The latest reports I’ve read estimate coronavirus lasts “in the air for up to three hours, on copper for up to four hours, on cardboard for up to 24 hours, and on plastic for up to 72 hours.” But no one seems to have studied a critical metric—how long Covid-19 is planning to live on in our brains.
Best guesses put it at: forever.
I remember the week that I realized coronavirus had become the only thing I was capable of thinking about. It was around March 8. I had received a notice from the American Conservative Union informing me that an attendee at its annual conference had tested positive for the virus. CPAC, for the unaware, is a gathering of devoted Trumpists; I’d attended as a journalist and been exposed—both to the president’s delusional followers and to a pandemic. March 8 was also when I started keeping my kids home from school (our school nurses had requested). After that it happened fast—a steep slide into a world that contained nothing but coronavirus. As soon as March 13, coronavirus was all I was reading about, although it still felt unreal. I remember a particular piece on the NPR website about South Korea’s drive-through coronavirus testing, and it seemed like something out of a science fiction movie, with people dressed in hazmat suits standing around cars sticking swabs up people’s noses. Now I’m just jealous of their access to reliable testing, and the image is one of several dozen that I mentally flip through over and over, like a montage on repeat.
I live in New York, the Wuhan of America, so it makes sense that I can think of nothing but coronavirus right now. The death toll has climbed into the thousands. Our streets are empty except for the occasional ambulance. Our restaurants have been closed since March 17; our schools have been closed since March 15. The things that used to make our lives great—good food, great music and theater, our local bodegas—now arrive via delivery or streaming. Our stores have a limit on how much toilet paper we can purchase at once. My building in Manhattan has been abandoned, five families out of around 80 still here. The skeleton crew of New Yorkers who have remained behind consist of essential workers, patients, and the holdouts. Here, of course we’re attuned to coronavirus all the time. What else is there?
But even outside of our ground zero, coronavirus is eclipsing whatever else would otherwise have our attention. Social media is full of people documenting their experiences with it, sharing obituaries, even recommending the best shows to binge under quarantine. It seems like nine out of 10 headlines begin or end with, “In the Era of Coronavirus.” We can stream an infinite number of series, games, and specials, but our brains are turned to a single channel: pandemic.
For all but a handful of centenarians, the coronavirus is unlike anything we have ever lived through. The closest similar outbreak of mass disease was the influenza pandemic of 1918, which was 102 years ago and in an age before it was possible to refresh Twitter. Most of the people who lived through it are dead. Until now, the biggest disaster I had lived through was 9/11, which was 20 years ago. And even that was different. We refer to it as 9/11 because it happened on a single day; the effects are still being felt, but no one talks about 9/12 or 9/13. Coronavirus will never have a day on the calendar. We have no idea when it will end.