Plague Journal, Day 11: Devolution: Thermometer edition

The Girlfriend feels punky. She’s achy, listless, seems to have a fever. We can’t tell for sure because we have no thermometer.

If a case can be made for devolution — life evolving in a negative direction —  the development of household thermometers has to be on the evidence list. When I was a lad our family had a couple of mercury-filled glass-tube thermometers that did excellent service. (Mercury when heated conveniently expands by an amount directly connected to temperature.) Break one and mercury vapors are released that can in theory harm. Poison control centers rate the risk “low” since the amount of mercury is tiny, but many states banned them. 

Pharmacies are now filled with electronic thermometers, which send a voltage across their metal probes, measure current flows and resistance (heat hinders electricity flow; resistance rises), then use a microchip to convert the resistance to a temperature measurement. Swell. But throughout our daughter’s childhood we worked our way through eight or nine thermometers, of at least five different brands. Most were battery powered, some with AAs, some by tiny round-cell batteries filled with, fun fact, mercury. AA thermometers never worked, giving wonky readings or conking out after two or three uses. The round-cell batteries are designed to hold a charge for three years but in our experience died on a schedule exactly equivalent to the time between illnesses. Unlike, say, safety razors, pharmacies don’t routinely stock round-cell batteries.

I’ve lived in my apartment for three years and never needed a thermometer. (I lost one in the move; my child and I have since been fever-free.) In the Covid-19 era, thermometers turn out to be harder to find than gold nuggets or toilet paper. Online searches this month revealed either no stocks or confiscatory prices ($80 or $100). I visited four Brooklyn pharmacies, all of which were out of stock and told me to come back within days for their next shipment; return visits revealed that the promised shipments contained no (or an already sold number of) thermometers.

At month’s beginning the Girlfriend also had no thermometer. She ordered one online that turned out to gauge water rather than body temperature. She called her father, who mailed an extra from his Western state. Since The Girlfriend is staying with me while her son uses her bedroom, I use The Girlfriend’s car to drive in the late afternoon through a cold rain across mostly empty Brooklyn streets to her apartment building, where her daughter runs downstairs in fuzzy oversized cat slippers and hands me Pa’s thermometer. I drive back. Brooklyn feels more forbidding in a vehicle, with less human contact (even that allowed by the socially sanctioned six feet), more haste, more felt urgency. Pa’s thermometer was apparently bought in Eastern Europe, where he often travels; it measures in Centigrade. Thirty-seven degrees, it turns out, is the conversion of the awkward 98.6 F. The Girlfriend hits the 37-degree red line twice: normal. Still, we decide to use extra caution and to sleep apart. 

While she rests I call my best friend, who lives alone upstate in a town of about 25,000. He’s been sick for 10 days: aches, listlessness, mild coughing, and, oddly, the opposite of a fever, with temperatures never rising above 97 F. It’s allergy season, and he’s routinely afflicted. Maybe it’s just regular flu. He’s been isolating, working from home, which his non-profit management job allows and which he likes. Then he awoke last night from a sound sleep, unable to draw a breath. He stifled his panic, used self-calming techniques, regained equanimity and regular breathing. His doctor this morning via videoconference told him he’s doing everything right, and not to come in unless his fever spiked or breathing woes persisted, as in pneumonia. He may have Covid-19, she said; we don’t know much about the virus, and it’s exhibiting different symptoms in different regions. (Seattle, for instance, is seeing many sufferers with digestive woes, which has not been true in Wuhan.) But we don’t have enough tests to check all but the most likely cases. His spirits remain high; he’s not worrying. 

Just before I head to my daughter’s bedroom for my night of solo sleep, my co-parent texts from their house: the kid is sick. Headache. Sore throat. Slight fever, perhaps: their thermometer battery died, so who knows? I offer to head out in the morning to scout more pharmacies, but she counsels against it; her fiancé needs to pick up medicine in the morning, and he can shop for batteries. In the nation’s Covid-19 epicenter, with the city under lockdown, every trip will likely mean intersecting with a disease vector. 

Are these illnesses around me real? Routine flus and colds and allergies? Psychosomatic? Physical manifestations of ungodly stress? In South Korea or China my kid, exhibiting a fever, would be immediately tested; if her temps were high, she’d be taken to a clinic and isolated, her family quarantined. Here? We’ll sit tight unless she needs to go to a hospital. Will that system work? For her? For New York City? For smaller hospitals upstate? For the nation?

As of Monday night Covid-19 cases in New York state total 20,875, up 5,707 from Sunday, or 38 percent. The number of dead more than doubles, to 157.