One thing that occurred to me as I was settling my father’s estate Is that Covid makes everything take longer. Under more ordinary circumstances, I would’ve had a ton of people physically helping, but I only have a few, because people are understandably afraid of infection.

You can’t actually have 10 or 20 people in your house packing things up and sorting things and loading things onto a truck because each additional person multiplies the chance for spreading the pandemic beyond your circle. This is painful for them as well.

Now multiply that problem and apply it to a business or an institution or a county government, or a state government, etc., suddenly you’re looking at the pace of everything being slowed down because fewer people are available to work as a team in a space.

Yes, there are a lot of jobs that can be accomplished on a computer. But a lot can’t be done on a computer. Anything that involves physical objects, taking care of people’s bodies, packing and unpacking boxes and making sure things get to the right place. All that slows down.

I wonder if this partly accounts for why, as so many people have told me, it feels as if a day lasts three days, or a week feels like a month. We are all moving in slow motion because everything has to happen more slowly, because of the lack of ability to gather.

Even something as simple as delivering new clothes to my mother’s room at the hospital is slowed down, because The hospital has fewer people in the building, it’s low on the priority list compared to physically caring for people.

I have a dear friend of 30 years who brought me some boxes, which was fantastic, and then apologized profusely for not being able to physically help, because he is the caretaker for several people in his family and he didn’t want to endanger them. I get that.

A lot of the psychological devastation of the pandemic is happening way down at the level of “it’s not a big deal.“ But stuff like not being able to physically be there for people in a time of need actually *is* a big deal. It contributes to the national emotional depression.