Awaiting Pandemic: March 12, 2020
Amanda I. Seligman
In June 1992, my classmate and I drove west. The Great
Plains terrified me. Fresh out of our first year of graduate school, where I
studied the changes that had shaped the North American landscape, my mind’s eye
could recreate the vast herds of bison that used to thunder over the American
grasslands. Under skies broader than I had ever imagined, horizon unbroken in
all directions, you could see them coming for miles but never get out of their
way. No matter how fast you tried to run, they would trample you. I knew that
nineteenth-century American hunters had shot the bison herds to the brink of
extinction, destroying the animals and imperiling the indigenous cultures
wrapped around them. But the curse of the historian is to conjure up the past
and the future into the present moment. I could almost hear the imminent
hooves, and I could not dodge them. I trembled.
I feel that way again, sitting in my living room, letting
the internet unreel COVID-19’s spread across the planet into my historical
imagination. It’s easy to lose an hour flipping among multiple news outlets,
Twitter, and Facebook. I have been preparing in a low key, non-freakout way
over the past month. In February, I dipped into Max Brooks’s World War Z,
checking whether he had placed the origin of the zombie apocalypse in Hubei
province (he had, if I read Chinese geography correctly). On every trip to the
grocery store, I bought a few extra essentials to set against the looming
lockdown: toilet paper, two dozen cans of soup, ten pounds of flour, five
pounds of rice, soap, toothpaste. At each restaurant and school event, I asked
myself if this was the last one before we all go into our bunkers. But today I
can hear the ground rumbling, and I know things have shifted. Instead of bison,
it’s contagion. It might be a while before my next trip to the store.
I send an email to the school superintendent and repost it
on the middle school parents’ Facebook page. My university is extending spring
break to give instructors time to transform their in-person classes to remote
learning. I ask the schools to do the same. My fellow parents’ responses run
mostly along predictable lines. Some folks are 100% on board with my mildly
phrased suggestion. Others quite rightly point out the hardships closing
schools will cause for working parents and families that rely on free lunches.
A few are dismayed at the prospect of a couple weeks of alone time with their
children. I order myself not to write a rebuttal essay about how
public health is undervalued because its effects are invisible. I refrain from explaining
that because none of us has lived through a comparable emergency their
complaints that not everyone learns well online are off-base. But I do remind
myself about the basic stats of the 1918 influenza outbreak:
50 million dead
from a planetary population of
less than 2 billion people, or somewhere a bit above 2% of the global
population. And I choke back the anger of my gut response to my more reluctant
internet neighbors: so you want your children to be the bullets that kill your
elderly parents and cause the health care system to break down?
Distracting myself from my work with quick hits of current
information worsens my mood, exhausting me. I’m on sabbatical this semester,
preparing new classes. My colleagues are swamped trying to move their classes
online for the duration, but I lack their focus and keep dipping back into the
river of news. It reminds me of what happened after 9/11. Psychologists warned
us to turn off our TV sets so that our children would not think that new planes
were hitting those towers over and over again. I suspect I am traumatizing
myself in a similar way by watching the crisis continually unveil itself in my
news feed. But I don’t know how to adjust my inner balance: how much
information helps me understand the present moment vs. repeated input that will
overwhelm me so thoroughly I crumble into an anxious heap? I try closing tabs,
putting an extra step and a deliberate choice between me and the news. I set up
rules about when I can look to the present and when I must focus on the past.
They don’t last long.
I wonder about the other rules that we are supposed to be
following now, the ones implied in the idea of “social distancing.” I
understand that we should keep some physical space from other people. But what
other rules apply, and how do we know when to implement them? How do we
recognize the moment to reduce our outside activities? Is today it? Is it
already too late? The Unitarian Universalist Association, offices closed for
the duration, is recasting “social distancing” as “
community care.”
But in practical terms, how do I implement the important idea that it’s my
responsibility not to become infected so that I don’t pass on the virus to
people who are more vulnerable than my family? Should I bother trying to keep
my own kids at home if the schools stay in session? I’m not worried about them
getting sick, since
children seem less affected than adults. I don’t want them to be vectors infecting
others, but what’s the point if everyone else is still merrily out in public?
Should I skip church, where last week we already substituted bowing “Namaste”
for our usual handshakes and hugs? I probably shouldn’t go to yoga, but can I
swim in the pool or walk on the track? Can I go to the grocery store at times
when it’s likely to be uncrowded, or is now the time to forego fresh foods?
The
Dust Bowl of the 1930s resulted in part from the absence of bison doing their
part for the ecosystem of the Great Plains. Pandemic mutates our economic and
medical ecosystems. I know that I don’t need to buy clothes in person, but I
have $40 in Kohl’s cash that will expire soon. Is OK to spend it online? Does
doing so put the packer in the warehouse and the delivery driver in jeopardy or
protect their jobs in a time of economic crash? I’m hanging out at home today
because a pre-existing cold combined with an adverse reaction to a shingles
vaccination to make me feel pretty crummy. Ought I postpone the second shingles
injection until after the crisis is over, so that my clinic can focus on more
urgent needs?
When someone asks me to identify the worst natural disaster
in history, I point to the flu outbreak in 1918. Sitting in my PJs at home a
century plus two years after, I can hear it on the horizon again. It’s not the
thunder of bison hooves I can imagine, but the planetary echoes of the whoosh
of a bat or the scritching of a pangolin somewhere in Hubei province. There are
eight identified cases of COVID-19 in Wisconsin today, with one recovery, no
deaths, and an unknown number of untested infections circulating or quietly
self-quarantined in our community. The disaster isn’t here yet, but I am
hunkering down as if for a long series of blizzards. I read a few weeks ago
about the utter exhaustion of the
nurses in Wuhan and today about the terrible choices of the doctors in
Lombardy.
I define medical triage for my increasingly less innocent child: quite
literally dividing patients into those you can save, those you can only
comfort, and those to treat later. I cannot calibrate my emotions or my
actions. We will know only if we succeed or fail in tamping down the disease
collectively, not individually. I am exhausted from knowing the past and
reeling from the anguish of a future we are trying to prevent. The bison are
coming up over the planet’s curve. I imagine if we lie very still, they might
evaporate into a figment of the past, leaving only the dust they kicked up,
making us wonder what all the upset was about, because the worst didn’t happen
after all.
