Meghan ORourke - A World Out of Reach: Dispatches from Life under Lockdown

A World Out of Reach

DISPATCHES FROM LIFE
UNDER LOCKDOWN

Selections from
The Yale Reviews
Pandemic Files

Edited and with an Introduction by
MEGHAN OROURKE

Copyright 2020 by Yale University. Introduction copyright 2020 by Meghan ORourke. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020942320
ISBN 978-0-300-25735-9 (paper: alk. paper)

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To the memory of those who lost their lives to COVID-19
and
to the essential workers who kept the world running during the pandemic

Meghan ORourke

Katie Kitamura

Laura Kolbe

Nitin Ahuja

Rena Xu

Alicia Mireles Christoff

Miranda Featherstone

Maya C. Popa

Major Jackson

John Fabian Witt

Octvio Luiz Motta Ferraz

Joan Naviyuk Kane

Nell Freudenberger

Briallen Hopper

Brandon Shimoda

Yusef Komunyakaa and Laren McClung

Eric OKeefe-Krebs

Sean Lynch

Millicent Marcus

Meghana Mysore

Rachel Jamison Webster

Emily Ziff Griffin

Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Kathryn Lofton

Monica Ferrell

Russell Morse

Randi Hutter Epstein

Noreen Khawaja

Victoria Chang

Joyelle McSweeney

Khameer Kidia

Emily Greenwood

Elisa Gabbert

Emily Bernard

Hafizah Geter

Emily Gogolak

Roger Reeves

In January I started reading obsessively about the novel coronavirus that was racing through Wuhan, China. I was finishing writing a book about contested chronic illnesses and the role viruses play in them, and I have an amateurs interest in disease, especially poorly understood ones. A friend of mine, a longtime science reporter, had drilled into me that the world was overdue for a pandemic, and I wondered if this was it. Each night as I read, the developing story seemed startlingly different from the one Id read the night before. First the story was an account of a new virus affecting a handful of people at a wet market in Wuhana story about animal to human transmission, in other words, and perhaps about the dangers of wet markets and climate change driving us to eat a wider range of animals, exposing ourselves to dangerous new viruses. The next day there was a story about how many people in the city had this virus, which was alarming, because it suggested a gap between what we thought we knew about the virus and what we actually knew about it. This virus had to be transmitting from person to person. Days later, there it was in the newspaper: a story about evidence of human to human transmission of the novel coronavirus, now known as SARS-CoV-2.

As the days passed and the news worsened, I felt dread rise in me. Even as I sat in my childrens dim room, warmed by the glow of the nightlight, watching my boyswell fed, clean, and cozy in their pajamas, as safe and well as I could ever make themplay with their blocks, I knew a pandemic was coming. Over the next weeks, before cases were known to be in the United States, I canceled travel and prepared for the worst, following the instructions of a virologist friend who told me to buy extra supplies at the store each time I went shopping. Even so, it was still a shock in March when, seemingly in one stroke, Connecticut (where I live), New York, and New Jersey shut down. One day I was at a friends book party, shouting over the house music and sharing tapas; the next our sons preschool was closing, and a curfew and then a lockdown were imposed on the state.

Overnight the world was lost to us. I vividly remember, as many of us must, those first days of sitting inside, looking out the window at the still-bare branches of the March trees, then seeing the first buds of green, and knowing that time was passing. Inside, our days were a parade of small tasks: getting the children fed, dressed, entertained, set up for preschool with Zoom; trying, somehow, to put in a workday; then doing everything in a kind of reverseundressing the children, bathing them, getting them to bed. Time scalloped, looping in on itself. At one point, on the night of the supermoon, an ambulance and a fire truck came down our street. We watched as the EMTs and firemen painstakingly put on their PPE (personal protection equipment) before going in to our neighbors house and bringing him out on a stretcher. My sons, aged three and eighteen months, were delighted to have the close-up view of the flashing lights. Weee-ooo! said the baby, pointing at the ambulance. He was ecstatic; I was chilled.

WHO ARE WEwho were wein the pandemic? As some answers grow clearer with time, others become dimmer. Collected in this book are attempts to answer this question. The emergence of the novel coronavirus has disrupted nearly every aspect of our lives and transformed American life in ways we cant fully understand yet. We will need historians and political scientists and novelists to wrap their minds around the full scopethe ramificationsof this pandemic; the future will be able to see things that we cant yet process. It will know the depth of the viruss economic fallout; it will know when the vaccine arrived, if one did; it will know if a treatment was developed, or if and how the virus mutated, becoming less or more dangerous to human health. It will take stock of the ways we have failed one anotherthe mass graves at Hart Island, explored by Kathryn Lofton in the pages that follow; the structural implications of pandemics, investigated by Octvio Ferraz; the shameful treatment of the vulnerable populations of incarcerated citizens at Rikers Island and other jails, as Russell Morse captures. Yet the future will also assess the ways Americans rose up to demand change, especially in the Black Lives Matter protests of late May and June, chronicled here to great effect by Hafizah Geter and Roger Reeves.

But what the future wont know, exactly, is what it felt like in the moment. How in the first months, each week felt like a distinct new chapter of experience; how rapidly the virus seemed to spread in the Northeast, and with it misinformation; how it felt to watch President Trumps afternoon task force meetings, with their bizarre and performative scripts, knowing that they were part propaganda while also clinging to the shreds of information to be found within them. The future wont remember what it felt like when our children, our parents, our partners began coughing, running a fever, feeling unwell, and how desperately powerless we felt, how hard it was to get masks, tests, gloves, in those first weeks (it is hard to remember even now). The future cant experience how life seemed to go from normal to frozen almost overnight, so that for a few days it almost felt as if we were just on spring break (and many of us werethe lockdown started over the break at Yale University, where