PLAGUE JOURNAL May 2020: Zombies Everywhere, the Dosage Model, the Desert, Temperature & Humidity
The only way to survive is to stay indoors and board up the windows.
[Note: All Plague Journal entries were written as events unfolded. I have edited the drafts for clarity, but the tone and content are original, reflecting what we could see at the time.]
Risks and Environment
When I ride my mountain bike on local trails, I’m aware that I could encounter a rattlesnake. I know people who have, and more than once, an uphill rider has told me there was one on the trail ahead of me. I’m also aware that rattlesnakes come out in certain temperatures and weather conditions. They hibernate from October until March, then come out on sunny days over fifty degrees. They are especially active between 80 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit. I am always careful not to put a foot down in brush or any place that I can’t see, especially in these temperatures.
I’m aware that in this same area of hills and trees, mountain lions hunt at dusk. They are elusive, seldom seen by humans, although every once in a while there’s a story about an attack on a dog, a child, or even an adult. Runners and bikers have been attacked, presumably mistaken for fleeing prey.
I am aware that when I’m on the trail I face certain threats and that the risks vary depending on environmental conditions. I am unlikely to encounter a rattlesnake in a Starbucks or be attacked by a mountain lion while pumping gas. It could happen, but the risks are low. On the trail, I am closer to nature. The virus is dangerous at a birthday party in Chicago in March or a nursing home in New York in April. It is not dangerous on a desert trail in Colorado in May. Just as rattlesnakes pose the greatest risk on sunny days when temperatures are between 80 and 90, the coronavirus poses the greatest risk on cloudy days when temperatures are between 32 and 40.
We went into a deep lockdown in April, to stay safe. I thought of those video clips from college campuses beginning in 2015 or so in which college students randomly screamed “safety” at visiting speakers in what seemed like a combination of attention-seeking, intimidation, and delusion. They said that their lives were at risk. There seemed to be a direct line from these early performative outbursts to our current mania. Now the message of safety and distance is the only story, but the messages are lazy, misleading, and generally unsafe.
For sixteen years I had made a spring trip to either the Colorado desert or the Utah desert as the ski season wound down. The group evolved from one year to the next but centered around a core group of friends. We camped, rode mountain bikes, made bonfires, played guitars, and drank local brews. We planned this year’s trip for the first weekend in May, but as the weekend approached, we didn’t even communicate. The trip was unthinkable. Local parks and trails were full of people, and everyone seemed happy and healthy, but it was impossible to drive anywhere, or stay anywhere, or be anywhere. I wondered about the relative normality of the people running and biking and realized we were two populations: those who got out and stayed healthy and those who locked inside and watched MSNBC.
All along I had wondered, why aren’t grocery store clerks getting sick? My grocery has remained relatively normal. Workers continue to take coupons and credit cards, bag groceries, ask if we play Monopoly (something to do with the receipt). We enter shopper ID numbers and sign the credit-card machine. No one wore a mask or stood behind plexiglass until late April. Workers stood close to each other, talking and laughing normally. The lines at the pharmacy were longer than I’d ever seen them. I returned three times before finding a crowd small enough that I was willing to wait—not because I was afraid of the virus but because I disliked waiting.
My local big-box liquor store was full of people. I’d never seen a line as long as on Cinco de Mayo. The store is nothing but metal and glass, and everyone touched things. My butcher shop sold through its frozen steaks but was normal otherwise, if more crowded than usual. The cashiers continued to have me sign my credit-card receipt, already an anachronism in most shops even before the virus. The only change was that by late April, there was a cup for sterile pens and a cup for infected pens.
I rode my motorcycle to a local brewery a number of times just to see people. On one visit, the owner was at the bar furiously typing into his laptop, working on his application to the paycheck protection program. There were more employees than usual, perhaps eight or nine. Some of them were doing maintenance; some were painting a wall near the patio. Others were sat at a table doing something on their computers. Service was carry-out only, but the employees behaved normally—no masks, no panic, not a lot of distance.
Gas stations were normal. I wondered aloud to friends why people weren’t getting sick in all these places, and I was assured that they were.
