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Formerly DT: COVID-19 - Featuring Lots of Politics, now CR because political talk not going away

InkaUtexas

By InkaUtexas
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Uncle Boobs
Uncle Boobs

Against my better judgment and several beers deep, I have taken you up on this, potentially ending my streak of totally worthless posts. I have done 3 and 7 day averages only on the Worldometer data. 

Brisketexan
Brisketexan

Daughter’s home. A little PTSD, we’re picking up Whataburger to help.

Coelenterate Fuccboi
Coelenterate Fuccboi

Just try and imagine GreenspointTexas being the person to intubate you as you fight for your life against COVID-19. You’re laying there gasping for air while he chastises you for all the things you li

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Hpara759

Hpara759 1778

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There is a "hot spot" up in the Panhandle .... Small Town  Nazareth......there are 6 confirmed cases from there.....last I heard 3 on vents in Amarillo 1 in hospital (no vent yet) and 2 at home.....ages 16 thru 80's

It's in Castro Co which went on lock down yesterday.

Nazareth pop. Around 300.....% pretty damn high

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Nice Guy Eddie

Nice Guy Eddie 13512

Posted
Posted
5 minutes ago, Hpara759 said:

There is a "hot spot" up in the Panhandle .... Small Town  Nazareth......there are 6 confirmed cases from there.....last I heard 3 on vents in Amarillo 1 in hospital (no vent yet) and 2 at home.....ages 16 thru 80's

It's in Castro Co which went on lock down yesterday.

Nazareth pop. Around 300.....% pretty damn high

I imagine that any many rural hospitals don’t have enough or maybe 0 ICU beds. Only option is to shift them to larger city hospitals which may not be able to absorb them soon.

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MissingInAction

MissingInAction 25076

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22 minutes ago, Patricio Swayze said:

The person at my office who was suspected of being infected last week has been confirmed positive. I assume I did not have direct contact with this person as our HSE group hasn’t called me. But who knows if I had contact with someone that did and so in and so forth.

Today was my day to go in, and to see so many people crammed into a cubicle environment with zero PPE nearly sent me through a window. My hands are cracked from washing them so many times.

 

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JBJ

JBJ 3654

Posted
Posted (edited)
9 minutes ago, Hpara759 said:

There is a "hot spot" up in the Panhandle .... Small Town  Nazareth......there are 6 confirmed cases from there.....last I heard 3 on vents in Amarillo 1 in hospital (no vent yet) and 2 at home.....ages 16 thru 80's

It's in Castro Co which went on lock down yesterday.

Nazareth pop. Around 300.....% pretty damn high

Great town.  You can take a load off there for free.

Edited by JBJ
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Hpara759

Hpara759 1778

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3 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I imagine that any many rural hospitals don’t have enough or maybe 0 ICU beds. Only option is to shift them to larger city hospitals which may not be able to absorb them soon.

Closest hospital is Dimmitt 11 miles... I know for sure 2 of the 6 started there before transfered to Amarillo

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PenelopeWitherspoon

PenelopeWitherspoon 19101

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There is a "hot spot" up in the Panhandle .... Small Town  Nazareth......there are 6 confirmed cases from there.....last I heard 3 on vents in Amarillo 1 in hospital (no vent yet) and 2 at home.....ages 16 thru 80's
It's in Castro Co which went on lock down yesterday.
Nazareth pop. Around 300.....% pretty damn high
Nazareth is where my family would have to go to buy beer when visiting my grandparents in Tulia. Was the closest town outside Swisher County which was completely dry.
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Pato del Muerto

Pato del Muerto 52498

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12 minutes ago, Hpara759 said:

There is a "hot spot" up in the Panhandle .... Small Town  Nazareth......there are 6 confirmed cases from there.....last I heard 3 on vents in Amarillo 1 in hospital (no vent yet) and 2 at home.....ages 16 thru 80's

It's in Castro Co which went on lock down yesterday.

