covid year one

on becoming worse

I first heard about COVID at the beginning of the year, as we were planning for a trip to Japan in February. At first I hoped we’d be able to just ignore it, just another weird animal flu sweeping through some piece of Asia like H1N1 or SARS before it.

As February approached, it became clear that at the very least, that piece of Asia was going to include the parts that we were visiting, as the Diamond Princess cruise became one of the earliest outbreak sites and was quarantined just off of Tokyo, where we were planning to stay. We swiped a box of masks from a hospital room in New York, where they were still plentiful and freely accessible, and planned to use them on our trip and then leave them with our friends in Japan, who were already finding them hard to purchase. Thus armed, we nervously proceeded with our trip.

Throughout our visit, I was checking Twitter for more updates. We gaped at the extensive lockdowns rolling through China and the extensive precautions their doctors were taking. People theorized about how to disinfect medical masks for reuse by steaming them, how to split up a ventilator so that it could be used by two or three patients at once. My wife Amy was an internal medicine resident in Manhattan at the time, and she laughed at me, saying there was no way they would ever do any of that. A month later they were doing all of it.

Our trip passed mostly without incident, other than getting used to wearing the masks everywhere we went. One local friend had made a reservation for the three of us at a highly-recommended sushi restaurant, then had to cancel as she suddenly developed a fever. We went anyways and had one of the best meals of our lives. It turned out later that we had actually gone to the wrong place, just wandering into another random restaurant that happened to be located in the same highrise. Such is the quality of Tokyo sushi.

We cut our trip short to depart from Narita the afternoon before the local authorities planned to release the Diamond Princess passengers from their quarantine. I remember arriving home and closing our apartment door behind me, taking off my mask, disinfecting our luggage with a bleach wipe, and breathing a sigh of relief to have put all that behind us.

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As February turned to March, it became obvious that we had not put anything behind us. We saw more and more reports from San Francisco and from Seattle, where an enterprising flu researcher continued reporting a growing number of COVID cases, despite being ordered by the FDA to shut down their investigation.

Looking back now, it’s hard to believe how different the institutional stances were on COVID back then. The FDA prohibited the use of most tests, delaying them while the government developed its own, which then turned out to be unusable. The CDC recommended against wearing masks, especially medical-grade masks, claiming that laypeople could not use them correctly. Republicans called for a shutdown of travel from China in the face of the frightening foreign disease, while Democrats downplayed the risks. Silicon Valley firms were mocked for asking their employees to avoid handshakes. The New York Times published editorials about how worrying about a possible pandemic was racist, and local representatives made a show of attending Chinese New Year celebrations. I remember a blogger’s summary of the two schools of thought, at least among people who bothered to think about it at all: those who thought that things typically go on as they had before, vs those who looked at a simplistic exponential spreadsheet model and found the output plausible. Baseliners vs modelers, empiricists vs theorists.

Even as a lifelong baseliner/empiricist, it seemed obvious to me that there was no reason that COVID would spread any slower here. I tried to prepare as best I could, but how? I bought frozen food and disinfectants from local stores, a blood-oxygen monitor from Amazon. I asked my parents to stock up on several months’ supply of their medications and to stop attending church services. The preparations felt pathetic, inadequate. I built a little spreadsheet model of my own, which suggested that all of New York would be infected within a few months, at which point herd immunity would prevail and the pandemic would end. I hoped that it would be over by the end of spring and we'd have a month or two left to enjoy the city before our planned move in the summer.

At work, we were getting more and more nervous watching the case numbers rise. One coworker had sniffles that he said were just allergies, another one fretted about getting coughed on on the subway. We kept the windows open despite the cold weather and wore coats indoors. One Thursday in March, late after hours, I wrote a long email to our executives saying that the team was not doing well and we needed to consider closing the office. The point was already moot by later that evening, when a famous actor and an NBA player both tested positive, and New York City issued an order closing schools, bars, and restaurants. Lockdown had arrived.

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By then, Amy had already been drafted into the COVID service at her hospital, along with all of her fellow trainees. They were given very little training or equipment. Alone in our apartment, I watched videos of Chinese doctors covered head to toe in white plastic suits, clean air pumped in through sealed tubes, while Amy came home at night with a flimsy surgical mask which I carefully saved to disinfect in case we needed to reuse it. Her director estimated that 70% of her fellow residents would contract the disease within the next few months. We shamefacedly wrote to our friends in Japan asking them to return the box of masks we had delivered, to which they graciously agreed.

