Recognizing the Ill Omens
Folks in the ancient world rummaged around in the guts of sacrificial animals to try to predict the future. I had the internet.
I was working from home when I first became aware of the virus making the rounds over in Asia. It wasn’t completely unusual to see a news article about a scary-sounding disease. Folks who had refused to get their kids the standard round of childhood-disease preventing vaccinations had led to vintage diseases like measles circulating out in places like California. There’d been a fairly recent bout of whooping cough in the area. Ebola virus popped up in Africa from time to time. The Zika virus had terrified my pregnant friend into avoiding all outdoor hangs a just a few summers ago. And pretty much every year, I wondered if this was the year Avian flu was going to make a big go for it. There was always the worry that some super bacteria would arise from the hospitals or the factory farms with the ability to resist all known antibiotics and take us back to the old days where folks dropped dead from the complications of a papercut.
But there was something about this virus.
It seemed like every time I took a break and alt tabbed over from the work-related windows on my computer to check the news there was another article about it. Usually weird disease news either got the full nightly news dedicated freak out (like Zika) or it got minor coverage for a day or so and then went away.
This one had a snowball effect—a steady, but slow increase in coverage from a growing geographic region. It was giving me the Stand. It was giving me 12 Monkeys. It was inspiring me to take my growing unease to Facebook where on January 28, I hauled out my laptop to inform the world or at least my 150 acquaintances that I was “Eying news out of China while slowly compiling a prepper-style Amazon wish list.”
It was a feeler out into my small circle of the world. A way of asking indirectly, “Are any of you seeing this? Should we be worried?” And honestly, the post didn’t get much of a response.
On January 31st, just a few days later, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a global health emergency. The illness had now spread from China to the US, Germany, Japan, Vietnam, and Taiwan. The Trump administration suspended entry into the United States by any foreign nationals who had traveled to China in the previous 14 days, excluding the immediate family members of American citizens or permanent residents and 213 people had died and nearly 9,800 had been infected worldwide.
My Amazon wish list was real. I wasn’t sure what I needed so I cross-referenced different types of advice like what I should keep on hand in case of wildfires, earthquakes, zombies, etc. (No joke, the CDC posted “Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse” to the Public Health Matters blog in 2011 as a way to entertain the public while advising them on disaster preparedness.) I had items on my wish list like thermal blankets, giant containers in which to store water, and a deluxe package of 300 meals-ready-to-eat that came in a sealable bucket. When the time came, the bucket was for you to poop out the parts of the 300 meals-ready-to-eat that your body couldn’t use to keep itself going.
Around us everything was just going on as normal though. So we got ready in the morning, sent the kid off to school, my spouse went to work, I shuffled to my desk, tried to remember to brush my teeth sometime before five, and I picked the kid up from after school care in the evening.
Meanwhile, the snowball was growing and heading toward us. On February 3rd, a public health emergency was declared in the US. Infographics started appearing showing what types of facial hair were best suited for wearing a facepiece respirator.
The virus was named by the WHO on the 11th: COVID-19.
By late February, organizations like NPR posted articles to Facebook on how to prepare your home for Coronavirus. I started cross-referencing those articles and modified my Amazon list. Water storage and thermal blankets were bumped down in priority in favor of shelf-stable pantry items, first aid supplies, and cold and flu medicine.
We were still doing stuff though. In mid-February we rented a cabin with two other families and went up there on a Saturday after a Friday spent celebrating Valentine’s day at the kid’s school and out in a restaurant for dinner with my mom. Saturday morning we took the kid to a classmate’s birthday party before driving to the cabin. After the adults settled in and some had a glass of wine or two we all sorta looked around and wondered aloud whether gathering together had been a good call or not given the news.
That trip was the last group trip before the snowball became an avalanche.
On February 25th, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said COVID-19 met two out of three required factors for a pandemic: illness resulting in death and sustained person-to-person spread. (Worldwide spread is the third criteria.) On the 29th, the US had its first reported death, a patient near Seattle. (In fact, two people had died earlier, though their COVID-19 diagnoses were not discovered until months later.)
To submit your own story, email us at heycanwetalkaboutcovid@gmail.com.