Nazareth pop. Around 300.....% pretty damn high

A little hair of the dog won’t hurt em

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clapclapclap

clapclapclap 9000

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Are dolts still lined up at Costco?  Because it seems quieter today on the HEB front.  Went at 5pm and there were zero lines, all entrances open, and an uncrowded store, other than the occasional bunching on an aisle (easily avoidable.)  Still no paper towels, but shelves looked 80% full, and they even had the big refill bottles of anti-bac foaming soap (though only 1 bottle of a scent other than Pear, of which there were about 20.  Logical, I hate pears, too.)   But anti-bac soap really isn't better than regular soap when it comes to viruses, right?  Are we speeding up a boom in drug-resistant bacteria? 

And they had fresh bread, french and garlic.

#Survive&Thrive

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Hpara759

Hpara759 1778

Posted
Posted
2 minutes ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:
14 minutes ago, Hpara759 said:
There is a "hot spot" up in the Panhandle .... Small Town  Nazareth......there are 6 confirmed cases from there.....last I heard 3 on vents in Amarillo 1 in hospital (no vent yet) and 2 at home.....ages 16 thru 80's
It's in Castro Co which went on lock down yesterday.
Nazareth pop. Around 300.....% pretty damn high

Read more  

Nazareth is where my family would have to go to buy beer when visiting my grandparents in Tulia. Was the closest town outside Swisher County which was completely dry.

That's the place.... German's....they gotta have their beer

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bmbmd

bmbmd 1027

Posted
Posted
15 minutes ago, Hpara759 said:

There is a "hot spot" up in the Panhandle .... Small Town  Nazareth......there are 6 confirmed cases from there.....last I heard 3 on vents in Amarillo 1 in hospital (no vent yet) and 2 at home.....ages 16 thru 80's

It's in Castro Co which went on lock down yesterday.

Nazareth pop. Around 300.....% pretty damn high

Could it have been basketball related? 

https://www.kcbd.com/2020/03/25/basketball-tournament-possible-commonality-hockley-county-coronavirus-cases/

 

By KCBD Staff | March 25, 2020 at 9:31 AM CDT - Updated March 25 at 1:44 PM 

LEVELLAND, Texas (KCBD) - In a statement released to a Levelland radio station, the county judge for Hockley County said there is a possibility a March basketball tournament could have contributed to the spread of COVID-19 in the region.

Judge Sharla Baldridge was given a report from the Texas Department of Health Services that said the boys A and AA regional basketball tournament on March 7 was a possible common event in some confirmed coronavirus cases. That tournament took place on March 6 and 7 on the South Plains College campus.

“At this time this event does not seem to be a common attribute in any of Hockley County’s confirmed cases,” Baldrige said in a statement to KLVT-FM in Levelland.

Judge Baldridge said there was a case reported in Brownfield where investigators were told someone was at a sporting event in Levelland on that date, but they can’t conclusively connect it to this tournament. This incident was not connected to the tournament, but it was reported on March 7.

The health services department will continue the investigation into the confirmed cases in Hockley County. As of the publishing of this article, five cases of coronavirus were confirmed in the county.

Overall, the South Plains has recorded 22 cases, with the majority of them in Lubbock County.

“I cannot emphasize enough to our citizens that we must be united and diligent as a county in the battle against the spread of COVID-19,” Baldridge said. “Without complete cooperation and compliance with the safety guidelines set out by CDC and strict compliance with Governor Abbott’s Executive Orders by everyone in Hockley County, we cannot flatten the curve and protect our citizens.”

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Hpara759

Hpara759 1778

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Posted
1 minute ago, bmbmd said:

Could it have been basketball related? 

https://www.kcbd.com/2020/03/25/basketball-tournament-possible-commonality-hockley-county-coronavirus-cases/

 

By KCBD Staff | March 25, 2020 at 9:31 AM CDT - Updated March 25 at 1:44 PM 

LEVELLAND, Texas (KCBD) - In a statement released to a Levelland radio station, the county judge for Hockley County said there is a possibility a March basketball tournament could have contributed to the spread of COVID-19 in the region.

Judge Sharla Baldridge was given a report from the Texas Department of Health Services that said the boys A and AA regional basketball tournament on March 7 was a possible common event in some confirmed coronavirus cases. That tournament took place on March 6 and 7 on the South Plains College campus.

