A Journal of My Plague Week

Not quite a year, and (let's hope) not quite a plague.

In 1665, London experienced an outbreak of bubonic plague, the same disease behind the "Black Death" that had devastated Europe a few centuries before. Over 18 months, 100,000 Londoners -- about a fourth of the city's population at the time -- died from it, despite widespread closure and quarantining measures. (One such closure, of Cambridge University, forced student Isaac Newton into self-taught homeschooling, during which he developed his theory of gravity, among other things.) Several decades later, in 1722, author Daniel Defoe (of Robinson Crusoe fame) published A Journal of the Plague Year, a deeply-researched account (arguably one of the world's first novels) of life in London during that horrible time.
Here, I have no pretensions to be anywhere near as exhaustive, as my far more modest title should suggest. Nor will I attempt to feign expertise. But the sheer weirdness of the 2020 outbreak of COVID-19, the fact that it has already affected my life in several ways, and -- perhaps here pretension sneaks back in --  the desire to create an account for myself and for others (present and future) all compel me to describe the first week that this novel coronavirus has actually affected my life.

***

Throughout January and February, as the virus began its journey from a wet market in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China to America, I vaguely followed news of its spread from afar. But it was not always my foremost concern. I spent most of January and February preparing to move from Washington, D.C. to New York City for a new job, actually moving there, and then getting used to my new life. Because of this, and the fact that it had not yet come to America, I didn’t pay much attention to it. Only when American cases began to appear did it become more than a secondary concern for me.

It became a much more real story at the beginning of March. One of the first significant American outbreaks was centered around the New York City suburb of New Rochelle, not far from where I now lived and worked; one of the first known infected commuted into midtown Manhattan daily. Because of the delayed-onset nature of this coronavirus, he may have done so before he was diagnosed. As a result of this, during the first week of March, I began to take the outbreak a bit more seriously. I became a compulsive handwasher, and felt a newfound gratitude for the bottle of hand sanitizer that my new apartment’s previous occupants had left behind. I had two phone conversations with distant friends, both of which featured coronavirus heavily (with cameos by coronavirus conspiracies positing even more malice by the Chinese government than is yet known). I was somewhat nervous about using a bathroom in Central Park on a run (but did it anyway). I tried to avoid actually touching door handles as much as possible. And I also tentatively told my Cincinnati family that, if I felt things were starting to get bad, I would probably come home. And on Sunday evening (after I won a 10k, where I nervously used portapotties), my anxiety increased when the priest at St. Josephs’s in Yorkville gave a series of coronavirus guidelines: no communion on the tongue, no holy water in baptismal fonts, no sign of peace. This was the first time the virus actually affected my life. 

At the start of the 10k I won. 

Over the second week of March, my concern became much more elevated. In the prior week, I had begun to wonder if I should alter my commute, for which I had been using the Times Square-42nd Street Station, surely one of the busiest -- and germiest -- in the city. That Monday, though, I did not end up doing so. But as the number of people wearing medical masks around the city -- and on the subway -- continued its ominous (and foolish) rise, my paranoia likewise increased. I tried consciously to touch what other people did as little as possible, and also, obviously to avoid accidental brushes up against others. I even tried to stop two of my worse habits: touching my face, and spitting on sidewalks (the latter ingrained from many years of running). I did all of this on Monday, March 9, the first day I would say I was truly anxious about coronavirus.

This ended up being the last day I commuted into my midtown office. My employer had already offered working from home as an option before any of this began, and it was already part of my regular routine. The conversations I had about the outbreak at work that day, and the news of its growing spread, ultimately convinced me not to go into the office for at least a day or two. On Tuesday morning, I ran through Central Park, as had become part of my incipient New York routine. Near the end of the run, though, I felt a pain in my right hamstring. A combination of coronavirus commute anxiety and a desire to be able to stay home to ice and rest kept me out of the office that day. During my day at home, I happened to page through my copy of Paradise Lost . . . and opened it right to the page where Adam is shown all the diseases that the Fall of man will unleash into the world.  

Heretical bibliomancy.

I spent most of Wednesday taking in news about the outbreak’s spread, only leaving my apartment once that day. By the end of the day, I hadn’t decided yet whether I would leave New York. But the increasing spread, and measures, both real and rumored, of the local and state government, began to make me nervous.

