Patience

Patience. It's a virtue.
I looked it up.
Which is pretty much how I feel about the coronavirus. I go back to what feels like forever ago to me: junior high school. My Earth Science teacher gave us a roll of toilet paper that we were supposed to roll down the hallway, then start to mark out historical events and geological epochs on our double-ply timeline. This was our scale. The length of the hallway was the age of the earth. Dinosaurs were in there somewhere. There was a long time before dinosaurs were there. That first mudskipper that pulled itself up onto the beach was before that. This was not as simple as simply dividing the whole thing up into seven days, starting with heavens and earth and so on. This was science.
If you were never part of such an experiment, I can skip to the end for you: Our time, human time, on earth is a thin strip on the end of one sheet out of that roll. All the important things we have crammed into our existence as masters of our domain have been shoved into a relatively tiny sliver of time. Compared to rocks and microbes, we have only been here a short time.
Six months then, is the tiniest fibrous wisp of toilet paper. Which is how long we have been wrestling with the notion of a global pandemic. We tried shutting things down for a few months before we started getting anxious and upset that we were missing out on all that capitalism. And freedom. And not wearing masks. Mostly the capitalism.
Surprise, surprise. The germs were waiting for us when we stuck out heads out of our burrows. As much as we as a species would like to exert our will on one another, we have as yet to discover a way to make a virus go away by simply being mad at it. Baseball players, highly trained physical specimens kept in isolation are contracting the disease, causing games in an already shortened season to be cancelled. Children hurried back to school at our dear leader's insistence are showing up and testing positive, not for academics but for COVID-19. Standing outside the burger hut, waiting for our online order to be ready, we have the urge to creep forward in line to get ours. Social distance doesn't mean a thing when it's keeping me from my double cheeseburger.
How long can this go on?
No one seems to know for sure. But our wishes for a quick resolution is being denied by a timeline that is based more on geology than sociology. At least you can get toilet paper at the store again. We just had to be patient.