“At this time this event does not seem to be a common attribute in any of Hockley County’s confirmed cases,” Baldrige said in a statement to KLVT-FM in Levelland.

Judge Baldridge said there was a case reported in Brownfield where investigators were told someone was at a sporting event in Levelland on that date, but they can’t conclusively connect it to this tournament. This incident was not connected to the tournament, but it was reported on March 7.

The health services department will continue the investigation into the confirmed cases in Hockley County. As of the publishing of this article, five cases of coronavirus were confirmed in the county.

Overall, the South Plains has recorded 22 cases, with the majority of them in Lubbock County.

“I cannot emphasize enough to our citizens that we must be united and diligent as a county in the battle against the spread of COVID-19,” Baldridge said. “Without complete cooperation and compliance with the safety guidelines set out by CDC and strict compliance with Governor Abbott’s Executive Orders by everyone in Hockley County, we cannot flatten the curve and protect our citizens.”

Of course.... Everything in Naz is basketball related.....the Swiftettes have won 24 state championships over the last 44 years

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ShaggyBevo RIP

ShaggyBevo RIP 3868

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Posted
1 hour ago, Loco said:

Maybe some more good news...  The home depot ventilator

https://ufhealth.org/news/2020/uf-researchers-lead-way-rapidly-designing-building-low-cost-open-source-ventilator

vIJpNCGd?format=jpg&name=900x900

 

I said Raspberry Pi a couple days ago for cheap readily available circuit boards/base computer.  
Anyone know what platform LEGO EV3 is on? That’s another widely available computing source   

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po elvis

po elvis 2070

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26 minutes ago, Hpara759 said:

There is a "hot spot" up in the Panhandle .... Small Town  Nazareth......there are 6 confirmed cases from there.....last I heard 3 on vents in Amarillo 1 in hospital (no vent yet) and 2 at home.....ages 16 thru 80's

It's in Castro Co which went on lock down yesterday.

Nazareth pop. Around 300.....% pretty damn high

son of a bitch

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Player

Player 4575

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Maybe some more good news...  The home depot ventilator
https://ufhealth.org/news/2020/uf-researchers-lead-way-rapidly-designing-building-low-cost-open-source-ventilator
vIJpNCGd?format=jpg&name=900x900
As a University of Florida mechanical engineering student decades ago, Samsun Lampotang, Ph.D., helped respiratory therapist colleagues build a minimal-transport ventilator that became a commercial success. So, when the coronavirus pandemic hit and he heard the desperate international plea for thousands more ventilators, the longtime UF professor of anesthesiology set out to build a prototype using plentiful, cheap components that could be copied from an online diagram and a software repository.UF researchers made a ventilator out of common household items.

