Monday. We’re settling into a new routine. For starters, everyone feels healthy: The Girlfriend, The Kid, me.
I run for the first time in a month, re-starting my “Couch To 5K in 9 weeks” program; I’d got to Week 6 before CoronaWorld. I decide to turn the clock back to Week 4 (warm up, run 3 minutes, walk 1.5, run 5, walk 2.5, run 3, walk 1.5, run 5, cool down); I can't finish the last 5. I tell The Girlfriend I felt it in my kidneys, certainly because I’ve read this morning about Covid-19 affecting patients’ renal systems, with hospitals running out of dialysis machines; I know my kidneys are fine. The Girlfriend wonders if all my Covid-19 symptoms were psychosomatic. “You do symptomatize,” she says. She may be right; without tests, we’ll never know. I need no tests to feel my thigh muscles ache like a rented mule.
I text The Co-Parent: “How you holding up without The Kid?”
“Life has fallen into meaningless disrepair.”
“How I’ve felt for the past month.”
“Ouch. OK, I guess that was deserved.”
“Not meant as a burn, only as a comment: it’s better to have her around.”
“She is a delight. I’m glad you get to talk to her. She’s almost endlessly interesting.”
“She just cleaned mildew off my shower curtain. Brave New World.”
“Wow. She cleans?”
“She complained. I said, If it bothers you, here’s a sponge and some cleaner. She said, OK. I thought, Wow -- why didn’t I do this years ago?”
“She wasn’t bothered years ago.”
“I still had to ask her four times to clear the table and put dishes in the dishwasher, then twice more to run the dishwasher. So it’s not like she’s a different person.”
The Kid has school assignments but no classes that meet by videoconference. Her math teacher asks for work each day by 2:50 p.m. (the end of the regular school day); otherwise, assignments are due, presumably, at midnight. Normally she’s in bed at 9, up at 6. Now she’s going to bed at 10:30, up at 8:30. I’m sleeping more, too. When she was sick The Girlfriend slept more than since she was a child; now she wakes for hours each night, worrying about her house sale.
The Kid and I have weird dreams. (Apparently lots of folks are.) I wake anxious and blurry; The Kid wakes anxious and clear. She details a dream in which she took an unusual school bus because it meant she wouldn’t have to swim (the bus carried children with insufficient oxygen in their veins), then realized she had no idea how to get home; knowing her anxious mother waited she exited when the driver dropped a child for “264 Cliff Drive” but immediately got lost; she navigated past an elaborate haunted house only to realize Cliff Drive was home to a massive cult where sightless old women in long white dresses stood with backs turned before doors signed “Do not speak; we cannot see”; she sprinted back and forth, stopping always just a number or two away from 264; she asked a woman in a housekeeper uniform who directed her to a wall with pictures of doors, including 264; she wanted to ask more but the housekeeper was a police officer, who left to arrest the blind women. (This is the short version.)
“What do you think it means?” she asks.
“It means you’re sleeping in CoronaWorld.”
In The Girlfriend’s apartment, her two college-aged children and the elder one’s partner remain healthy, happy. After a month’s quarantine at my place and a week of no symptoms, The Girlfriend is now visiting. (When forced to leave his dorm last month, her son displaced her.) They decide on a schedule for her to hang out, clean, play games: she’ll go Mondays, Thursdays, Sundays.
My laundromat reopens, the first business on my neighboring block of Waverly Avenue to do so. “I’m so glad you’re back,” I say to the boss as I hand him a 16.45-pound bag ($20.60). “We need to work,” he says, gesturing at his skeletal crew: a couple of women doing loads, one delivery man, my Filipino friend cleaning. (He sings arena-rock songs to me only when the boss isn’t around.) “I hope everyone’s healthy,” I say. “Yes, yes,” the boss says with a curt nod, the hand gesture that communicates nothing.
The Georgia governor decides some of his state’s businesses should reopen Friday, though the state has not met benchmarks the White House says would mean it was ready to relax social distancing. Many television networks do a poor job covering anti-quarantine protests in state capitols driven by right-wing ideologues, friends of the president; a Buffalo News reporter describes her smart efforts to cover one such protest in her city. Given the president’s dire political prospects, inability to act for anything but his own personal gain, and existence of a propaganda network working on his behalf, such protests will continue.
The president faces conditions combining those faced by Democrats in 1920 (after the 1918-19 flu pandemic), Republicans in 1932 (the Depression); his team has already decided they can’t run on his coronavirus record. The alternative: trash Biden and Democratic governors, foment dissent, play to his base. His tweet Monday night that he’ll use executive authority to suspend all immigration seems inevitable, his go-to instinct ginning up support by blaming foreigners. Meanwhile, the occupations most at risk in this pandemic are staffed disproportionately by foreign-born workers.
Rather than use federal power to manufacture testing capability or buy personal protective equipment to keep nurses and doctors safe, the administration is forcing states and local hospital systems to bid and bargain. Beyond that, the head of a four-hospital chain in Springfield, Mass., tells a bizarre tale in which he travels to a mid-Atlantic state, fills disguised trucks with equipment bought from China through “an acquaintance of a friend of a team member,” securing the trucks only after being interrogated by FBI agents and they’re almost seized by Homeland Security (whom he mollifies through a congressional connection). It all seems part of the Trump family-and-friends grift, the result of decades of strip-mining governmental efficacy in the name of personal and corporate gain, so the U.S. responds like a failed state (writes The Atlantic’s George Packer), “like Pakistan or Belarus.”
Meanwhile, we hear fewer sirens. I teach The Kid to distinguish police, fire, and ambulance sirens (the last higher, steadier, more plaintive). The sounds arrive distinctly now, routine but not with last week’s persistence. The number of New York City hospitalizations has fallen each day for nearly a week. So has the city’s percentage of positive Covid-19 tests. So has the number of deaths. The shutdown is slowing the spread.
People with Covid-19 are still dying, in this city by the hundreds each day, across the nation by the thousands. Most die cut off from their families. Lots of others are dying, too, of other illnesses that our strained health-care system can’t properly treat.
My Connecticut Friend’s mother-in-law dies. She was 86, suffered from dementia, lived in a nursing home, a good one, but “nursing homes are just pots of Covid-19,” my friend texts. She tested positive only three days ago; her son, my Connecticut Friend’s husband, visited her the day before results came back. He’s immunocompromised. Now he’s quarantining (“no symptoms so far”), unable to attend his mother’s small graveside service later this week. Another son from out of state is quarantining in a Connecticut hotel. They’re planning a larger service for whenever later might be.
(New York state numbers as of Monday: 247,512 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 1.9 percent; 488 dead, to a total of 14,357 up 3.5 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 1,620, to a total of 37,429, up 4.5 percent.)
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