Diary of a Mad Small Businessman 7: It’s all fixed and we get to reopen?!? Really?

By Ben Calica

I know we’re supposed to be eager and excited to finally get to start opening again. But the truth is eagerness and financial fear doesn’t really overrule the science. You (and I) are to important to me, so any games we play won’t be with our lives.

(Note: This was written going to be shared right when the big shift with policing and systemic racism happened. Those of you who know me, know that I try and keep politics away from the store, instead focusing on doing what we can to nurture people treating each other with respect and kindness. But I reached my limit for what I could stand by and watch happening to other people who shared more than 99% of DNA with me and started spending time trying help things, at least in our little town.)

Time to open? Really? You can hear the almost desperate excitement in the air…finally getting to emerge from our various bunkers and go back to opening our little shops. The truth is that getting to go out and go shopping really isn’t that different for most people. We’ve been going to markets, as well as Target and Costco, and other big stores that got to stay open because they also sell essential goods to buy all the stuff little stores like mine sell (which was frustratingly unfair ). We are each good at going to the market now, masks in place and able to whip out sanitizer on the handles of hand carts by reflex. Small businesses have been on dribbling life support if they haven’t already failed and the panicked need to get our business back is thrumming through our bones.

And we knew from the beginning that we were in for a rough ride. My main reason for having the store is how much I believe in the fundamental value of getting people to play face to face, to use games as an excuse to connect and laugh together. I knew that the way we did that was going to have to fundamentally change, probably for the next couple of years. And I do have an idea how to do that [coming in the next post.]

But when it comes to the state permission to open back up again I had to think long and hard and I’ve ended up deciding to do things a bit differently. I’m clearly turned into an overly careful old man and am going to do things a lot slower and more safely,and make that decision based on the science, not the $$$. (which is gonna be a big pain in the butt and probably cost me a lot of $$.) I’m going to finish up getting the store online and we will stick with curbside for a while longer. But it’s your store too, and you guys deserve to know what the heck I’m thinking and what will change that?

So I got scared: The truth is I was blindsided at the pit in my stomach that happened when the state orders came to get ready to open up. I knew that we were going to have to do a lot of things different when we opened up, and had just started doing curbside when they said go for it, as long as you can keep people six feet apart, you are good to go. And the pit in my stomach has started to grow as I’ve watched people who have been so careful for so long just jump back in like the problem was suddenly gone. But here is the problem, it isn’t gone. Let’s be completely honest, to safely open back up, what is scientifically required is pretty straight forward.

1. A functional and widely used vaccine. (Nope, we don’t have those yet and it will be a while for that to get created, tested and out in the world.)
2. A real effective treatment. On one hand, it doesn’t seem like that big a percentage, but it seems to be about 1.5–3%. I get about 100–150 people coming into the store. Pretty sure that if we had to walk by 2 or 3 of them dead by the door, it would not seem worth it to keep a game store open for browsing. (Nope again)
3. Contact tracing/almost universal testing. Basically, this thing moves from person to person. The problem is that like 80% who have it don’t even know and end up spreading the sucker around. The whole idea of contact tracing is finding everybody who came in contact with a patient and having them quarantine for a couple of weeks. Sucks for them, but after you really do this for a while, you end up ending most of the spread, and if it breaks out again, it is in much smaller places and becomes easier and easier to keep from spreading. (This is the one thing we could actually do, but nope. not being done either, because somehow the notion has gotten out that more testing creates more cases, rather than giving us a chance to stop them from spreading.)

What I have seen instead is an amazing display of people acting like opening things back up a bit means everything is hunky dory. I drive down the by the park this weekend and saw dozens of people in groups without masks. I see my fellow stores reopen and the 6 foot tape is getting the same respect that a sign that said “we would prefer you not park here, but you can if you want to” would get.

I don’t really blame people….it is an invisible killer that leaves most folks alone. And it has been exhausting trying so carefully to be safe and diligent about this. But I have also seen what is coming and it looks like I don’t get to predict it because it is already happening. Our nice flatten curve is exploding again. Partially because of the protests (which I support) and the reopening (which I think was too soon). But mostly because many people have stopped taking it seriously, which worries me the most.

