Maybe depression hits Tuesday night because, for the first time in days, my chest feels tight. Plus I'm listless. It feels like earlier in the month, when I had symptoms that lagged (and were weaker than) The Girlfriend’s. Now, after three weeks, she’s feeling normal, energetic. Since Friday I had been, too.
“We’ve gone through exactly what everyone describes,” The Girlfriend says. “The symptoms come in waves. People feel better, then get hit with another peak. If you’re lucky, like us, the peaks get steadily lower. It happened with me how many times?”
“I know,” I say. “But I thought I was done with it.”
It’s not that my signs are so serious; often I think they’re psychosomatic. But the psychological toll is real. The uncertainty, the seesawing, the potential danger: it’s exhausting.
Maybe depression hits because earlier in the evening, when I felt normal, I drove to see The Kid, went for a walk. I hadn’t been outside my neighborhood in a week or so. Traffic, though far from normal, seemed significantly higher than the last time I’d driven. Lots of people were out in Prospect Park; many seemed indifferent to physical distancing rules, including two groups playing soccer on fields behind chain-link fences labeled “Fields are closed to group play.”
Social isolation bites. For us in quarantine every day feels the same, time impossible to track. Now, when The Girlfriend asks, “How long have I been at your apartment?” I have to check the blog’s day count. The New York City skyline looks gorgeous from the apartment windows: flowers blooming, cherry blossoms blowing, other trees in full bud; from the 12th floor it’s a typical April. But we live by social as much as diurnal, seasonal calendars. We’re living without school outings (The Kid should be prepping for an overnight class trip to Boston); vacations (The Girlfriend and I would be coming home today from Paris); Tuesday night piano bar outings (Sid Gold’s Request Room’s are now virtual — nice, not the same); baseball standings (the Giants should be 6-11 by now, in Cincinnati as the second stop of a three-city road trip, on-base-plus-slugging percentages taking on meaning as sample sizes accumulate). Without signposts, time blurs. We eat meals at regular times; I try to post my blog by 5 p.m., give the day an anchor. Occasionally I remember to watch Steve Nieve, Elvis Costello’s keyboardist, playing lovely tunes each day on a social media page at 1 p.m. EDT. Mostly I forget. I feel befogged and, oddly, drained. The task of picking up laundry from the laundromat — the one across the street is closed; I’ve found one three blocks away — feels monumental. Spending all day in physical contact with one other person (for me; I consider myself lucky) is beyond abnormal; it’s bizarre.
So I get it: Who doesn’t want to come out of the house, meet a couple of friends, play a quick game of soccer? Didn’t Cuomo just say the worst is behind us?
Another characteristic of American life spurs social, if not anarchy, anomie: the utter disinclination of our federal government to act in ways to boost confidence that we can end this plague without tens of thousands of additional deaths.
We’re testing not quite 150,000 people each day; private labs have huge backlogs, are running out of required chemicals. We have no path to test the sick. Paul Romer, New York University Nobel Prize-winning economist, says if the U.S. wants to curb the virus’s spread we would need to isolate 70 percent of the infected, which would require large-scale tracking and something on the order of 20 million to 30 million tests a day. (If you have 100 people with the virus circulating in society, within two weeks you have 250 infected people; if you isolate 70 and leave 30 circulating, in two weeks you have 75 infected people. China, Singapore, South Korea have used this strategy.)
We also still aren’t running sufficient blood tests to understand how many people —crucially, what percentage of the population — have been infected. Are The Girlfriend and I immune? We’ve signed up for a couple of tests (Mt. Sinai, the NIH), haven’t heard back. We know of a score or more people with similar symptoms who’ve never been tested. If the virus is infecting large numbers of people — say, 20 percent — that bodes well for an early end to quarantine. (The virus would be highly transmissible but not so deadly, and the path toward “herd immunity” would be smoother.) But if, say, only 5 percent of the population is infected, then we have a much, much longer path toward large-scale immunity, and, says Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina, “Then we’re in dire straits in terms of how to move forward.”
Apparently the current administration hasn’t figured how to make massive expansion of viral or serum tests pay dividends for the president or his friends. That’s the only coherent rationale for their actions: pandemic as a path to expand their grift.
So when epidemiologists plead for Americans to maintain vigilance in physical isolation, I hear them. In my better moments I feel New York City is banding together, making millions of individual decisions for the benefit of all, lowering the curve to protect our parents, health care workers, first responders, package deliverers, bodega clerks.
Tuesday night? In the confusion of mixed government messages I fear too many of us are being selfish, heeding our own desires, screwing the common good in the name of social media feeds that say the pandemic is a panic induced by blue-state governors and mainstream media to harm the president. In short, I get depressed.
So I snap at The Kid when we discuss how judgmental I am about other people. I snap at The Girlfriend when she wants to watch the end of a movie I’ve decided I hate. I take little pleasure in a perfectly good meal, perfectly warm bath, perfectly comfortable bed that I crawl into hoping to bury my fear, my pain, my hatred, my desire to wake up in any place other than CoronaWorld.
(New York state numbers as of Tuesday: 202,208 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 3.7 percent; 778 dead, to a total of 10,834, up 7.7 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 25,708, up 9.9 percent.)
No comments:
Post a Comment