If you want expertise, don’t bother reading any further here. I know as much about coronavirus as any stunned disbeliever with a sudden, irresistible urge to touch his face.
This is a news story that’s spookily personal — far more personal, somehow, than all those other ongoing horror stories out there, about war, refugees, climate change. Those stories are real, yet compared to the coronavirus story, they feel like abstractions. This is about a potential pandemic — the possibility of hundreds of millions of deaths worldwide — and it’s about the need to use hand sanitizer. Right now. And also, don’t touch people anymore. And stay home.
Part of me feels positively Donald Trumpian about this: Come on, this isn’t real. Indeed, my urge is to defy the warnings and hug my friends, shake strangers’ hands, continue living a connected and joyous life. But part of me stops cold, thinks about the post-World War I influenza pandemic that wound up infecting almost a quarter of the world’s population and killed as many as 100 million people. These things really happen. Don’t be ignorantly dismissive. But don’t panic either.
