Covid Comes Knocking

On Tuesday I went for a walk with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. We’ve been walking occasionally since the pandemic began and have done our best to maintain our distance despite our close friendship. But he has since moved away and it was especially nice to see him so I had to work hard to keep myself from hugging him when we met. In retrospect, I am grateful for my restraint.

Human beings are such lovely (and troublesome) creatures. I really miss being close to them. I miss the feeling of casually passing near someone on the street or being in a restaurant with the warmth and quiet hubbub of scores of simultaneous conversations.

I especially miss the days of people coming in and out of the Zen Temple where I live. It used to be a daily occurrence – sometimes just a handful and sometimes several dozen. We would smile and chat a little, then get down to doing nothing—but we would do this nothing together. A little chanting, then silence and stillness. Sometimes a talk was given and we would have a group dialogue about the teaching presented, but mostly it was just sitting. It turns out that just being in the company of other humans is a big deal for us upright bipeds. Every spiritual path I know places a great value on being part of a community—showing up with and for each other. We really need each other’s support, in words and in silence, in order to be fully who we are.

One of the worst punishments we inflict on each other is solitary confinement or, in a communal setting, social shunning. We have this ancient capacity to turn away from each other – to pretend another person doesn’t exist. He’s dead to me—is the ultimate social punishment. We close our hearts and move on as if that person was no longer walking the earth. But there is a terrible cost to this—both for the shunner and the shunnie.

In some ways, keeping our physical distance is a form of intentional and well-meaning shunning. I mean we can still talk across the six feet, but the physiological message of maintaining distance is one of distrust and danger. Perhaps none of us fully appreciated the nourishment we received from simply walking by or walking close to another human being until we learned to keep our six-foot distance. But as a country, we not been able to learn or remember consistently enough.

The COVID-19 contagion is spreading. On Thursday, we hit a new national number for cases diagnosed – 150,000. This comes just a week after we first experienced 100,000 in a single day. Hospitalizations and death rates are also rising. Hospitals are reaching capacity and sounding alarms all around the country. The upper mid-west has been hit especially hard, but it’s all over. The New York Times reports:

Case numbers are trending upward in 46 states and holding relatively steady in four. No state is seeing cases decline. Thirty-one states — from Alaska and Idaho in the West to Connecticut and New Hampshire in the East — added more cases in the seven-day period ending Wednesday than in any previous week of the pandemic. Vermont, Utah and Oregon were among at least 10 states with single-day case records on Thursday.

And one of those 150,000 cases diagnosed on Thursday was the grown son of my friend—the son with whom my friend had had breakfast before our walk on Tuesday. At breakfast the son was asymptomatic, but by the afternoon had lost his sense of taste and had a slight fever. He was tested on Wednesday and was diagnosed on Thursday. He called his father and his father called me. As I texted my friend after he left a message informing me: YIKES!!!

Suddenly, Covid feels much closer. My friend, who I have known for decades and is a part of my most intimate support circle, might have been contagious. The likelihood is low. He was exposed for forty-five minutes in an indoor setting (long enough to transmit), but I saw him just an hour after that. The contagion appears to spread through a ‘shedding’ of the virus after it has built up in someone’s system. You definitely are contagious before you have symptoms, but once exposed, it seems to take some time before you yourself, if you do indeed contract the disease, are contagious. My friend and I were outside all the time except for a three-minute tour of the new addition to our house where we wore our masks. We kept our distance. I’m probably OK, but there’s a chance…so I’ll be very careful and get a test in a few days.

A scientist friend who studies these things says my current odds of contracting Covid are probably about the same as they were before the walk.  But, this morning, I’m more vividly aware of how close the virus really is. Contact with one known and trusted person exposes me to wide swath of others who may or may not be practicing precautions and may or may not have come in direct contact with someone who has the virus. YIKES!!!

It’s hard to keep keeping our distance. We all miss each other terribly. But one good thing about this virus is that even though it’s invisible, it’s also quite predictable. No one catches it randomly and there are simple measures—mask wearing, physical distancing and hand washing—that are guaranteed to make your risk of infection practically zero.

May we all continue (or begin), with easeful care, to practice the precautions necessary to keep us all safe.