Some of us sit at home, where we belong.
Others continue to show up at work places, where they belong.
All of us search , for answers, for balance, for a best way forward through a landmine of deliberations and choices that stress-test values, principles, ethics, and moral-decision-making's once-unthinkable reaches.
Have we arrived yet at the end of the beginning of the novel coronavirus crisis? The beginning of the end of the pandemic's devastating impact? Or somewhere in between? New residential construction's investors, developers, builders, and other partners eat, sleep, and breathe the hearts and minds and household composition and pocketbooks of consumers. So, answers as to where in Covid-19's trajectory and sweep may be--the Federal Reserve and $2 trillion in economic rescue programs, notwithstanding--lie where two-thirds of the GDP always dwells, in consumer households.
Depending on where your butt sits, if you ask people to put a number on a scale of one to 10 to whether they're 1, not afraid at all, or 10, off-the-charts terrorized, about two issues right now--their health (and that of those they love) and their wherewithal (earnings, savings, job security, etc.), you're going to get different answers. Place identity and the timing of the spread of Covid matter. On balance, it's probably inevitable that skeptics still believe it's not all that bad out there, and a relatively quick rebound is likely, even as others feel overwhelmed by an impending cataclysmic collapse of life as we know it--and now, tens of thousands of our fellow Americans and world citizens face grievous losses of life and livelihood.
Pew Research Center analysts wordsmith survey data gathered among consumer households between March 19-24, 2020 this way:
"A new Pew Research Center survey finds that the coronavirus outbreak is having profound impacts on the personal lives of Americans in a variety of ways. Nearly nine-in-ten U.S. adults say their life has changed at least a little as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, including 44% who say their life has changed in a major way."
Which is interesting in itself. Less than half the U.S. adult population feels completely upended by a pandemic that's still spreading, still particularly fatal, and still eclipsing health providers' capacity to handle its effects.
So, are the folks who don't feel "their life has changed in a major way" feeling that way because the pandemic hasn't yet directly affected them, or because they're more resilient of character and less prone to panic? End of the beginning or beginning of the end?
Time will tell.
What is also interesting in the Pew Research data is evidence of polarization, divides we've been ever more keenly aware of over the past decade or so: Red vs. Blue, old vs. young, women vs. men, families-with-young-children vs. households without children, highly educated vs. less educated, religous vs. non-religious, urban vs. non-urban, etc. These dichotemies factor into patterns of belief, fear, behavior, attitude, preference, and values--just as all social and cultural phenomena do.
For example, the analysis notes:
"Working-age adults with higher incomes are more likely than those with lower incomes to say they have worked from home because of the coronavirus outbreak: 61% of those in the upper-income tier say they have done this, compared with 41% in the middle-income tier and an even smaller share (27%) of those with lower incomes.
"In states with a high number of coronavirus cases, 45% of working-age adults say they have worked from home because of the outbreak; smaller shares in states with a medium or low number of cases say the same (38% each)."
When we huddle each day with team members in our bailiwick--a relatively youngish, well-educated, geographically dispersed, evenly representative group of men, women, parents of young kids, homeowners and renters, across a continuum of pay, the pulse we take tells us that our group is vibrating. They're at a 9 to 10 level on both scales--fear for their health and safety and fear for their financial and economic wherewithal.
This owes in part to structural disruption in the specific business sector we work in.
However, media is not alone in that. Pre-Covid, the gorilla-in-the-room issue for the U.S. economy was--and remains--the future of work, the future of livelihoods, the future of careers. Covid-19's advent has merely escalated, accelerated, and supercharged that issue.
In housing and construction economic and business analysis, reporting, and observor-dom these days, there are two kinds of people: Covid-19 skeptics who hope they're right and Covid-19 alarmists who hope they're wrong.
The first type is apt to believe that once the overreactions and catastrophizing calm down, fundamentals and dynamics and fiscal, monetary, and legislative policies now in place will jump-start the big-shouldered engine of new home construction as an intrepid reflection of a society with no quit in it.
The second type senses that, by denying the order of magnitude of threat and destruction into which we've been plunged, we're only making ourselves more fragile, more intolerant, less prepared, and less resilient than we need to be to face up to the challenge.
Pew Research data gathered starting a little more than 10 days ago seems to mirror these two types.
Meanwhile, Google search data shows a steady beat of fear that surges during waking hours and descends each night. It's the search for information on "testing" for Covid-19.
Here's what that looks like: