I've had a strange COVID19-related social problem arise over the past days/weeks I thought I'd share, maybe some of y'all will have insight or opinions on it, or just find it amusing to hear about.
About 2.5 years ago my wife and I moved from the city (biggest city in our western U.S. state) to a pretty rural county about 180 miles away.
We have 40 acres of property around our house. We've got a couple cows, couple goats, some chickens, nothin crazy. It's great, and more rural than anywhere we'd ever expected to live, but the silence and the mountains make up for it. My neighbor to the south and west is a 900-acre ranch, my neighbor to the north is a 360-acre farm, and my neighbor to the east is a national forest larger than Rhode Island.
Over the past couple weeks (but especially the last 5 days) we've had quite a few friends who've been sent home to work remotely call us and ask if it would be ok for them to come stay with us until the virus calms down in their city.
It's been really fuckin awkward telling them all no. Two of the guys who've called to ask me are really close buddies, so I'm comfortable just saying something like "nah man just hunker down and you'll be fine" and then we go on talking about other things. But some of them are straight up offended.
One of my grad school friends asked me "why not?" and I was so taken back. I almost said "because fuck you that's why," but I just told him I'd already promised my guestroom and office to my siblings if they wanted to come join my wife and I's little quarantine unit (which is actually true).
Another friend (my wife's friend) called her and my wife told her the same thing (our guest space is set aside for my siblings). An hour later, that woman's husband called me and asked if they could come stay with us. It was mind-blowing. Both were pretty offended we shut them down.
One of my buddies asked if he could drive down here (3 hours) to buy some of the deer I shot this last season, or if I'd be willing to split one of our cows with him. I was like "dude what?! I'm not slaughtering any animals, and I don't think that drive is worth it, every parent in America just realized summer vacation was starting 2 months early and rushed the grocery stores, there's plenty of food, this isn't the apocalypse."
It's not like we have some bountiful garden of eden we're selfishly hording away for ourselves. It's our fuckin house, it's where we live. We're not some rescue hostel. Literally millions of people throughout the rural west live like we do.
Am I being a dick? I don't even know how long people would want to stay, or how long until the bell-curve of the virus takes to pass through an urban area... and wouldn't ushering in panicky people from the city just create more potential for this thing to spread to rural areas anyway?