***

After my Thursday morning run, I decided I would leave New York, shortly after receiving an official recommendation to work from home indefinitely from my employer and securing position to do so. I’m not sure what was the final straw for me; if I’m being honest, it may have been the unsubstantiated rumors I was hearing of a citywide shutdown. But my ultimate rationale was something like this: New York may or may not completely shut down. The same could happen in Ohio. But most of my family and many of my friends were in Ohio, and it was a place I knew well. Whereas I had just gotten to New York, and was still figuring the place out. New York has many merits. But it was not the place I wanted to be in the worst-case scenario, a reality I reasoned we were approaching. So back to Ohio it was. I wanted to leave as quickly as possible, and was hoping that flights would be cheap, as I’d heard they were due to plummeting demand for tickets. This didn’t end up being the case, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to get home. Which is why I also hailed an Uber to get me from my apartment to LaGuardia airport. A few weeks earlier, navigating to that airport for the first time, I underestimated the duration of the trip and missed a flight; I did not want to do that again. This would also avoid having to use the subway again before leaving, a boon for germ avoidance.

Before my departure, I packed carefully, but quickly. I tried not to think about it too much, because I just knew that I wouldn’t be able to take everything I had worked so hard (and so recently!) to get into my apartment back with me, and would have to be parsimonious. I left with only a travel suitcase and a carry-on, which seemed almost embarrassingly sparse, but I could not imagine an alternative given my circumstances. I also consumed as much of my perishable food as I could manage, and told my roommate that the rest was fair game for him. He had not yet made plans to leave, though I suggested he do so (I have learned since that he did). I left my apartment without much ceremony. Perhaps I should have given it more of a last look, since I truly didn’t know when I would return. But I suppose I didn’t want to give myself enough time to think about all of this.

I got into the Uber at around 4:30 pm for a 6:55 pm flight. It wasn’t supposed to be rush hour yet. But the Upper East Side, through which most of the trip took place, was quite crowded. At this time, already pretty much fully consumed by coronavirus paranoia, my feelings grew somewhat ominous. As I sat helpless in unmoving traffic somewhere between my apartment and the airport, a scene popped into my head, unbidden: a passerby walking unassumingly but quickly up to the car I was in then suddenly smashing the glass of one of the windows. I don’t know why I thought of this. Fortunately, it ended up being nothing more than a dark imagining, and I arrived at the airport without incident.

The airport, however, presented a new obstacle. There aren’t many more germ-intensive environments than airports; coronavirus had already taken advantage of them in its spread. So I made some resolutions before entering: to touch directly as little as possible; to wash my hands compulsively; and to open my mouth only when necessary. Despite some deeply ingrained habits, and the exigencies of the TSA line -- where my luggage had to be screened twice for some reason, and where I received what I considered an unusually aggressive pat down from a TSA agent (just a few days after news reports revealed that a TSA agent at one airport had tested positive for coronavirus) -- I mostly succeeded at this. Though my paranoia about every stray cough and sneeze, building over the past few days, was now peaking as a result. And I tried as best as I could to avoid overly close proximity with people when I could.

Now, I just to wait for my flight. While doing so, I half-watched airport CNN and half-read the book I had brought with me (The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov). More important, I finalized my arrangements upon arrival to Cincinnati, my destination. I asked one of my sisters who still lived there if she could pick me up; she said yes. Demonstrating a knowledge of COVID-19 more developed than my own, she then suggested something I had not even considered: that I should stay either with her or my other Cincinnati-residing sister, at least for the first few days of my return home, to minimize any possible transmission risk to my 60something parents, as older demographics tend to be more susceptible to serious damage from the disease. I decided she was right, and agreed that she would take me to my older sister’s home from the airport (as she had a guest room with a bed). But I still had to get to Cincinnati. Once I boarded my flight, my anxiety to depart increased. And was not relieved: a half-hour after the plane was supposed to take off, it was still idle on the runway. I began to worry that some bizarre event would prevent its departure. Fortunately, this was another dark imagining, and a great weight lifted from my shoulders when it got into the air. On the flight, I opened my mouth only for occasional deep breaths, but otherwise did not even refill my water bottle or take a drink from it. I was very thirsty by the end of the flight (and very bored, since I finished my book early on in the flight; and thank goodness, because it was pretty bad).

