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.
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Due Date: 124 days away
At the time, it felt like the weekend escalated quickly.
Someone showed me my first virus meme at work earlier in the week. The caption said, “PANIC ROOM.” The photo showed a bathroom with dozens of toilet paper holders installed across the walls.
That was three days earlier.
By Saturday afternoon, Liz was showing me actual photos people took at Target or Costco or wherever, the shelves completely cleared of fresh meats, bread, eggs, milk, all the tornado essentials. On top of that, cleaning supplies, rubber gloves, and masks looked like they were getting snatched up too.
I wanted to see better angles. I couldn’t tell if everyone was just cherry picking the empty aisles or if entire stores were actually like zombie land out there. I started searching around the internet to find out more.
Headlines from Europe showed countries in various levels of concern. Countries like Italy and Spain struggled to hospitalize all their sick. It had gotten crazy in Europe, and I was just wading into it then. Demand for ventilators rose enough that I had to experience captions like, “Patients over 80 told to go home and die.” Meanwhile, the Brits doubled down on their stance: “London will not quarantine. Economy more important than people.”
In the US, we landed somewhere in the middle. A few states, mostly on the west coast where they’d confirmed the first cases in the country, closed their schools and as many businesses as possible. Others continued “business as usual.”
For whatever reason, toilet paper went, well, viral on social media. Half the posts were serious, like, “You need to get toilet paper now. It’s about to be gone forever. And you can’t survive without it.” The other half poked fun at the first group. One helpful gentleman showed how to photocopy an image of a stack of toilet paper and then tape multiple photocopies to your windows so it looked like you were hoarding hundreds of rolls.
As the memes spread, so did the panic. It seemed like people who didn’t mean to stock up started buying a roll or two, just in case, along with a side or two of beef, again, just in case. And then the more photos everyone saw of empty aisles, or photocopies of toilet paper in windows, the more they worried, and hoarded that much more. By the end of the day Saturday, none of the stores had anything anyone wanted. We’d successfully created a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Some of the larger stores announced modifications to their hours and put restrictions on what people could buy. Most of the 24-hour places switched to closing in the evenings, leaving the third-shift crew for restocking. Kroger posted signs to try to hire more employees, no application necessary.
I told Liz I could maybe pick up a second-shift job to scoop up some extra cash during the crisis. She didn’t think it was funny.
The whole world might not have changed that weekend, but ours sure did.
Our governor had started doing daily press conferences at 5pm. I hadn’t caught any of the others, but I watched the one on Saturday with Liz, since I was home from work anyway.
Compared to other states, he was definitely taking aggressive action. From what I could tell, only California and Nevada seemed more intense. The governor kept referencing a chart comparing Philadelphia and St. Louis during the Spanish Flu of 1918. Philadelphia was exhibit A in letting the flu just do its thing. St. Louis took the opposite approach, enacting strict government regulations to lock the city down. Philadelphia held their World War I parade. St. Louis canceled theirs. While Philadelphia continued business as usual, St. Louis closed all their schools, parks, and public gatherings.
I didn’t remember anything, from college or otherwise, about the Spanish Flu.
“You’ve never heard of it?” Kenneth said. “It killed more people than World War I.”
Evidently, he knew about it from the one of the online games he played. As we dug into it a little more on Google, we found out it actually killed more people worldwide than the Black Plague too. Maybe it just didn’t have the marketing behind it here in the United States, probably because it didn’t look good for us.
The governor used his Spanish Flu chart to argue that we needed to close everything, social distance as much as possible, and take this seriously, before it becomes devastating. He hadn’t gotten to enforcing it yet, but he certainly encouraged all public gatherings to cease.
With the schools closed on Monday, churches faced an important decision: do we hold services or not? Some churches had already canceled the previous weekend. I tried not to pass judgment then. This weekend, though, just seven days later, it didn’t feel so out there.
Liz had already decided she wasn’t going.
I heard Kenneth’s dad facetiming Kenneth. “Hey, buddy, how you guys holding up?”
Kenneth told him about school.
I decided to check in with my mom.
“I’m glad you called,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to call you guys. How are things?”
I told her about school too, and our governor’s warnings.
“What’s Mississippi like?” I asked.
She moved down there to be with my sister after dad died.
“Oh, we’re fine, fine.” she said. “Nothing like you all up there.”
“Are you staying home? What are they doing for church tomorrow?”
“Kel’s still dancing. We’re still going to church tomorrow, if that’s what you mean. We haven’t seen it affect us much here. ”
“Do you even have any confirmed cases there, like anywhere in Mississippi?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay, well, that’s good.”
“There’s so much misinformation. It’s difficult to know how bad it is everywhere. It’s so frustrating.”
“Well, and then the numbers don’t seem like this huge pandemic. I watched a YouTube video where someone explained it. He was saying there are like two parts to the problem. One is that the virus spreads exponentially, and we’re not very good at understanding what that means. Like it’s not intuitive. And then two, there’s this two-week lag time, where like you could have the virus but not know it. In that two-week time frame, you’re just running around spreading it all over. And no one knows. Combine that with it spreading exponentially, and it can just get out of control really fast.”
I left some space for her to respond and then added, “Just be careful, mom. Who knows what this will look like in two weeks or however long it’ll last. Just don’t even get sick, okay? Double down on that vitamin C.”
“You know we restocked last weekend at Costco.”
We laughed.
“I figured.”
“How’s Liz? How’s the baby?”
I told her about the appointment the day before but left out the part about not being able to take Shepherd anymore. “We’re just taking it easy, staying home. If we can make some easy decisions now that keep us from having to make difficult decisions later, we want to do that.”
