No easy answers when they say you’re essential but you’re not sure you should be
The messages come through from all over Kansas City and beyond. A mother is devastated about her daughter’s canceled wedding. A man is heartbroken to miss a beloved aunt’s funeral but felt he had no choice with a wife and young child at home.
Maybe you read about the Lenexa woman who lost her husband to COVID-19 and is now in isolation, planning a funeral even though she can’t yet know when it might take place.
We are in the beginning days of Kansas City’s shelter-in-place order, which brought us in line with many other cities and regions around the country, prohibiting church services, weddings, funerals and all business deemed non-essential.
But that’s a strange term — essential. What does it mean? Who decides?
What’s essential to you may seem superfluous to me, and vice-versa. Dry cleaners remain open. Is that really essential? Accountants are open for business, despite an extension on filing taxes. Public parks are open and you’re encouraged to exercise outside, but golf courses are closed. Nebraska Furniture Mart argued it was essential, then closed its doors Tuesday evening.
The middle is murky. Nobody knows. The only easy decisions exist on each extreme.
Nurses. Doctors. Police. They need to work. Pro baseball and soccer players can’t. Swimming pools and gyms close. It’ll be a while before you go to another concert.
But what about those in between? My email and DMs have filled with stories from readers. The ones in the middle — those without obvious answers — stand out at the moment. One came from a man who works construction — we’ll call Michael, because he’s about to explain why he’s a crappy employee right now. The least we can do is not rat him out to his boss.
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas’ stay-at-home order labels construction an essential business, but Michael isn’t sure it should be. He suspects the determination arose from political connections.
That’s not reassuring.
“The way I read the order was ‘essential to health and safety,’” Michael said. “I read that as immediate health. I’m working on a job that’s going to be done six months from now. Nobody’s going to get sick or not have food or anything like that because this job gets done a little bit later.”
Michael isn’t paranoid. His wife has essentially been saved by an experimental drug fighting a disease doctors first thought might kill her by now. Michael calls the drug “almost a miracle.” She’s not cured, but she’s stabilized. The catch is the drug weakens her immune system. You can see why that’s a particular problem right now.
Michael’s mother-in-law is in her 70s. She lives with Michael, his wife and their daughter. One more reason for Michael to worry.
He’s the only one who leaves the house.
“If they were to get sick now, I would know exactly where it came from,” he said. “If I were to stay home, I could all but guarantee their safety.”
This is the impossible choice so many in the country are left with: work and provide, or quit and stay safe. Each comes with risk — one financial, one health.
Michael describes himself as analytical. He likes data. Numbers. The biggest global crisis in years doesn’t give him much to work with. He lays awake when he should be sleeping, trying to calculate his chances of exposure — 1 percent? More? Less? At what point does that accumulate to the point he should stay home, his responsibility for protection overriding that of providing?
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s hard to say. I guess I’ll know it when it gets here. I don’t know, because I don’t have actual numbers to work with. I have my feelings.”
He knows he’s not alone. He’s talked to guys on his job site, and others. They have extra hand-washing stations. They’re not supposed to share tools. Social-distancing requirements apply. Tool handles and other touch spots are sterilized several times per day.
It’s impossible to know how much that helps. All of those steps sound good, and the spirit is great. But construction sites are active places, and as long as work needs to be done, some of the extra precautions are bound to be broken.
Maybe you can relate. Should hotels be open right now? Does Amazon need to be shipping boxes full of toys from person to person to person? What about childcare for someone with a so-called “non-essential” job that can be done at home? Not to mention basically any air travel?
Who decides which business trip needs to be taken and which one will happen on Zoom?
Maybe you’ve had some of these thoughts. Maybe you’ve watched a neighbor drive to a job you don’t think is essential to public health. Maybe you’re like Michael, and you’re the one driving to a job you don’t think is essential to public health.
“I don’t know what the right thing is,” he said. “That’s the hardest thing right now. Trying to do right by my co-workers, by my family, and then by the people whose houses I drive past who are shut inside and afraid and watching the rest of us go to work when they don’t have the option.”
Stories like this are best if there is an obvious actionable item. But what is Michael’s? What’s his play here?
He can’t just quit. He has a wife (who stopped her part-time job because of the virus) and daughter and now a mother-in-law at home. They need to eat.
But he also doesn’t feel right about working. His is a fairly social job, and at the moment he finds himself avoiding people. Nothing critical. The job isn’t in danger. He’s not ignoring safety. But there are double-checks and triple-checks and time spent chatting with a co-worker and a dozen other extra steps that are best done for the job.
Michael isn’t doing any of that right now.
So, again, what’s his play here? Does he talk to his boss about his concerns? And risk being blown off, or worse? He expects the construction industry to struggle along with the economy. Should that factor into his thoughts? And if so, which way? To value every last paycheck even more, or to feel like he has less to lose by staying home?
Michael is guessing, for now. The specific details of his life are his own, but his story isn’t important because it’s unique.
Quite the opposite: His story is important because it’s common.
We’re all guessing here, together and alone, from the politicians writing these orders to the rest of us trying to make sense of them.
This story was originally published March 25, 2020 at 5:00 AM.