So much of the current discourse is driven by confusion induced by the gap between the rhetoric of “stay home” or “shelter in place” and the reality of the actual policy.

The other day I drove to Wheaton and bought a MacBook Air — the policy isn’t that people have to stay home or that Best Buy has to be closed, it’s that to buy something at Best Buy you preorder on your phony and they bring it to you at the parking lot.

As we move forward it would be really helpful to speak more specifically about what we mean by “ending lockdown” or “opening up” — allowing restaurants to return to dine-in is a different policy from reopening schools or dentists and there are different considerations in play.

In fact the whole dialogue has been a bit weirdly tilted to the restaurants question rather than schools, dentists, and other things for which there’s no real equivalent of trying to substitute with curbside takeout.

(I have a five year-old and I had a dental procedure scheduled for March 11 that’s now been delayed forever so I am talking my own book here but these seem like not-uncommon problems)