Author: Aaron Barlow

You should be starting your own ‘Time of Coronavirus’ journal soon, if you haven’t already. You needn’t share it on OpenLan–unless you want to–but you will be using it for a paper and turning it in as part of your portfolio. I am going to keep a journal, too, providing an example, I hope, for you as well as a record for me of this strange and unnerving time.

When I awoke yesterday, I had a stuffy head–not unusual for me, but of concern as we face COVID-19. My wife could hear the difference in my voice and quizzed me on it but I brushed her off. I was in a hurry to get our clothes to the laundromat by seven when it opens for I did not want to be there when other people are. I should have let my wife go, and recognize that now, but I wanted to get out for a bit (all we have been doing is walking the dog and a bit of grocery shopping).

Normally, I do our laundry, using the time there to read or grade student papers or do other work. Last time, though, I dropped it off. It costs about twice as much, but I had decided that the degree of contact with others was not worth the saving. This time, I did the same.

We are among the lucky New Yorkers who have room for a car. We rent a space in front of our building so it was easy to load the laundry bags into our little Mini Cooper. No one was out on the street. Our block is beginning to take the situation seriously, especially since the death of the son-in-law of one of our neighbors last Thursday. The laundromat we use is about a mile away on a normally busy street. We like it because it is always clean and the people who work there are personable.

Though I arrived at the laundromat at seven, opening time, it was still dark. I parked on the street where I could see the bus stop across the street for I new that Phyllis, who opens up, would arrive by bus. There were a couple of people waiting, so I knew she would likely be on the next one to come by.

She was. The bus came after a wait of about fifteen minutes. Phyllis was in a mask. I waved to catch her attention and told her I would give her a few minutes to get things ready before coming in. In her Italian accent, she replied, “Thank you, Aaron.”

She had her mask on still when I lugged my bags in. She weighed them while we kept the appropriate distance apart and told me she was quite busy, which I expected, and asked if tomorrow was OK for pick-up. I said sure and drove home.

I am glad that I did respect the distances suggested, for I started to have a raspy throat by noon. Now, I have seasonal allergies and that’s probably all this is but, frankly, I don’t know. So, we decided that I should isolate even in the house. This is going to be difficult even though it is just the two of us, but I am beginning to learn just what that means. We are lucky. Our apartment has a half-bath right off the bedroom. I am unlucky. I have been stuck in the bedroom for almost a day now and may be here for a while.

Today, I will spend time exploring how best to isolate in a New York apartment. Maybe we’re exhibiting an abundance of caution, but there’s no way I can get tested right now so we’re putting safety first though I am not happy about it–though, at the same time, I am annoyed at myself for having gone out at all yesterday. What if I am positive and infected someone else?

Right now, I have a box of tissues on the night-table that looks like it has an image of the coronavirus on it, or at least it amuses me to think so. I don’t need them right now, but want to have them around.

Yesterday, before my throat got a little rough, we wiped down everything in the apartment from door knobs to telephones to countertops to bannisters (ours is a third-floor apartment with one flight of stairs inside). I’m thankful for that, for I decided to isolate soon after, soon enough so that my wife didn’t have to do it all over again immediately, though she will again, today… leaving me feeling guilty that I can’t help.

No matter that I know that this is what I should do, I feel rather foolish isolating like this. Everything seems so calm, though sirens are still constant in this city, making me feel I’m being overly dramatic. I’m feeling quite imperfect but I am trying to do what is needed.

Your experiences will be quite different from mine but do try to record them three or four (preferably four) times a week, writing for half an hour or more. In may, you will use your journal as the basis for a paper, one where you will add some outside sources, citing what other people have written–doing, that is, a bit of research.

The ancestor I am named for traveled to Norfolk, VA with his daughter Esther in 1800. They both died there of yellow fever and were buried there in an unmarked grave along with other victims of an outbreak not large enough to be considered notable, so common were such occurrences at that time. Though vaccination for smallpox was already possible, it would take more than a century for a yellow-fever vaccine to be developed. Its creator, Max Theiler, would receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine for it the year I was born, 1951.

Vaccines and preventive measures, awareness of epidemics, and knowledge of the need for research were widespread and welcome during my youth. Members of my own family had died of polio and I remember clearly the sugar cubes with pink (or maybe they were blue) drops of the Sabin vaccine within them and the remarkable relief they and the slightly earlier Salk vaccine engendered. Measles, mumps, chicken pox… these and other diseases were being eliminated or severely curtailed as I grew up.

The idea of being prepared as a nation for epidemics while fighting to stop them from occurring was taken for granted in my early days. National funds were used for planning, preparing and research. This was one area where Americans agreed that what affected one, affected all. Every one of us understood from personal or family experience the dangers contagious disease poses to groups and the individuals within them or to those coming into contact with them.

The idea of going on spring break and shrugging off a pandemic—as is happening now—would have occurred to very few Americans in the 1950s or 1960s. We knew what carriers were, had all heard of Typhoid Mary, and heeded the warning. We had experience of disease in a way that the generations beyond the baby boomers have not. We would never have dared call warnings about a pandemic a hoax—something paradoxical now as quite a few of my contemporaries are doing just that.

Oh, how quickly we forget!

Just as our parents had even greater knowledge of the benefits of vaccines and the dangers of contagion than we had, we baby boomers should be offering more knowledge in this area than our children and grandchildren can. Doing so should be extremely important to us, for we are apparently more at risk than younger people, making coronavirus perhaps more of a focus to us than it may be to the rest of the population.

But, no. Not always.

Perhaps it has gotten too easy to dismiss anything we don’t like as a “hoax” or as “fake news,” especially now that we have a president who bandies such accusations about on an almost daily basis. Anything that threatens our complacencies and sense of worth can be brushed aside, today, as we go about our solitary pursuits, secure within systems of protection we no longer acknowledge. Systems whose reactive powers we have allowed to erode because perception of the threats they keep from realizing upon us has receded.

What worries me is that, if we slow the spread of the coronavirus, bringing the incidence of COVID-19 at any one time to manageable levels, many people will start claiming that the reactions of both federal and state governments were well beyond what was needed. What also worries me is that too many of us feel this isn’t going to affect them, that others are going to feel the brunt and that we should be able to continue with our lives as was wish. It’s not our concern.

My ancestor Aaron Barlow traveled to Norfolk on business. He had certainly known about the large 1798 yellow-fever outbreaks in Philadelphia, Baltimore and further south—and that they hadn’t completely subsided. He certainly did not plan on dying when he took his trip and surely never would have put his daughter at risk. I don’t know why he felt his trip would be safe for him. Clearly, it wasn’t.

We don’t know, with disease, what will happen. But we can be careful when communicable disease threatens. My ancestor was only fifty years old, his daughter fourteen. They were robbed of what might have been decades of life.

I’m going to try to learn from my ancestor and stay home, as he should have done. I hope we can all do the same.