Mallory's Camera

Mr. Pugliesi—Not His Real Name! — was coughing so hard, I fully expected bits of lung to explode from his mouth. I figured they would look like pieces of coral only coated with bloody, gooey froth.

He was grey. I mean, like for real.

He was also sweating profusely.

Bari, where Mr. Pugliesi is from, is 500 miles away from Veneto, the Italian coronavirus epicenter, and of course, Mr. Pugliesi hadn’t set foot in Bari in years.

Nevertheless, I found myself uneasy: What if coronavirus virions were actually aliens from the planet Glork orbiting Proxima Centauri b, and they had developed collective consciousness and could jump backwards and forwards in time and space so that they had infected Mr. Pugliesi—details on the mechanisms behind cross-geo-chrono transmission shaky, I admit—so that he was Patient Zero in the great Hudson Valley Covid-19 epidemic?

I was bound to get coronavirus, too, right?

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Legacy of my RN days: I always travel with bottles of hand sanitizer.

I think I used up half my current bottle solving Mr. Pugliesi’s tax problems.

Hand sanitizer does absolutely nothing to airborne respiratory droplets, of course.

And I was pretty pissed off that Mr. Pugliesi had shown up at all.

Was Mr. Pugliesi showing off how American he had become? Is this a peculiarly American phenomenon? To parade your mettle and your commitment to the Puritan virtue of Hard Work by showing up at your workplace or whatever other ordeals of duty are on your daily list when common sense dictates self-quarantine?

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

Mr. Pugliesi is a chef, by the way.

I made a careful mental note of the name of the restaurant that employs him so that I would never, ever eat there.

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The CDC is telling us the pandemic isn’t a matter of if but when.

I’m not sure how helpful this kind of rhetoric is.

If I were the CDC’s PR flack, I would have stuck to statistics. People seldom erupt in irrational panic when you barrage them with statistics because numbers make most people’s eyes glaze over.

Of course, the best part about reading about some great disaster taking place in some part of the world that’s far away from you is all those stories about empty supermarket shelves. You plan your own Disaster Shopping List!

Let’s see, I’ll want to buff up my immune system, you think. That means vitamin D and vitamin E and vitamin B6 and selenium and zinc!

Fortunately for me, I’ve always been fond of tinned sardines and kippers, so on my way home from TaxBwana, I ducked into Ocean State Lots and bought a whole mess of them.

And then ducked into CVC and bought more hand sanitizer.

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Honestly, though? I can’t quite figure out why this particular coronavirus strain seems to be panicking the world to such a degree that economic supply chains are being disrupted at a massive level. At 2.3%, its death toll is considerably less than MERS or SARS.

I mean, c’mon—it is not the fucking bubonic plague.

It’s a mutated form of a virus that’s been causing common cold symptoms forever. One would assume that most people with reasonably healthy immune systems have some level of preexisting immunity.

Interestingly, it doesn’t seem to kill children at high rates. It targets Boomers like me! Since we're such a drain on the health care system and the patience of our Millennial children and grandchildren, why not kill us off? Coronavirus is doing the world a favor! Bernie Sanders might win the Presidency after all! Unless he, too, dies of coronavirus!

Also, men have a much higher probability of dying from it than women do (and one might think that would give some clue as to its mechanism of action; there’s possibly something on the X chromosome that helps immunity.) And its comorbidity rates are highest with diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, which is also interesting since as a respiratory virus, one might hypothesize that its highest comorbidity rate would be with chronic respiratory diseases.

Anyway.

Enough dithering for one morning.