We knew from the New Yorker that anyone going to work or riding a subway was in grave danger, so I’m fairly confident that we would hear the stories if grocery clerks were dying in great numbers. We heard about nursing homes and meat-processing plants. Why not grocery stores? I saw a headline that a worker in a King Soopers in Colorado tested positive. A worker. And who knows whether he got it at work or at home? The headline appeared early on and I didn’t hear of further cases. I saw a headline about a cluster in a Wal-Mart in Massachusetts, but why didn't they all have them? And what made us think the virus spread at the store? Even these occasional anecdotes were mostly from the early days. With the media’s appetite for scare headlines, shouldn't we see hundreds or thousands of stories about grocery infections as the thing progressed? Yet there were no stories. Grocery workers were fine. Things weren’t quite what we were being told.
Dosage, Not Zombies: Time Plus Distance
It wasn’t until mid-April that I heard a physician on a podcast say that dosage mattered. If you had to stand close to someone, you should step away after fifteen minutes. More of the stuff was worse than less of the stuff. This was news. I’d assumed it was a binary event: either you caught it or you avoided it, whatever it was. I realized that movies informed my perceptions, including zombie movies, in which you either catch it or you don’t. In 28 Days Later, after Brendan Gleeson’s character catches a drop of infected blood in his eye, it’s only a matter of seconds before he goes into convulsions and tries to eat his daughter. I assumed the coronavirus was like that. In the movies, a small bite doesn’t give you a fever or sniffles; it makes you eat brains. You got all of it or you got none of it. So don’t get it. Stay home.
The sequel to 28 Days Later, called 28 Weeks Later, begins in a small country house with all the shades drawn. When an unexpected visitor arrives, the people inside are blinded by the brief blast of sunlight when they open the door. Clearly, they have been on lockdown for a long time. They dine quietly, to avoid arousing what’s outside, but the attack comes anyway.
On the Adam and Dr. Drew podcast recently (“The Feelings Hopper,” 5/14/2020), Adam Carolla captured the sense we are meant to have in our new pandemic:
This thing is out there. We treat it like it’s Dawn of the Dead. You know, this is out there. Like you’re looking out your window: it’s out there. It’s coming for you. It’s out there. Okay, buhhh, how do we prevent it? Well, don’t go out there. Don’t go out there. It’s a zombie apocalypse out there. You stay in. Batten down the hatches. Board up the doors.
My own family members and friends seemed to take this view. The virus was outside lurking, and that we were safe inside with the blinds drawn, scrubbing ourselves. We needed walls and we needed to stay out of sight, as if it was hovering above, looking for movement. The responses of many people I talked to seemed medieval.
As we saw people wearing gloves and heard repeatedly that we should not touch anything, I was reminded of the beginning of Contagion, a montage of scenes in which Gwyneth Paltrow gives a bartender her credit card; an obviously sick man grabs a boat rail and a bus pole; a London model sets a portfolio on a studio table; and another sick man grasps a pen, an airline-bathroom doorknob, a cocktail tumbler, and a Tokyo train handle. Then the first sick man smears his fingers on an elevator button, stumbles through a wet market, and collapses in front of an oncoming truck.
This thing lived on surfaces and would get us that way. Sometime in late March or early April, Contagion became available on Netflix and immediately became one of its most-watched movies. I watched it again myself. The fictional virus had a fatality rate of 25-30% and killed people within days; movies need to keep things moving.
The media could have done a public service by telling us that Covid-19 was nothing like the virus in Contagion. We were not getting it from surfaces, and it would not kill a quarter of those infected. But the news would keep us guessing. At any time, Don Lemon could have told us that our conceptions from popular culture—from Contagion and 28 Days Later and The Hot Zone and The Walking Dead and ebola and the Black Death and the 1918 flu—were wildly off, that this illness was closer to the seasonal flu, more dangerous than the flu for people older than 80 and less dangerous than the flu for young people. But Lemon knew nothing or cared nothing. He was in the business of fear and politics.
