A lot of people are feeling panicked and afraid and stressed out. This is a rough time. But things will go back to normal. They always do.

I have been trying to find good information about COVID-19, but here is one things I’ve learned: we have not had enough time to come up with the right data to make completely accurate models. Things may be better than we think, but I sincerely doubt that they could be worse than worse-case scenarios.

We aren’t sure what to do because we don’t have all the data right. We can’t tell the future and so we don’t quite know how to prepare for it. The leaders of our cities and states and country are trying to figure out how to minimize negative impacts. But no matter what they do, there will be negative impacts. The tradeoffs are not great right now.

I fully support social distancing, but we don’t need to overreact and panic. I am hopeful that when the data becomes more and more accurate, it will be better than we think. We do not need to shut ourselves in our houses in fear, but we can wash our hands, keep our distance, and prepare our healthcare system.

This is a tragedy. These are hard times, and I don’t want to ignore the difficult time people are having. But bad things always happen. We had deaths from heart disease, cancer, the flu, car accidents, drug overdoses. We are working on all of those problems. People get sick. It sucks. We have a hard time understanding the scale of any tragedy and there is not a great way to put it into perspective.

With this pandemic, we just have too much information in the wrong places, leading to too much fear and confusion. We have to trust in experts, let them do their job, and make the best out of what we have. We don’t need to be afraid, but we can be prepared.

We cannot avoid every bad effect anymore. We are going to have major consequences in health and economics. People will die, and it is incredibly sad and hard. But acceptance of the tragedy can help us be more rational in figuring out how to lessen the worst effects without being so afraid that we overreact and create more harm than we have to. Worry and fear can be a useful catalyst for action, but actions need to be kept within rational and sensible bounds.

I am grateful for epidemiologist who are trying to come up with more and more accurate models. For economists who are studying economic impacts. I am grateful for imperfect yet helpful policies that will help keep us going.

I have faith. I have faith that we can come out of this better than we will be before. This is not a catastrophe. This is not the end of the world. This is hard and it’s terrible, but we move forward like we always do.

I have been very worried and stress, but my mind feels a lot more clear now. Accepting that a hard thing is happening helps us move forward and make the best of it. We can’t eliminate this from our lives. But we can keep moving forward and doing the best we can.

Things I am hoping for right now:

*People be rational and make the right decisions to minimize the loss and negative effects of this pandemic.
*That we can find appropriate treatments that shorten hospital stays and reduce severity of the disease.
*The death rate starts getting lower and lower.
*Increase testing ability and more equipment for health care.
*That there are more asymptomatic people than we realize and we will be able to achieve herd immunity.
*For a quick economic recovery–where people can get their jobs back quickly and businesses can find capital to keep going and that the recovery bill does it’s job in providing more expansive unemployment and that when we do open things up and get going again, we have minimized the reduction of GDP and long-term unemployment.
*And that there will be an end of this and life will go back to normal, except for it will be a better normal because we have learned and grown from this experience.

Please don’t be angry and afraid. Just keep trying,