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Be safe, don’t strut
As the U.S. continues to reopen without a well-defined national strategy, personal responsibility is more important than ever. But how should you think about COVID-19 if you, like me, are not an epidemiologist?
On the last Friday of every month, I usually host a large, no-agenda happy hour with some friends called Cocktails and Conversations. There’s nothing to it: just friends at a bar on a Friday, talking about their week over drinks and french fries. Somehow, this casual ritual grew from about ten friends when my friend Michael Henderson and I started it in 2017 to well over one hundred people attending regularly in early 2020.
At our Cocktails and Conversation on Friday, February 22, as people were coming in and out of the South Congress Hotel Bar, I found myself talking with a few startup founders and a some friends who are involved in policy and politics in Austin. The discussion centered around whether or not it was time for people to start wearing masks, and whether or not SXSW was going to cancel.
As of February 22, 2020, COVID-19 had killed ~2,458 people worldwide and there were ~78,572 confirmed cases, most of them in China — Italy only had ~60 confirmed cases. Still, while large companies like Twitter and…
