This Has All Happened Before

I went out to a bar with my girlfriend after work last night. I know that's a social distancing no-no, but neither of us knew how long it would be until we could do it again, so we went and sat at the bar, ate chicken fingers, and talked about what the future might hold. We had a better idea than most, because we've lived thought this one time already, having arrived in Beijing for Lunar New Year on January 19th this year. It was before everyone knew what was coming, and we weren't particularly worried when we arrived.

As we sat at the bar last night, we talked about how similar it felt to the night we got dinner at a dumpling restaurant in Beijing with a friend who had just gotten back from reporting on a story at the wet market in Wuhan where the virus had started. It was two days after we arrived, and I remember asking him how worried everyone was, and him telling us that everyone was acting like business-as-usual. We weren't sure what was going to happen next, but we still bought N95 masks at the convenience store after staying and talking until the restaurant closed. Looking back, I think that was the day that the feeling of dread started in the background of my mind, the same way it did in NYC when the first confirmed cases were announced.

A day later my girlfriend's mom called and told us that the big Lunar New Year meal was cancelled. We had lunch with her grandparents in their home and the call was made that we wouldn't be going to visit her other grandparent in Anhui province. We rode a mostly empty subway car up to the retirement community north of the 5th Ring Road, unsure if this was because of the normal Lunar New Year exodus of people or because everyone was staying home out of an abundance of caution. This was before any formal guidance, so we had no way to tell and that only served to make things more eerie.

The next day we went out in search of new masks and only found empty streets and empty malls in Wangfujing. What few people we did run into seemed to share the same uneasy feeling that things were about to get much worse. Every time I pass signs in New York saying that they sold out of masks and hand sanitizer, it reminds me of that afternoon, and it makes me worried that Americans aren't fully prepared for what's coming next.

Wangfujing, January 26th

Everything seemed to go fully apocalyptic in the span of a couple days. By the time we got to Shanghai on the 28th, most things were closed. Everyone's temperature was checked entering every building. The government hadn't formally closed things, but my girlfriend called every place she wanted to go in Shanghai only to learn none of them were open. We found a bar in a hostel and spent both nights there, and hung around a completely empty mall just to have somewhere to be that wasn't a hotel room. By this point the dread that had hung around in the background was front and center, and I felt the same thing on Wednesday night when the NBA announced that one of their players had tested positive and the season would be suspended indefinitely. Sometimes the dread creeps up on you, sometimes you get a push notification.

I can't speak from my personal experience for to how much worse things got - our flight left Shanghai on the 31st and we were asked to perform social distancing for 14 days, or at least that's what we found out after I called the CDC six days after we arrived home and had effectively locked ourselves indoors. They told me that I could go out and go for a run and do my laundry, which was important to hear when you think of yourself as a kind of leper, or a walking biohazard. Practicing safety during a pandemic isn't an easy mental task, and it feels like it's a lot harder when you live in a 2 bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. You have to take care of yourself and find your ways to be kind.

Right now,  both from my experience and the statistics, it seems like China's about six weeks ahead of us in all this. This is going to be long, and it's going to be hard, and it's going to get a lot worse and a lot harder very quickly, but it will end. The dread will stop feeling like dread because we're going to adjust to things as the new normal, the same way that 1.5 billion people did. We will all find new ways to live our lives, because that's what every human does when confronted with a new situation. And if you want to know what the future looks like, take a look at China where the dread seems to finally be lifting. We just have to get there.