So one of two things is going to happen next. Either we are going to have another wave of shutdowns, which will really suck, or something much, much worse. See I didn’t mention the 4th thing that can happen that would allow full reopening.

4. Endemic: Or…we just give up. That means that we just stop trying to flatten the curve, we accept that it is out there and we are just going to be exposed to it and accept that 1–3 out of a hundred of us are going to die. In exchange we get to go about our business doing business. We trade the spectacular inconvenience of shutting down or doing true contact tracing that is trying our patience for the acceptance of a bit of extra death. This is all a race between how many people have to die before we have enough time to develop a vaccine or effective treatment, and one option has always been to put up our hands and accept the losses.

We’ve been extremely careful in how we do our curbside business from the beginning, because I’ve taken what is really going on here deeply to heart. I was ok with all the hardship to the store because I was in a position to really save lives by being responsible. Every time it would get tough, I would think, “If someone told me closing for 3 months would save the life of my mom or dad, I’d do that in a heartbeat. How can I do anything less for someone else’s?” With that in mind, I was stupidly scrupulous and careful about making sure we were not the source of potential infection in anything that came out of our door. We’ve been getting the shop online and have been getting better and better at carful curbside, and was ready to do that for a while.

But what feels like a little too suddenly, we’re oked to open, and I find myself genuinely afraid. I’m not a fundamentally fearful guy. (I’ve done years and years of martial arts, jumped out of a perfectly functional plane, and am technically a Rescue Diver. No, never rescued anybody…but I have far too young picture of myself on certification card that says I could. ) But here’s the thing of it…we aren’t opening up our shops for the right reasons, and the math of it is bad.

We’re reopening the economy cause people need the money from working to pay for food and rent and all that stuff. We’re plugging our noses and jumping in because we just can’t deal with the body blows to the economy anymore, from the big E economy to the, gotta pay rent personal economy. But we haven’t found a treatment that keeps people from dying away from their loved ones in pretty horrible ways, we haven’t created near universal testing and contact tracing so we can hunt this sucker down and keep it from playing a silent game of tag where those of us hiding from the seeker don’t even know we became it a few days ago. The virus’s fatality rate is about 1.4% (updated to potentially 5.4%) these days, which means that if we have 100,000 (update since writing — 122,000)deaths in the US right now, which means that there are at a minimum over 7 million cases in the US, even though the reported cases are only 1.7 million. And my gut tells me that these numbers are way low. (Update, the difference in the numbers between when I first wrote this and when I’m publishing it are enough to make one thing incredibly clear..without almost universal testing, we have no idea how bad this is, and that scares me even more.)

So what does that have to do with me? My concern has always been for my customers, but I think I can set up systems to take care of that. But the numbers for me are a lot worse. The City of Alameda has had 45 (69 now) reported cases, but that is with virtually no testing . They think that 80% are mild or asymptomatic, so I think that realistically means that there are at least 500 people walking around Alameda right now. So about 1 in 160. Figure I get 50 to 120 people coming into the store in a given week. Oh..and a big portion of my clientele includes teens and early twenties. I have a little too much experience with this particular age group, and the fact that they are pretty much invulnerable to the effects of actually getting sick with this, and they are mentally invulnerable anyway, and the likelihood of a legion the blissfully unaware spreaders is unfortunately high.

Bottom line is this, I think right now, if I open my doors beyond curbside pickup, not only do we continue to put people in danger, but I have a pretty high risk of getting my older then I look mid-fifties self exposed to this sucker.

We went on lockdown because we were facing a threat and we needed to protect each other while we bought the time to get the tools we needed to develop to fight this. Now we are reopening because we haven’t figured out how to put the whole system on pause and just focus on the true essentials and alternative ways to do things while we do so. We are gonna have to do things differently anyway to be of value/useful in the long term. Cutting that short because we are desperate to feel like things are normal isn’t a a game I want to play, not for these stakes.

The new website for the online store part of the store is www.d20gamestore.com, and we are working to get everything up and in there.

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