Don’t Sneeze On Me

I’m currently fighting a cold, and all that hand-washing and hand-wringing over “Are my hands clean enough?” and “Will I catch coronavirus on top of this?” is a bit tiring, I must admit. I am a model hand-washer, but I’ve been hit with an obscure feeling of guilt over having a cold, as if the very sight of me sneezing might be enough to send the populace into a panic and the stock markets tumbling. On top of that, I’m having to stay hydrated to keep a mild cold from turning into a bad one, my hands are dry from all the washing, and my nose is turning a becoming shade of red. Good times!

The coronavirus situation was borne in on me the other night when I went in search of sanitizing wipes. There were none to be had in any of the stores I went to; a Walmart employee told me that when the store does get a shipment, they sell out immediately. In the grocery store this morning, the toilet paper aisle was nearly decimated. When I heard about the strict quarantine taking place in Italy, I was amazed: if Italy is making people stay home, things are getting serious. Officials had been telling people in the beginning that there was little to worry about here in the U.S., and technically I suppose that was true—until the first cases appeared.

It all reminds me a little of a disaster movie in which the global threat of a pandemic starts to unravel the underpinnings of civilization and send the world back to the Dark Ages. No big deal not to be able to find Purell at the grocery store, you say. Oh, that’s just what you think. It starts with Purell and then progresses to milk, bread, antiperspirant, and beer. Then they’ll run out of toothbrushes and clean underwear. People start rioting in the streets, and the thin veneer of modernity gets ripped off like a dirty bandage. It’ll be up to a straggly band of hardy survivors to escape the pestilential cities, where people are fighting over stray boxes of Kleenex and tubes of toothpaste, to set up a new coronavirus-free zone in some Edenic setting that resembles Isla Nublar but hopefully contains no dinosaurs.

Well, I hope our structures, institutions, and resolve to hang onto our hard-won evolutionary gains will keep the coronavirus from spinning us all out of control. We’ve been through it before with the flu and other infectious diseases, and there seems to be little to be done other than following reasonable precautions. I haven’t noticed people behaving much differently here. I won’t be going to any large-scale events in the foreseeable future, but I wasn’t planning to anyway. I’ll be nursing my cold, trying to remember not to touch my face, and hoping the shortage of sanitizing wipes doesn’t last much longer (they are handy things to have, but I wouldn’t fight someone to the death over them). I have no large-scale mythological advice to offer beyond “Wash your hands,” and you already knew that anyway.