Fragments

There is a huge untapped resource for combatting COVID-19, and it is growing just as fast as the pandemic. I am referring to the shut-ins, like me, who suddenly find ourselves with time to occupy while home alone that previously we would have spent in company or out in public at work or play. This has been very frustrating, not only because of the loss of personal opportunities, but also because it inhibits reaching out to help people who have been even more adversely affected by the virus’s medical and nonmedical effects. So far the way not to feel completely useless has been to consider that “We also serve who only stand and wait.” By sheltering in place and without guests we not only protect ourselves but also others whom we might infect if we happened to be carrying the virus without symptoms. Furthermore, even in protecting only ourselves, we free up hospital personnel and beds and ventilators for others. But this is not very emotionally satisfying, and anyway there is m...

We have seen with the new coronavirus how something very simple in itself can have devastating implications. Thus, what COVID-19 requires of every human being on Earth is "simply" to stay six feet or two meters apart from anyone else. But what havoc this has wreaked! I could not even count the ways, but they are now known to all of us, so I need not bother. From the global (world recession) to the intimate (no touching, please), we live in an entirely new world now. This is much like a science fiction story, for a typical device in that genre is to change "just one" thing and then see what happens. For example, Philip Wylie's novel The Disappearance begins with the sudden vanishing of all women from the Earth. You can begin to imagine what would result, and Wylie does. But who would ever have imagined the imperative to keep six feet apart from everyone else? Of course it does "follow" from the way contagious disease spreads. But even in Camus...