A Tale of Two .sigs

Sometime maybe in March I decided that I would use my email .sig to try to make a little bit of a difference in the general awareness to the pandemic.  I had heard something on TV and I had decided to write the phrasing on the sidewalk, and then I decided that I had access to way more people via email than I do via sidewalk and so maybe I should use my .sig.

So sometime in March I appended this to my .sig:

STAY HOME - STOP THE SPREAD - SAVE LIVES

I think one of the NBC shows was signing off with it or something and it just resonated with me.

That .sig was very much in line with the instructions we were getting early on: that people should stay home.  Don't travel, don't go to playgrounds or parks, don't eat out; stay home to "flatten the curve."

Sometime in the last couple of weeks I started to feel like I was the only person trying to deliver that message.  Locally they've opened the parks, people are eating out, and they are talking about in person school within a month.  Although the infection numbers are as bad as they were months ago, authorities have very much abandoned the "Stay home..." message.

That's too bad.  From my own vantage the message in that .sig is still exactly what we ought to be doing.

Other folks must have also come to the conclusion that there was nobody following behind where they were leading and so I heard a new pandemic catchphrase: the 3 W's.  The message seems more in line with the strategy being espoused by leadership.  So I changed my .sig:

WEAR A MASK - WASH YOUR HANDS - WATCH YOUR DISTANCE

There's part of this I like better than the old one: it seems critical that any messaging include "wear a mask."  Even under the old rules many people were going out, and it was important for those people to wear masks - often they did not (often they still don't).  I guess the old phrasing could have been "Wear a mask - Stop the spread - Save lives" but the WSS isn't as catchy as the SSS even if the "Stay home" part was always mushy.

It does sound like experts believe we could bring the virus under control with the measures in the new message without needing the greater restrictions of the first one.  I hope so.  Still it feels like we've softened the response at a point where we should have been becoming more restrictive.  The new phraseology seems far more economically friendly than the old one.  I am unsure that's where the priority should be.

But I'm not in charge.  I'm just playing around with my .sig.

And occasionally writing on the sidewalk.

And maybe changing the name of my wireless network.

And blogging about it:

Stay home

Wear a mask

Wash your hands

Watch your distance

Stop the spread

Save lives