We went down to Stanford the other day, nominally to see the Arizona Garden but really to get out of the house. It was a cold day and the light was flat so not really a good day to wander a garden but still good to get out. Normally we would be glad to see other people but in this new world, all we wanted to do was keep our distance. About the time we walked by the Stanford Mausoleum, a dog ran up to me and I backed up.

As an aside, I used to be a dog person but I got sort of bitten in a Bali rice paddy more than twenty years ago and I’m still a little freaked. I say sort of because, after I walked by, the dog took a lunge at my calf and drew blood but very little and I say a little freaked because it taught me how fast things can change with an animal. End aside.

In the past, when I backed up, the owner would say something like, “oh, he’s harmless, he won’t bite”, now everything has changed, now the owner laughed and said, “That’s right, don’t touch other people’s dogs.”  

My world has changed the same way the contagion has changed: imperceptible, then slowly, slowly, then boom! it’s a new world. On December 31st of last year, the Chinese government announced that they were treating a new virus that they knew about for a couple of weeks but had been suppressing the information saying that there was no evidence it could spread from human to human. I must have read about it in early January but it made no impression, then, in February, a slight problem in distant Wuhan couldn’t pull our attention away from Death Valley’s weather conditions. But the slight problem only seemed that way because I wasn’t paying attention, France had already had its first death, Korea a major outbreak, and Iran, for some unknown reason, had become another center.

I went to my last Cardiac Rehab workout at Sequoia Hospital on March 9th a full nines days after the first coronavirus death in the United States. We were a nervous group but, somehow, we thought we were being responsible. Two days later when I had lunch with Barbara, an old friend and my former partner in Stern & Champion. I went home glad we had gotten together but feeling oddly guilty. Monday, it had seemed like a good idea but by Wednesday, it seemed dumb, too risky. The US had 1,260 cases with 28 then and now we have more cases than China at 85,498 (that’s reported cases, China may have more).

Three weeks ago, or thereabouts, I remember reading that the Chinese government had shut the country down – the story came with the caveat that this kind of social control was something that democracies would never be able to do – and the smog went away. Every day, I get an email from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District that gives the Air Quality Forecast for SF Bay Area for the next five days and every day, for the last couple of weeks, the forecast has been green. It is green because we are shut down in a way that didn’t seem possible only three weeks ago. It is sort of shocking.