By the end of the first week of quarantine, my family and I had handled and set up most of what was needed for the near term. Both my and my wife's businesses had been ported to online-only, as had her and the girls' schools, as well as my mom's social life. The girls were each settled into their respective spots to ride out the pandemic, distant from us but safe. Delivery of food and other necessities seemed reliable enough. It felt strange, but it all seemed to be working and we had most of the details sorted. We felt ready as we could be.
Sitting inside our bubble of preparedness, watching the numbers climb, it seemed to me that any day now we would be overwhelmed by stories of hospitals swamped with patients and stacks of bodies exuding viruses, inner cities collapsed into riots, governments paralyzed as leaders fall to the disease, and the sick and uninfected alike plunged into poverty. I looked out to the horizon and could see the tsunami rolling toward our shore.
Except that this week has not been like that. Unquestionably, the news has been terrible: we're now over 100,000 cases and nearly 1,700 deaths nationally and some hospitals in New York City, the most affected region, are close to capacity. The economy has taken a hit as this week's number of newly unemployed leaves all other records in the dust and the federal government's ineffectuality continues. But these numbers, while horrifying, are not yet overwhelming; in a country of 330,000,000 people, less than two thousand deaths means only a small fraction of us will know anyone who's been killed by the disease and even 100K cases means that, although I personally know of one person who has tested positive, I suspect most folks still don't.
This week, I felt a gap between the relative mundanity of my day-to-day life and the sense that a tidal wave hung over it, ready to flood everything at any moment. After the press of the previous week to get everything working and everyone settled into safety, life has seemed oddly quiet, even as we watched the pandemic grow. I think that there is an emotional-fueled expectation that the storm will begin as soon as you close the shelter door, but that's not how it works if one has attended to the signs and gotten into the shelter in a timely way. The storm moves how a storm moves.
And the COVID-19 pandemic is moving how a pandemic moves. It is nonlinear, exponential -- but it's not magic. It can't go from infecting a few hundred people to hundreds of thousands overnight (if it did, the story would have been entirely different from the start). This week we've watched the number of cases triple in Maryland since last Sunday, which is a frightening rate, but it's still a small fraction of the people living here.
Thus this paradoxical experience of seeing the tidal wave arching over our heads* but yet it moves more slowly than an hour hand. We look up and can see the sun through the water, refracted light scattering strangely, and know that disaster is upon us and that we are as prepared as we can be. And yet we still breath, the birds still twitter and court in the arriving spring, the magnolias blossom and litter the ground with their gentle and generous petals, and children pass the days playing in the shadow of the tsunami.
*Yes, I know tsunamis don't actually do that. Work with me here.
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