COVID-19 Comes Near

So, COVID-19 is now a global pandemic. What once was novel and distant comes to our doorsteps—to our state, our city, our neighborhood.

I liken the feeling of its inevitable encroachment upon us to watching a radar screen of an approaching tornado or hurricane. It slowly develops at a distance and moves across the screen, growing in force, and soon it is too close for comfort—it is upon us, shaking our house.

I also think of the movie ‘Melancholia’, in which a planet or massive asteroid is visibly headed for a collision with earth. Catastrophe is inevitable. Knowing this, people in the story try to carry on, reacting vastly differently to impending doom.

This virus is not impending doom for all. Most will survive the contagion, we are told. But it bears death for many of us. That is its power. It has the ability to strike down not just elderly and physically compromised people, but the young and apparently healthy. Nobody knows who lives and who dies. The suffering for many is unimaginable—directly and indirectly.

Still, we act in hope of survival and for the sake of being human.

I hope to survive and to have stayed human.