At any point, the talking heads could have shown diagrams of the spreader events, which would have conveyed how we catch the thing and how we don’t catch the thing. They would have made compelling TV, more interesting than the endless scolding, and they would have been more effective than the parade of false experts with their exhortations to “socially distance,” a vague and inadequate prescription. Just spread out. They never mentioned the time element, that dosage increased with duration of exposure. They could have told us to open a window and use a fan to create a cross-breeze between two people (not from one to the other). But Lemon and the others were not in the business of information or public safety. They wanted us home watching TV, not outside where the virus couldn’t get us.
Sometime in April, we heard about the study from China revealing that people were not getting infected outdoors, but we didn’t hear it from the major news outlets, and the stories weren’t rising to the top of Google searches. The results were compelling. Of 1,245 positive cases across China, 79.9% were contracted in the home, followed by 34% from transportation (the totals combine for more than 100% because some people were exposed in both places). Only a single outbreak could be traced to the outdoors, involving two people. All 318 outbreaks that involved three or more people took place indoors. None were traced to “food, entertainment, shopping, or “‘miscellaneous’.” I didn’t see this news on CNN, MSNBC, or in the pages of the Times or the Washington Post. Yet it seemed relevant.
To the Desert
On the Wednesday following our aborted camping and biking trip, one of the guys sent a note saying it was on for the upcoming weekend. I began packing. None of us discussed it. People who had been safe a week earlier were suddenly ready to go. Our group consisted of nine or ten adults and a number of children. It was as if, at the same instant, we all came to our senses and realized that the story and reality had little in common.
On my drive out, I drove under massive electronic overhead billboards advising, “Stay indoors, save a life” and “Safer at home.” I mentioned the experience to a family member a week later and she responded with a plea for all of us to stay safe. Don’t go anywhere. But air and sunshine are safe, I tried to say. Moving air is better than stagnant air. The thing didn’t live in the desert dirt. It lives in the lungs of people, in dry, stale indoor air. But she was adamant that we had to be safe. When I said that indoors is more dangerous than outdoors, she said, “But I live alone,” as if I’d suggested the apartment itself was going to attack her. At least open the shades and windows, I suggested.
A few days later, I got an email from a friend that contained a link to a Bob Dylan parody. The refrain, “Everybody must get stoned” from “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” was updated to “Everybody must stay home.” The song warned against doorknobs and parking meters.
Imagine if we were experiencing a novel outbreak of lung cancer and the media-led government response was to tell everyone to hunker down in windowless rooms and smoke. Imagine if they put signs over the highway saying “Safer with smoke” and “Take a puff, save a life.” Imagine if you were to tell a friend, I know CNN told you to smoke those things, but I think they might be bad for you, and the friend’s response was alarm and pleading (between puffs): I think it’s really important to stay safe. Even if you don’t care about yourself, we need to think about everyone else. I’m going to smoke, and so should you. We need to stay safe. Although the coronavirus threat is from gray skies and cool weather and dry indoor air and compromised immune systems, we closed the beaches and parks and swimming pools and gyms and sat inside watching CNN and going mad.
Environment and the Virus
Pools and beaches and gyms remain closed. Although the government has finally allowed their opening, the entities operating them cannot figure out how to staff up enough to accomplish all the new superstitious rituals required by law. An email from a condo homeowner’s association contains an air of resignation: “The current Public Health Order only allows outdoor swimming pools to open at 50% capacity or 50 people, whichever is lower, with social distancing measures in place, creating a bureaucracy of reservations and policing. The facilities must be cleaned and disinfected every hour.” HOA boards spent many hours discussing how to operate in compliance with the government mandates and guidance. Most finally gave up, unable to afford the extra labor and fearing lawsuits.
Yet the science is simple: wet air is safer than dry air. Relative humidity above 60% slows the spread of viral droplets. Hot air (or cold air) is safer than cool air. Sunshine is safer than gray skies. But the zealots at the New York Times will not tolerate the opening of a swimming pool. There will be no refunds to our HOA dues, as the HOAs have to perform all the routine maintenance. All cost, no pleasure, no safety. Fun is deemed a public health menace.