This is a most sorrowful thread, one that touches each of us most deeply.

Why art thou sad, O my soul? And why art thou disquieted within me?
Hope in God! For I shall again be praising Him,
my Savior and my God.

but allowing travel to food stores and drug stores does seem to have been inadequate. That isn't a really stringent quarantine policy.

I can understand a quarantine of a village or town 100 plus years ago. This could stop the transmission of a pathogen, no one in no one out, and a supply of food for the 40 days. In our society this does not work, we have to go out to shops, we have to go to doctors, drug stores, we have deliveries. All these methods can spread pathogens. Someone pointed out that Amazon could send you Covid within a day or two on their cardboard!

I think the problem with Covid is it is harmless to far too many people, if 50%-80% of people that do not show symptoms, all it needs is for one delivery driver or one person in a logistics centre to have the Virus and it will spread. I will submit as my evidence the log graphs of positive results or deaths per population for each country look remarkably similar.

We were going above and beyond mandated and suggested 'stay home' and 'social distancing' practices, everything from leaving shoes outside the door to washing every grocery item that came in the house, etc. but my husband got sick anyway.

I think it's very difficult to prevent the spread of an illness in general, and moreso one that shows no symptoms in many people or is contagious before symptoms show.

Even in 'normal' times even people with symptoms of illness constantly go out in public and interact. I have sat in church right in front of someone sneezing and coughing the whole time. I have gone to churches to pray when not feeling well. Any of us in choirs I've been in, secular or sacred, would often sit in rehearsal with a pile of kleenex and thermos of tea, so as not to be scolded for missing practice. People I know often say they just have an allergy, when they really probably have a cold, so as not to be excluded from work or activities. When I worked in NYC it was not at all okay to miss work for being sick. It was considered lazy. I think that factor of recent experience being so different does make it particularly hard for people to adapt to the idea of a very strict quarantine.

And clearly even decent efforts are quite failure-prone.

I might add, just because I find this very true during this period of isolation: the world I perceive when my sources of information are only read/heard, versus the world I encounter when I go out of the house and interact with real people, are very different. Even if the local parish just does praise music, or the director of the choir is a a donkey's rump, or the neighbor says something snide, those encounters make up perhaps 2% of my day, and even those people have good qualities as well, and are largely only irritating due to the same sorts of faults and foibles that any of us have.

But when I only encounter people via the media, social media, etc., that 2% seems to become 80%, because none of the ordinary banal parts of life get included - just the outrageous and offensive and horrible. It is, in that sense, a river of lies or distortions, even when true.

True; and the quarantine is mis-applied to healthy people, rather than diseased ones. First time in medical history that's been reversed.

Close the borders, test, trace and quarantine seems to have been quite effective in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan

And more so, more they are isolated naturally. New Zealand seems to have won the battle this way, they just need to live a comfortable self-sustained life until everyone is vaccinated.

And we were just stupid enough to go along with president "Mr. Gorbatchev, tear down this wall" instead of waiting for that other one "Build that wall! Build that wall!" It's your fault, dear American friends, that people in West Berlin are dying now!

Explore this for a second, and see how many heads start to spin:

1) Active participation is the goal to be considered at all times as the essential.
2) Singing is discouraged.
3) Holding hands is discouraged.
4) Choirs are discouraged, but cantors are encouraged.
5) Extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion.....?
6) Hospitality ministers should greet each person, so as to make him feel welcome.
7) Social distance must be observed.

ROTFL... sounds like we are going back to the TLM...
8) Priest should turn around so as not to breathe on the servers and the congregation.
9) No longer receive from the cup
10) Sign of Peace, no touching!
11) Discontinuation of contemporary music groups, microphones, etc. (I imagine microphones could be a harbinger of holding and spreading germs?)
12) Put lysol in the pipe bellows for slow dispersement through the church

Will lower wind pressure be mandated to prevent any unnecessary movement of air?
Edit: Forgot this wasn't the COVID humour thread.

The big topic in the library world at the moment concerns disinfecting returned books. In my library, it would be more a case of disinfecting returned technical monographs and engineering data.

I live in East Tennessee, the allergy capitol of the world. I should buy stock in the company that makes Claritin. With my choir, the allergies are real and believable. I encourage choir members who are sick to stay home and stress that no one is indispensable.

Somehow, I think we will all survive this, although it may not be fun. Has the thought occurred that some folks, having been away from liturgy for a couple of months, may not feel any compulsion to come back. We have those who were only marginally enthusiastic about mass in the first place.

two-munich-scientists

Wonderful news, but I have guests round for dinner and then we will sing Compline. So won't be able to do a literature search for other scientists whose research claims to show the opposite.

I am still looking forward to research being made into if we see increased rates of respiratory illness in choirs.

Of course 'safe' has all sorts of meanings, N.B. what is 'safe' in your kitchen is not considered 'safe' in a school laboratory.

No organized singing? Well, back to business as usual!

Here's a serious question: Is it possible to construct a screen in front of the choir which is made out of N95-mask-type material, but acoustically transparent?

The point of maintaining social distance is the possibility of being infected by someone carrying the COVID-19 virus who has not yet manifested the symptoms or may indeed be an asymptomatic carrier of the virus, which could infect someone else via close contact.

People worry about why the fuss over the corona virus, arguing that the flu is just as lethal, if not more so. It turns out that, deaths from flu over a six month seasonal period are fewer than the deaths from the corona virus over the past three months.

It is very distressing, especially to us who are church musicians, that churches have had to shutter their buildings and cancel or hold services without congregation - and that choirs are considered not viable because of the epidemic. I have been greatly saddened by these losses.

