These posts contain a series of lightly-edited excerpts from letters written to my two brothers and sister-in-law in Pennsylvania during the first year of the pandemic. Each brief chapter focuses on a particular day.
The majority of the chapters are personal observations that describe how Covid-19 impacted my wife and me, as well as the people closest to us. They provide an account of how we adjusted the way we socialized, shopped, and, more generally, settled into a relatively cloistered lifestyle.
A significant number of chapters deal with the statistical aspect of the pandemic, with Worldometer, The New York Times, and the Wisconsin Department of Health Services being the most frequently used sources. As the pandemic wears on, the focus here shifts from the international to the national to the state and finally to the county level.
And every once in a while, I allow myself to let off some steam.
This being a chronological account, I have refrained from inserting my current perspective into these excerpts. When appropriate, chapters will be prefaced with an explanation providing context, if only to more clearly identify people and places that are mentioned by name.
Bottom line: these posts is intended as a memoir, not an historical account.
Chapter 1: The First Mention of “Corona”
(Wednesday, February 26, 2020)
Context: In the spring of 2017, younger son Eddie, working as a bartender three years after graduating from college, went on a solo trip to Europe — London, Cologne, Berlin. “I need to shake things up” is how he justified it. At a hostel in Cologne, he met Madi, a young woman from southern Germany at the hostel where he was staying. His life was never the same after that. He moved to Germany the following spring.
Eddie wasn’t feeling well all of last week, probably part of the reason he didn’t respond to a couple of texts I sent him later in the week.
New York Times, 1/20/2020
I see that Germany was in the news today, I wrote on Thursday morning.
Eddie attends graduate school at the University of Tubingen and is enrolled in the American Studies program.
Then I added the following comment. (I mentioned the museum to him in an earlier text.)
As for the U.S., I feel as though
we are assembling a new exhibit for the Documentation Museum. Trump is really feeling his oats this week. He’s on quite the authoritarian tear.
No response.
I tried again the following morning, using a standard conversation starter.
What are your plans for the weekend?
I received a reply two days later, while JoAnna was at church.
We texted back and forth for the next 10 minutes.
Eddie assumed he contracted a bug the previous weekend in Oberdischingen while attending Carnival with his girlfriend Madi, who lives in Ulm. (Madi’s parents live in Oberdischingen.) Carnival is a country-wide series of local pre-Lenten festival, Germany’s version of Mardi Gras, He exhibited no symptoms until after his return to Tubingen. For the first few days, he attempted to shrug them off as they were fairly mild overall, no fever, headache, and typical cold symptoms. By Wednesday, he realized he was in no shape to teach his two classes. He canceled them, which only led to some second-guessing and mental stress on his part. Eddie tends to sweat the small stuff. During our recent What’s App conversations, JoAnna and I have repeatedly encouraged him, somewhat emphatically, to step back and take in the bigger picture.
A similar situation just occurred yesterday
Eddie called to inform me that his tuition payment was past due – and that he needed our financial assistance to pay it. (Not a surprise as we had already told him we’d help out.) He immediately verbalized a worst-case scenario, as if this oversight was going to jeopardize his status at a student.
“I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” I counseled him. “I’m sure the school will happily take your money whether the payment is made on time or is late.”
Sure enough. This morning I woke up to find the following text message awaiting my eyeballs.
Good morning. I hope this text doesn’t wake you. I talked with student administration and as long as I pay by the end of March I’ll be fine.
I couldn’t resist responding with an I-told-you-so comment, adding a grinning emoji at the end. Just teasing!
Clearly, the tuition deadline had some significant stretch to it. That seems to be the case across the board at the University of Tubingen. According to Eddie, many professors allow students to submit papers and other class assignments months – more than a semester’s worth -- after the deadline. In fact, he still has a paper to complete from one of his courses last fall. Not the best learning environment for a habitual procrastinator like Eddie. He apparently has lots of company, though.
The good news is that Eddie is finally over his sickness.
We shared another of our long and animated conversations yesterday. I have to confess, though, that by Sunday, when he was still in zombie mode (as he described it), I started to wonder, my mind getting overactive, if it was the Coronavirus he contracted at Carnival, the 2020 event attracting large crowds, even with the threat of Covid on the horizon, making it a veritable Petri dish for transmission.
I didn’t allow myself to go very far down that road.
OK, so here’s a coincidence. I just received the following text from Eddie.
Apparently there are two corona cases in a Tubingen clinic.
Are they students or locals? I asked.
A 60-year-old doctor and his 24-year-old daughter, locals, he replied.
He was vague on the details, as he read the report on a German-language news website. His German reading and speaking skills are still at the elementary level, so he wasn’t able to suss out all of the details. Later I found an English-language report. The woman had contracted it from a friend who recently returned from a visit to Milan.
Worldometer, a statistics website, provides regular updates on the number of coronavirus cases by country, as well as a breakdown of the number of mild vs. serious and active vs. closed. Italy has quickly shot to #3 on the list of counties where cases have been confirmed. (A very distant third to 1st-place China – 383 to 78,073. At this time, Germany has 15 confirmed cases.) The death rate -- 2,770 out of 30,359 closed cases is 8%, compared to 6.8% for the current flu season in the U.S. (Provided by CDC. I have to confess I don’t understand how the CDC arrives at its figure.)
As Eddie pointed out, nearly 1.4 billion people live in China. Panic is not the correct response. Best to keep things in perspective. Personally, I think it’s too early for this type of headline.
Here’s the thing. We already have a virulent strain of the flu infecting millions of Americans. Here’s the perspective on the current flu season in the U.S.
But it’s also much too early to be making blanket statements of any kind, hopeful or bleak. Who knows where the coronavirus is going to take us. Right now we all seem to be in a state of anxious uncertainty.
Read chapter 2 here
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