Awaiting Pandemic: March 12, 2020

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.