***

My sister greeted me at the airport -- along her dog, a 20-week-old Australian shepherd named Ringo. We spent the drive back to and then through Cincinnati to my other sister’s house keeping Ringo occupied, discussing coronavirus, and listening to music (the SiriusXM Beatles’ station; Ringo is named after Ringo Star). She confessed to me that she had been listening to many podcasts about it, the source of her elevated knowledge. We proceeded in this fashion until we arrived at my older sister’s house, where Ringo briefly interacted with Piper and Frankie, my older sister’s dogs. I then went to bed not long after this, and awoke to Friday, my first day in Cincinnati, still a little bewildered I was there at all. But I tried as best as I could to maintain my routines: running in the morning (in an area somewhat but not entirely familiar to me), working during the day, etc. I was home by myself with my older sister’s dogs for most of the day, and they made good but quirky company (though Frankie’s habit of chewing on toilet paper has taken on a curious valence in this time, for reasons I shall explain below).

Frankie liked The Gods Themselves more than I did. Before this, she was playing with it in her mouth. 

Saturday was a day to relax, unwind . . . and figure out what I wanted to do running-wise. I delayed the starting of my run, typically a workout of some kind on Saturday, long enough to receive an email that the Cherry Blossom 10-miler, a race I’d registered for which had been scheduled for April 5, was canceled. This threw my training into uncertainty; I tend to be somewhat unfocused and unmotivated when I don’t have a race I’m training toward. I eventually just decided on a fartlek, a non-specialized, segment-differing/rest-constant workout of the sort I can always do for at least some benefit. I had also waited long enough for a kind of wintry mix to begin (reinforcing how underpacked I was for colder weather). I did the workout in this weather at Otto Armleider and Lunken parks, popular running areas that were not entirely empty today, but which nonetheless gave off a strange, apocalyptic vibe to me. But the world didn’t end while I was out there, and I eventually returned, doing little for the rest of the day.

First thing on Sunday, I went for a long run almost entirely on the Little Miami Bike Trail, a rail-to-trail that hugs the Little Miami River from Xenia to its feeding into the Ohio River. I ran north, and the trail was mostly empty. I couldn’t stop myself from spitting, though I tried to avoid doing it while people were around. But as I did so, I kept thinking that, if I were vector of coronavirus, I would be conveniently spreading it 9 miles throughout the East Side of Cincinnati. But I felt fine, and eventually finished the run, spending a good deal of time eating afterward. Later that day, my sister returned to her house, and so did one of my cousins, just a few years younger than I, for a family dinner. While we hoped not to be violating the new cultural imperative of “social distancing” (a strange formulation urging people to avoid large groups and close contact), we talked, unavoidably, about coronavirus. And near the end of the dinner, both my cousin and I confronted coronavirus-related decisions. Mike DeWine, the governor of Ohio, had just announced the bars and restaurants would soon be closed, with only carry-out allowed (the state had already closed all school buildings, with schools now forced to educate online indefinitely). A student at a local college, my cousin wanted to join his friends at their favorite local bar, thinking it may be his last chance to do so before the end of the school year. And I had to decide whether to attend church. Every Ohio archdiocese had formally dispensed Catholics of the requirement to attend Mass for the rest of the month. But Catholic guilt is a powerful force. Eventually, my cousin decided to go to the bar. And I decided to go to church.

It was a strange experience. The mass may or may not have been more populated than usual; everyone was so spread out that I couldn’t really tell. There was no music. There was no communion wine. And, most important, there was no sign of peace. Nor was there even any acknowledgment of its absence; Father simply proceeded as though it had never been a part of the mass. I nonetheless made liberal use of hand sanitizer in my sister’s car before mass, in the church after mass ended, and in her car again when I returned to it. Though it probably wasn’t necessary to go there, I’m glad I went. (And was made even happier when I learned later that all masses in the archdiocese of Cincinnati had been canceled for the rest of Lent.)

On Monday, I hoped to restore a semblance of normalcy to my life. And for the most part, I did: a morning run, followed my first office conference call since arriving in Cincinnati. Amusingly, it went somewhat longer than usual, probably because these calls were having to do a lot more heavy lifting now that we were all remote from each other indefinitely. I did my work from my sister’s home while keeping the dogs entertained. My sister brought home food ordered carry-out from The Works, a local restaurant we both love and wanted to support in this unusual time, and had that for dinner. It felt . . . almost normal.

