40 is a biblical number. Once, it rained for 40 days and washed the world away. Now that we’ve suffered through our own contemporary 40-day trial, I feel a lot more empathy towards Noah—stuck on a boat with his family for nearly a month and half. Depending on your own specific living situation, you may or may not have new-found empathy for keeping a menagerie of animals alive for many, many weeks.

Tomorrow marks Day 41. For Noah that meant sunshine, a rainbow, and receding waters. For us in Virginia, Day 41 means at least two more days until the earliest possible peak in daily deaths and 50 days until the Governor’s social distancing restrictions lift. There’s no rainbow yet, just a vast, angry sky. Time to re-batten the hatches and go back to keeping the lions from killing the giraffes.