No one seemed to know what to do. Refrigerated trucks loitered outside of the hospitals to take away the bodies of the dead. A hospital ship was dispatched to New York City with much fanfare, only to depart after treating a few dozen patients. At sunset, New Yorkers banged pots and pans to show support for their healthcare workers. I saw Amy for a few hours a week, and no one else for months. The governor of New York appeared on television to announce that he was ordering nursing homes to accept more discharges from the overcrowded hospitals. Later on it turned out that this killed thousands of nursing home residents, but at the time it seemed to burnish his image. Our friends set up group houses outside the city, or threw private parties at home, which they wisely did not invite us to.

I made friends with our next-door neighbor, who happened to be a doctor at a different hospital. From time to time I saw her in our building’s laundry room. I offered her a few masks that we had saved up, which she accepted gratefully. Several weeks later, I heard her coughing loudly through the walls. It sounded really bad, and I wondered about the shared vents that ran between our bathrooms and bedrooms. We set up an air filter to run continuously in the apartment. She moved out quietly sometime later, and I never saw her again.

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That summer we moved to Los Angeles, where my wife had committed to a fellowship. Two weeks before we left, a Black man was killed by a white police officer in Minnesota, and our city exploded. The streets, eerily empty for months, suddenly swelled with protestors. At night we watched rioters smash in each of the shop windows across the street from us, and watched videos of policemen kettling and beating others on the Manhattan Bridge just a few miles away. Our last memory of New York was from the taxi to the airport, passing street after street of boarded-up storefronts.

In LA, I was possessed by a sudden urge for self-sufficiency. I bought books on homesteading. I borrowed woodworking tools and built planters, and grew vegetables on our tiny apartment balcony. I watered those tomatoes and peas twice a day for months, fertilized them, put up fencing to deter the squirrels. What was I thinking? All in all, I probably grew about a thousand calories worth of vegetables in total, maybe enough to keep us alive for one extra day at most. The best thing that came from them was a little hummingbird that came by a few times a week to sip from the white pea flowers.

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Other than the gardening, I did two unusual things during COVID. The first was very prosocial: in the first few months of the pandemic, I arranged for, personally purchased, and facilitated the delivery of thousands of medical-grade masks to the hospital where Amy was working, where they had run completely dry. I was briefly immersed in a world where brokers and speculators were trading pallets of medical equipment through docks and warehouses across the country, tens of thousands of pieces at a time, making incredible profits by cornering this suddenly scarce and lucrative resource. I couldn’t pull together enough money to divert any of these orders, but I eventually found a more direct avenue through a friend’s textiles business, which had relationships with Chinese manufacturers.

Thus, for a period of a few weeks, I was more effective at sourcing and supplying protective equipment than the entire purchasing department of a multi-billion-dollar healthcare enterprise. We also donated hundreds of masks to other institutions and to the staff of our apartment building, at a time when people were trying to cut them out of t-shirts.

My second unusual action was purely selfish. About a year after my mask purchases, I spent weeks researching ways to cut the line to get a vaccine. I read about pharmacists being forced to discard extra doses, about which geographical areas were prioritized for delivery despite their residents' reluctance to take the shots. I learned about the shifting classifications of essential workers, a huge system of favors bought and traded between various influential groups that had almost nothing to do with risk or exposure. Through one loophole I was able to get an appointment slot for myself, and I found a different one in a different state for two of my friends. I was shaking as I drove an hour and a half to get my shot.

Amy and I had a huge argument about it. You don’t need this shot yet, she said. There’s a line for a reason. I didn’t want to hear it. I was tired of being failed, tired of shots expiring because of idiotic and esoteric restrictions, of the double-shot regime when all evidence pointed to distributing first doses far more widely first, of staying indoors all year while the less conscientious kept the pandemic rolling. You dragged me out here to this city where I have no friends and can’t make any new ones, I said, you’ve left me alone all day every day for a year. You’re supposed to be in my corner. You aren’t going to stop me. In one last gasp of idealism, I delayed my own second shot for months. 

Up until that point, I'd always been an very cooperative, very agreeable person. So this was out of character, but that was the point. "If the rule you follow brought you here, then what was the point of the rule?” I wanted to change my character. I wanted to shed my naivety and my helplessness, and I did. I became worse.