This is a fictional story. All names, places, and viruses are used fictitiously. Resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, past or present, are intentional.
If you haven’t read from the beginning, please start at Chapter 1 here.
***
Due Date: 99 days away
Two weeks passed.
The rain stopped. The sun came out.
Dr. Madison called to check up on Kenneth. According to Liz, it wasn’t her front desk staff. She called personally, a first for her.
“I told her we’re doing what she said,” Liz told me.
I went to work. I came home. I cooked dinner. I did the dishes. That was my day. Repeat.
Liz stopped watching the governor’s daily updates. Everyone did.
A small but vocal minority protested the governor’s actions. “Unconstitutional,” they said. “Open up Kentucky, open up Kentucky, open up Kentucky.”
I’d all but forgotten that people were actually out of work. It all became normal so fast. When all the restaurants and businesses closed, most of my friends continued to work from home. Even the teachers. Kenneth did online learning, and everyone said they were doing more as a result, both the students and the teachers.
In those two weeks, the 14 days, the amount of time they said to quarantine someone if they were exposed to the virus, I didn’t contract it from the man at the grocery store. Or at least I didn’t come down with any symptoms. That was the weird part. The further we got into it, the more we heard reports that some people who had the virus didn’t show symptoms at all.
Jerry thought the tests were inaccurate, showing false positives. That’s what I heard from him at first. Later, we learned that they weren’t necessarily false positives. Some people legitimately had the virus but never got sick.
What did that mean for our testing procedures? Did a bunch of people have this virus, and no one knew about it? If a bunch of people had it, did that also mean that, after the 14-day quarantine period, they were now immune to it?
Supposedly, there was a test for antibodies, we heard, a way to tell if someone had had the virus. We still didn’t have enough tests for the virus itself, though, much less tests for antibodies. The longer the pandemic lasted and the more we knew, the more grime the outlook for getting everyone tested.
No one believed they would develop a vaccine in time either. Millions of dollars poured into research, and they did try some out. But there wasn’t much promising news on that front. If we couldn’t even get enough tests, how did we think we could develop a vaccine and get it to everyone in a meaningful amount of time?
So we just waited, punctuating our internal calendars with weekly, lawn care regiments.
What started as a two-week quarantine—at least that’s what we hoped—when they first closed the schools, turned into an indefinite shutdown. Other than the stimulus plan the government tried to rush through, it didn’t seem like anyone had a plan for recovering. No one had been through this before. Sure, China technically had, a few months ahead of us, but they were still recovering too. We didn’t know for sure if their quarantine, enforced even harder than anywhere we’d seen in the United States, had worked. The numbers seemed better, but no one knew for sure what would happen afterward, after everyone went back to working together, eating out together, exercising at the gym together, hanging out together, all the togetherness.
The outlook seemed worse, but as the sun stayed out, we began to let our guard down.
Another one of our employees got sick, Travis this time. He hadn’t taken time off to self-quarantine, despite being vocal about needing other guys to be tested before working with them.
“Screw it. If I get sick, I get sick,” he told me. “I’m not seeing my son. That’s hard. But you got to do what you got to do, right?”
In theory, I wasn’t sure I agreed with him when he said it. In practice, I was still at work too.
In reality, when he got sick, I didn’t even know it.
