Restiamo a Casa – We Stay At Home

With two long days of travel behind us, we are now at home in Wisconsin, where we’ll stay. The CDC mandates that anyone who has traveled to a “high incidence” country must do a mandatory self-quarantine for fourteen days. Fortunately, family members were kind enough to lay in supplies for us before we arrived home last night, so we are all set, at least for the short-term. As luck would have it, we already had plenty of toilet paper before we left for Italy 53 days ago.

According to the news reports this morning, our fourteen days of quarantine will be supplanted by a new “Safer At Home” order by Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s governor. Our state has already had some social distancing orders in place, from limiting sizes of gatherings to closing of non-essential businesses, but now we have in place what I consider the most important strategy to help suppress the spread of the virus – don’t leave your home.

So, we have traded the Italian stay at home mandate for the Wisconsin variant – a “Negroni and a cabonara” for a “Brandy Old Fashioned and a fish fry.” I have a preference, but there is a time and a season for everything under the sun.

I’m hoping that all the areas of the U.S. begin to understand that the only way we can begin to contain the virus is to keep transmission from one person to another to the minimum and that we’ll all resist the temptation to break our own self-isolations and begin to stem the tide. Nationally, the Italians have employed the hashtag #restiamoacasa – “we stay at home.” I wish we had a similar national rallying cry here in the United States.