Paradoxes of Pandemic Preparation and Protection

"Stock up and stay home."
  -- Go out every day or two, to see if the stores have managed to replenish necessities cleaned out by panic buying and hoarding.

"Wash your hands as often as possible."
  -- Sign in the drug store: "Restrooms closed for the duration of the epidemic." Also, hand sanitizer not available until further notice. If you're not carrying your own, you are S.O.L.

The grocery store still has a dispenser of sanitizing wipes where the shopping carts are parked. No one has yanked them all out and run away with them.

At the bike shop, it's hardly business as usual, because very little is as usual right now. The winter never really happened, so it's looking like early bike season a month earlier than early used to be. In previous weak winters, sometimes people would show up with their bikes, but more often they don't. This year, we've had a small early surge. It's too small even to be a surge, but more than a blip. One customer who dropped her bike for an early tuneup is a Massachusetts refugee who was told to work from home and decided to come up to Wolfe City and work out of her second home rather than stay down in plague-ridden Massachusetts.

The bike business was already hampered by tariffs and by the massive disruption of Chinese manufacturing as the new coronavirus erupted over there. But the shop owner had to get bikes in, so we're waiting for a few dozen to show up. They will all need to be assembled in case we get a season instead of a nationwide total shutdown.

The schools are closed for three weeks. That means our trainee is available for more hours, although he still has to keep up his assigned schoolwork. We haven't had a lot of customers come in and hang around, so the social distancing thing sort of works. Trainee is a bike racer, so he's already averse to getting sick. The rest of us live in the animal fashion of the working poor. We know instinctively that we cannot get sick or injured. If we don't get any business because there's a nationwide shutdown, or we can't work because too many of us are sick, we know that it's the end for us. There is no national support system, and little hope that this crisis will change that.

Americans have long prided themselves on doing as little as possible for each other. I don't know where that E Pluribus Unum bullshit came from. The obvious operating principle throughout my working life has been Every Man for Himself. We are free to associate, and many do, but those associations have clearly delineated membership. Many of them make no secret that their perimeter is fortified and their members are armed. Others are more benevolent. I suppose we're lucky that the hard-core authoritarians have not quite managed to seize control of national policy, since the benevolent ones have failed utterly to inspire national acceptance.

If we should have to shut down, or I have to be quarantined, I could work from home. I have almost all of the basic tools for a commercial bike repair shop. I can't work on hydraulics at home, and I have not kept up with the 15 or 20 different bottom bracket tools you need to service all comers, but I could get a lot of routine crap done. Somehow the bikes would need to get to me. Either the customers would have to truck them out here, or the shop would have to bring them. They could also provide any special tools a particular repair required, and douse everything with the appropriate chemicals to purify it after it came back from the leper colony. Let's hope it doesn't come to that. It would be cumbersome. More likely nobody would bother.

For now, we sanitize obsessively and wash our hands until they're scaly. We'd been doing gloves for a few years already, just to keep some of the grease, lubes, and solvents off of our skin. We have not adopted masks yet, except for the procedures that made them advisable already. But now you look at every incoming person as a potential suspect.

The cellist arrived at Portland Jetport at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday night. Because she fell while hiking a couple of weeks ago, she's been on crutches, and applied for a wheelchair to get through the airport. That meant that I was standing in the greeting area while everyone else got off of two flights that had arrived at about the same time. I watched them stream in and come down a stairway and an escalator to reach the lower level where the baggage claim and the street exits are. A few wore masks. One or two wore gloves. No one made much effort to stand apart, because the system is not set up for it. We arranged ourselves around the conveyor belts in the baggage claim area like bears waiting along a river bank for salmon. When the right one comes along, dart a paw in and snatch it out. The cellist's wheelchair driver waited patiently. He was a quiet, tall young man, probably part of the refugee community that has settled in urban Maine. His presence was calming.

The cellist and I have barely touched since she got here. She extended her stay when the governor of Maryland shut the schools, so she'll be here longer than the two-week quarantine period required for people coming from known hot zones, like Italy. Meanwhile, I'm still potentially exposed every day that I go to work or make a quick sweep through the grocery store because we still can. We don't want to dig into our stash of isolation foods until we know that we have no choice. Otherwise, we might have too little at the point that everything shuts down for real. If one of us gets sick, the other one is almost certain to. But she couldn't stay where she was, because her living arrangements are pretty marginal down there. Her chances of exposure were much greater. That thing that Kurt Vonnegut supposedly wrote, about going into the arts? Yeah, that's bullshit.  Go into fucking finance, people. Become a corporate lawyer. Just go ahead and rape the planet and fleece the chumps for your own fat gains, because it's all for nothing anyway. We can't vote away the Apocalypse any more than someone can pray away the gay.

The internet has developed its own familiar symptoms of proud ignorance, conspiracy theories, doomsayers, spiritual advisers, real scientific medical information, pseudoscientific crapola, and malware. It's a perfect laboratory demonstration of every debate about social, political, and environmental issues. It's like watching a Petri dish getting obliterated under a slimy, furry culture going out of control.

Good luck, everybody.