staff.[1] What this means is that over 30% of total deaths reported from COVID-19 in the United States have been related to nursing homes, in spite of the fact that nursing home residents and staff combine for about one half of one percent of the total population in the United States.[2]

But how did we get here, and where do we go from here?

Yes, a high percentage of the population who died from this virus were over the age of 65, and yes, nursing homes have high concentrations of older persons. However, simply attributing what happened during COVID-19 in nursing homes to their having lots of older persons is a copout to me. It is a copout because people involved with nursing homes are dying at a much higher rate than seniors as a whole.[3]

Instead, what we’re dealing with is that too many nursing homes and too many policy decisions related to nursing homes during COVID were/are broken on so many levels. Here are some of the ways in which many nursing homes, as well as many policy decisions around nursing homes, are broken:

  • Understaffed nursing homes
  • Poor quality of care at many nursing homes
  • Nursing home neglect, which stems from the aforementioned two issues
  • Deprioritizing of nursing homes by many government officials
  • Outdated laws
  • Inadequate government oversight (and oversight in general) with nursing homes[4]

The fact that so many deaths happened, and that so many of the deaths could have been avoided with better care from nursing homes and better government oversight of them, is a point of grief, I think. These deaths needn’t have happened. If it is a point of grief for you as it is for me, you might be interested in attending an event on May 20th that will be focusing on honoring nursing home lives.[5]

However, beyond grief there will be a need for significant reforms of our nursing homes—from the way we do (or don’t prioritize) them to the oversight they are given, there is significant need for wholesale changes. They are needed before the next pandemic, because yes, I believe there will be another one at some point. And they are needed so that we can extend and improve the lives of people in our nursing homes.

It’s time to value the lives of people in our nursing homes.

[1] https://www.aarp.org/ppi/issues/caregiving/info-2020/nursing-home-covid-dashboard.html

[2] The total population in the country is just over 330 million people: https://www.census.gov/popclock/. When adding the 1.25 million or so who live in nursing homes (https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/number-of-nursing-facility-residents/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D) and the over 600,000 people who work in a nursing home (https://phinational.org/wp-content/uploads/legacy/phi-nursing-assistants-key-facts.pdf), what we’re left with is a group of less than 2 million people that only takes up approximately half a percent of the total United States population.

[3] As of May 4, out of a total senior population of 52.4 million in the United States (https://acl.gov/sites/default/files/Aging%20and%20Disability%20in%20America/2019ProfileOlderAmericans508.pdf), about 447,000 people over 65 have died (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#SexAndAge); this amounts to .8% of the total senior population. On the other hand, there are 180,000 deaths out of 1.85 million (or so) people involved in nursing homes, which means that nearly 10% the total population related to nursing homes have died from COVID. Truly shocking.

[4] Many of these points come from an AARP report on the number of deaths in long-term care due to COVID. Note that the number back in early December, when this piece was written, was “only” just over 100,000: https://www.aarp.org/caregiving/health/info-2020/covid-19-nursing-homes-who-is-to-blame.html 

[5] Disclaimer: I volunteer for the organization that is facilitating the event. Still, since we’re talking about nursing home lives, I think it is worthwhile to note this event. By the way, the event is the inspiration for this post.