One can sing wearing a mask. I do my daily workouts wearing a mask, which isn't much fun as it diminishes the air intake, but I figure it builds lung capacity, kind of like exercising at high altitudes. It is said to be somewhat useless, though, as once the mask is drenched with moisture from speaking, singing or breathing hard then it no longer serves its protective function. But it might be better than nothing, or at least give a psychological comfort.

"One can sing wearing a mask."

Just because one can doesn't mean it's worth doing, though. It also wouldn't be as feasible for folks who have to wear glasses to read music/texts.

You joke, but I know of one church considering augmenting their music program with professional signers to make it more "inclusive" to deaf people.

At some point that I can't precisely identify, the mainstream narrative has changed from "flatten the curve" to "we can wait for a vaccine!". The first had sense to it. The second is just not viable (both due to the hypothetical nature of an imagined successful vaccine, and the time frame associated with its possible arrival). The costs we have already incurred in this country are steep, but nothing compared to what continued lockdown for 18-24 months would result in. And all this pales in comparison with the developing world - where a combination of famine and hundreds of billions of dollars of lost remittance dollars (money sent from workers in the first world home to their families for survival) could endanger not hundreds of thousands but hundreds of millions of people. To say nothing of war and revolution and refugee crises that problems on this scale so often cause. In case you think I'm making this up, just a quick couple of examples:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/25/world/americas/virus-migrants-mexico-remittances.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52373888

Of all the dangerous notions circulating right now, "we can wait for a vaccine" is probably the most deadly. If we do indeed try that, choir will be the least of humanity's problems. However, due to all the above I do not expect this to actually play out in reality. And on the pragmatic side, the gradual reopening and mingling of society over the summer will render such dramatic possibilities irrelevant anyway. Once a decent proportion of society is out and about getting haircuts, eating at restaurants, going to Mass, etc., it just won't make sense to think that cancelling choirs can somehow single-handedly stop the virus. Or from another perspective, if choir members are free to engage in heightened risk in their shopping and eating and other activities, they will also feel free to make their own decisions about the risk of choir. We have about 4 months of easing back into life, checking statistics and research, and getting used to all this before choirs would start again anyway. No need to mourn the end of choral music yet.

This is the kind of thing that's cropping up (to say nothing of the ACDA/NATS approach being based on waiting for a vaccine):

https://www.vox.com/2020/5/6/21241058/coronavirus-mitigation-suppression-flatten-the-curve

A number of my 50-year choir veterans are in their eighties, so I am concerned. I am 72 myself. Our youngest person is mid-thirties or so. We are not a young group but I suspect that is the case for many parish choirs.

a_f_hawkins, you can't be 81. You write like a much younger person. LOL.

Re: Jared's shared link example of the insanity ensuing, and "beating the virus into submission (really??)... good grief. Apparently, people don't understand how curves work, and that it isn't that a flattened curve reduces the number below it, but simply prevents the max being hit all at once. Of course, the good thing about that max getting hit far sooner, is that it then drops, significantly.

As those 2 urgent care docs said... you can't keep trying to protect "everyone," just those who will be hit the worst by it.
But substance and physical abuse, mental health, suicides (which Pres. Trump did point out yesterday, in the press conference I watched yesterday), etc. numbers are still rising, and that collateral damage is a very bad thing. People who otherwise might have gotten a "bad cold" and gone on with their lives are now dead.
Even some youth.
I watched a man's video about how his child hung himself, and he thinks the kid just didn't have the outlet he needed, because the world has become so incredibly small to some people that losing a single part of it (like their video game access) drives them into despair. I sobbed.
I hate talking to my kids about "hard subjects" like child suicide, but it was just too important to not sit down and discuss as something that is actually happening, and why it's both bad and wrong, and what we can do to not let our emotions get the better of us (which is really hard, because this Toronto's effects have caused so much unnecessary anxiety and stress).

It's heartbreaking, and it's continuing to be pushed further and further by people who are willfully ignorant at (a very gracious and lenient) best and malicious and sick at worst. Until they stop giving Bill Gates so much of the limelight, I'm stuck seeing it as being the latter convincing the former... enough so, that it's infecting the way parishoners view eachother.

"Life will never be 'normal' again," is a thought they've been pushing on people from the beginning. So many are so willing to accept whatever "new norms" are offered, so long as it isn't something deemed "selfish."

Ugh. I hate when conspiracy theories start to play out.
Emphasis is obviously mine:

H.R.6666: "To authorize...entities to conduct diagnostic testing for COVID–19, and related activities such as contact tracing, through mobile health units and, as necessary, at individuals’ residences, and for other purposes."

(Here's a Representative contact form: https://tinyurl.com/yd8gqea9 )

I am more interested in keeping my folks - and myself, too - safe than whether or not we sing as a choir. For the time being, that is. Maybe June will bring some new results and we can move toward normalcy, whatever that is. I don't think we were ever that normal to begin with.

I'm not stir crazy. It is nice having those extroverts in seclusion where they can't bug the rest of us. Things are much more peaceful. My choir isn't practicing but they will easily pick up where we left off when rehearsals do resume. This virus is serious but let's not make it worse by rushing things. We'll get there eventually.

The whole idea of flattening the curve is to minimize the number of deaths from the virus by not overloading the healthcare system, not to prevent people from getting the virus. No healthcare official said that shelter-in-place, social distancing and wearing masks would stop the virus. Those thinking otherwise are either misinformed or intentionally dense.

Those thinking saying otherwise are either misinformed or intentionally dense politicians lying to us.

We all just need to learn sign language and sign the parts!

I think you have something there, @bhcordova. Perhaps we can convince the powers that be that the director signing is the principal communication. The choir singing is just to be fair to those who don't understand the director, which might even include the choir.