Saturday, March 21, 2020

Plague Journal, Day 8: The circle of disease tightens

Friday. The circle of disease tightens. The Girlfriend’s best friend from junior high school is in a New Jersey hospital, without a fever though today they drained fluid from her lungs. She has to wait four days for Covid-19 test results. The Girlfriend’s co-teacher had lunch on Monday, March 9, with a woman who’s tested positive; the Girlfriend co-taught the class on Wednesday, March 11. Neither co-teacher has any symptoms, but it makes sense for us to limit the Girlfriend’s connections for another week. 

That means The Kid will stay at the Co-Parent's house another week. I’ve been going there every other day for afternoon exercise. Gov. Cuomo finally decided to institute a lockdown, which will start Sunday; whether it makes sense for me to visit The Kid every day is something we’ll have to decide. (The order allows for daily outdoor exercise.) 
The numbers pile up. New York is the U.S. outbreak’s epicenter, with 8,000 cases (up from 700 at the beginning of the week), half of those found in the country so far. Doctors in Washington are considering rationing care, as they’ve done in Italy and Spain — that is, deciding who gets intubated and who doesn’t, who lives and who dies. It won't be startling if it happens in the U.S. 

Journalists have debated for five years how to cover the Trump propaganda blizzard. Some say we need to grill him and his minions, not allow untrue statements to skate by, follow up and follow up and follow up; they rue the loss of daily presidential press briefings. I’m with those who argue that truth is better served by providing less oxygen to propagandists. Trump and his base love to bait the press, love to tussle with perceived enemies, are expert at dangling shiny objects to distract (such as “Chinese flu”). Today an NBC reporter tossed a softball (“What do you say to Americans who are scared?”), and Trump responded by blasting the questioner (“You’re a terrible reporter”) and his employer’s parent company, Comcast (“Con-cast”). Trump has replaced rallies with briefings; they’re his turf. When officials are willing to lie at will, as Trump demonstrated he would on Day 1 by forcing minions to brag about his inaugural crowd, tropes such as “holding feet to the fire” mean nothing. 

No decent foreign correspondent would have covered the press conferences of Leonid Brezhnev or Hugo Chavez or Haile Selassie as places to find truth; they were showcases for the government line. Why it’s hard for U.S. news organizations to learn this lesson after four years is a mystery. I’d like to think a pandemic in which government inaction and missteps are killing people day after day would prove salutary, but I’m skeptical. Suffice to say: The president is a vector of disinformation; broadcasting his daily press conferences disserves truth, amounts to journalistic malpractice. 
My sister has decided to leave her mid-Atlantic state, where her university campus had seven cases at week’s beginning and has now shut until April 13, to drive with her dog to her upper-Manhattan apartment. It may be counterintuitive to head toward the epicenter, but her community is here, including me. She’s scheduled to arrive Saturday afternoon. 

The Girlfriend is worried about her mother, now quarantined in a western state’s elderly care facility. Her mother, afflicted with anxiety disorders, dislikes the caregivers at her (expensive, excellent) facility; in response her three daughters hired outside caregivers who tend to her daily needs, everything from preparing meals to doing laundry to moving household items like spoons and books and rolling chairs that she fears she can’t reach based on pain from her (real but manageable) arthritis. Fearing a quarantine would keep these private caregivers out, the two daughters who live in her city this week moved her to one of their homes, but the disruption caused havoc, generated more anxiety, proved untenable. They moved her back; the Girlfriend hustled to get a doctor’s letter saying the private caregivers were medically necessary, needed access in the event of a quarantine. Now, despite the letter, the facility is barring everyone (including family members and private caregivers; her mother is without their help. She’s at no immediate medical risk, but no one knows how she’ll respond to increased isolation. 

Today the Girlfriend phones her mom to get bank information so she can transfer money to an outside caregiver, who’ll leave in the facility’s lobby meals and laundry that staff can carry to her mom’s door. Her mom doesn’t want to turn on her computer: the desk chair isn’t at the right height; when she uses it she feels pain; she’s stopped using the computer altogether. The Girlfriend gets mad: “Mom. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic. Everyone has to do things that are uncomfortable and unpleasant. You need to do this, and you need to do it now.” The tough love seems to work. (Later the Girlfriend says she thinks her mom found the account number and password elsewhere and didn’t turn on the computer.) But that situation promises no easy solution. 

The Girlfriend leaves to walk with a friend. I chat with my 89-year-old mom, feeling fine while locked down in her northern California apartment. “I like living alone,” she says. “I’ve done it for 10 years.” She and Dad moved 15 years ago into an age 55-plus community; Dad, diagnosed almost immediately with a form of dementia, died in 2010. The community has lots of sunny common areas between apartments, and she can visit with neighbors out there. But she’s worried about isolation, too. 

“Thank heavens for Alexander Graham Bell,” she says. 

I think: There’s a phrase I doubt my daughter will ever utter. 

The kid’s busy with school work and her after-school writing program, which has moved its seminars online. I make brownies, ride my bike solo to The Girlfriend’s house, entering at the tail end of a fight with her two children, 22 and 20. She wants the youth to get daily exercise, to prepare a family dinner on a rotating basis, to keep the place clean. None of those happened today to her specs, and first she and then everyone got upset. Things have calmed by my arrival; the youth agree to self-motivate more rigorously; the Girlfriend agrees that her anger is a poor motivational tool. We all note that families across America must be experiencing these exact pressures; nobody knows what “normal” looks like. After we all eat dinner and play Citadels and eat brownies, the Girlfriend and I bike back to my place through Prospect Park: not dead but, with only a smattering of walkers and bikers and no picnickers, not a normal spring evening with temperatures in the 70s. 

We crash early, exhausted. The new normal. 

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