I had my first real coronavirus reality interruption of my Cincinnati life the next day. After a fairly normal day, my sister came home and said I could go to the grocery store if I wanted to get things that she hand’t. I decided I did want to go, partly for the more prosaic reason . . . and partly because I wanted to see if all the things I’d been hearing about grocery stores without pasta, hand sanitizer, or, for some reason, toilet paper were true. So I went. It was true. All of it. And even more: I discovered upon entering the Mariemont Kroger that it had imposed a two-item limit on loaves of bread, gallons of milk, and cartons of eggs. 

I thought this was America. 

And I also found that nearly all of the spaghetti had disappeared (except for a gluten-free brand, and a select brand that, in a kind of cosmic insult, cost exactly as much as spaghetti does for me in New York, thus defeating my hope to take advantage of Midwestern prices while I am here).

They'll never run out of this. 

Meanwhile, most of the lasagna, rigatoni, and other pasta types that people don’t really understand was still there.

People really don't know to make lasagna.

And yes, there really was no toilet paper. Not a single roll. (Hence the danger of Frankie’s habit.)

I forgot to take a regular picture of the toilet paper section, so you'll have to make do with my Snap story.

I had never seen anything like it. Cincinnatians occasionally make runs on the grocery store in anticipation of snowstorms (many of which never actually come). But this…this was something different. I was still able to get most of what I had come for, but it was still surreal to see something like this in real life.

Wednesday was as normal a day as I can expect to have in this strange time, with one exception. Well . . . three, actually. That was the number of times I used the videoconferencing software Zoom to have conversations with people I was not physically present with. The first of these was for work, and is a normal part of my professional life in this new job. Though again, this call went longer than is typical, as it must now substitute for a great deal of other social interaction. The second was with former coworkers and now friends from my previous job. We often ate lunch together there, and one of them had the idea to simulate it by holding such a call during the lunch hour. It was a useful catchup, and a window into life in D.C., from where many of them were calling.

The first Zoom. 

And the last conference call was of my instigation, with a separate group of friends from D.C. My old D.C. apartment was the setting of what we called “Boys’ Night,” a gathering of “the boys” on Wednesday evenings just to hang out. In the wake of social distancing and public closures, Boys’ Night had been canceled physically. While I had accepted the reality of no longer attending in person, I sensed an opportunity when it was disrupted completely, and arranged for a digital version. It was a success; the boys were brought back together, and it was almost like we were in person together again. Almost.

The day's second Zoom. 

***

And that brings me to today. By COVID-19 standards, it’s been a pretty normal day: morning run, morning conference call, hanging out with the dogs, carry-out dinner brought home by my sister -- this time, from Paxton’s, another local favorite. But today, I also decided to end this phase of my coronavirus life by returning to my parents’ house. My sister has been kind to me, and would surely continue this kindness indefinitely, but I no longer wish to burden her, and am more confident of my capacity to function autonomously at my parents’ abode, as my intent is not to burden them either. And most important, I feel no symptoms for what might be coronavirus. I will still be very careful around them when I am home. But I do not think that, by doing so, I am being one of those selfish youths who thinks himself indestructible and forgets that he interacts regularly with those who are not.

Undoubtedly, this will not be the end of COVID-19’s impact on my life. It has already dislodged me from my living arrangements and forced me into an entirely new routine, though one made slightly more comfortable by the fact that I get to build it in a familiar environment. But I think I will soon grow accustomed to this life, for however long I have to live it, and thus it will increasingly grow less worthy of comment (unless these perpetual rumors of statewide "shelter-in-place" prove true, which I doubt). My experience has not been unusual, but it doesn’t have to be weird for something this bizarre in the first place. Unlike any news story I can remember, this is a real factor in the lives of just about everyone I know, and we are all affected by it in some way, and also striving to live as normally as possible -- a strange combination.

At such a time, it seems weird to say, but I am, on the whole, grateful. For having left New York. For having a job I can do remotely (something unavailable to many). For having a place where I could go in the presence of family (and friends, once I am comfortable seeing them again). For having time to complete a project that, while I doubt it will rival the work of Isaac Newton, will be of great importance to me -- and, eventually, to others, I hope -- once finished. And I am grateful, obviously, that I have avoided the disease so far, and hope that as many people as possible share this fate. We don’t know yet whether COVID-19 will prove as devastating as either the London plague or the Black Death; we can pray that it is not. But either way, it has already earned a place in history, one that it is our strange lot to live through.