Lampotang dispatched David Lizdas, Ph.D., the lead engineer in his lab, to Home Depot to gather items such as air-tight PVC water pipes and lawn-sprinkler valves. Along with engineering and medical colleagues at UF and — through a burgeoning open-source network — places as far-flung as Canada, India, Ireland, Vietnam and Brazil, they raced to “MacGyver” these items and other pieces, including a microcontroller board and a ham radio DC power supply, into an open-source ventilator they expect to make publicly available in a matter of days.
“The way I looked at it is, if you’re going to run out of ventilators, then we’re not even trying to reproduce the sophisticated ventilators out there,” said Lampotang, the Joachim S. Gravenstein Professor of Anesthesiology in the UF College of Medicine, part of UF Health, and the director of UF’s Center for Safety, Simulation & Advanced Learning Technologies, or CSSALT. “If we run out, you have to decide who gets one and who doesn’t. How do you decide that? The power of our approach is that every well-intentioned volunteer who has access to Home Depot, Ace or Lowe’s or their equivalent worldwide can build one.”
Lampotang, an inventor with 43 patents belonging to UF, will not try to patent the ventilator, he said. Rather, with UF’s approval, he will provide it “open source” for engineers and hobbyists worldwide as the number of critically ill coronavirus victims continues to climb. His team is working on adding safety features to meet regulatory guidelines and then they will run engineering tests to determine safety, accuracy and endurance of the machine, which can be built for as little as $125 to $250.
Gordon Gibby, M.D., said when his friend and former colleague Lampotang contacted him to help, he was a little skeptical. But then Lizdas used the Home Depot materials to assemble a pneumatic circuit, which Lampotang reviewed via FaceTime to confirm that the design concept — similar to the one he helped build decades before — would indeed work. Lizdas, working in his garage, made a video that was uploaded the same night to the website of UF’s department of anesthesiology, where Lampotang and Lizdas are based.
“I saw what they were doing, and realized it was going to work!!!!” Gibby wrote in an email to fellow members of ARRL, the national amateur radio (known as Ham radio) association.
Gibby, a recently retired associate professor of anesthesiology at UF and an electrical engineer, grabbed an Arduino microcontroller board, the kind used to build small robots or for a student to learn to program. Lizdas raced over to his house and dropped off a sprinkler valve in Gibby’s mailbox. Gibby fired up his soldering iron and built a transistor driver that could handle the current supplied by a Ham radio DC power supply.
Eight hours later, Gibby said, two drivers were built, code was created and tested and they had a working ventilator driving a “test lung” metal contraption from an air compressor that served as a simulated oxygen source. They were able to adjust the respiratory rate with the Arduino-based control software. A video of the ventilator working on Gibby’s dining room table was also quickly uploaded. Now, they are working on other key parameters, he said.
The ventilator’s valves will precisely time the flow of compressed oxygen into a patient with lungs weakened by viral pneumonia in order to extend life and allow time for the body to clear the infection.
“It was really easy for me to write the code to prove this thing’s going to work,” Gibby said.
Volunteers who jumped to help included Patrick Tighe, M.D., who prodded Lampotang to act on his idea; the CSSALT team; code developer Marcelo Varanda in Ottawa (motivated to build ventilators for Canada and Brazil); Gibby’s network, including noted software developer Jack Purdum and transceiver maker Ashhar Farhan of India; and Stephanie Lampotang, Lampotang’s daughter, a University of Southern California computer science junior who evacuated to Gainesville with two of her own Arduino boards in her luggage.
Lampotang and others are working with UF Innovate | Tech Licensing and the UF Health legal team to address legal aspects as the design advances and the FDA alters guidance documents for equipment cleared for use solely during the pandemic.
Already, they’ve translated their site https://simulation.health.ufl.edu/technology-development/open-source-ventilator-project/ into French, and a volunteer is translating it into Italian.
“We want to reach the whole world, and The Gator Nation,” Lampotang said. “We have UF graduates from all over the world. There’s already a network of people who can contribute in disseminating the technology if it’s needed in the next few weeks.”
Once the safety features are added, other researchers at UF’s Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering will help run tests to measure and document the safety and durability and whether the accuracy and repeatability meet engineering specifications, Lampotang said.
Nonetheless, he said, his wish is that the ventilator won’t be needed during the coronavirus pandemic.
“When all this comes to pass and the world settles down,” he said, “we hope it will be repurposed for use in underdeveloped countries, so they can build a safe and inexpensive ventilator for themselves.”
 

That's f'n awesome. I hope it works.
And if I was in the Federal government, I'd 1) have some folks evaluate quickly whether it works, and can be built on a large scale, and if so, then 2) use Defense authorization to get US manufacturers and their workers building these motherfuckers by the truckload.
It'd be like a WWII scrap metal drive, or converting typewriter factories to building rifles, except we'd have em building ventilators.


There are thousands of Boudreauxs all over Louisiana right now looking at the aerators in their live wells and saying - “dammit Thibodeaux, we coulda been gazillionaires.”

Hope that shit works too.
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Enchubben

Enchubben 5510

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5 hours ago, 'stache said:

Why the ever living fuck are there still people on cruise ships? This has been a thing for at least a month, and I don't know of many cruises that last that long. I get airports and planes still having required travel, but fucking cruises are the definition of leisure and unnecessary.

To answer - it’s because they started before any sort of quarantine or social distancing. My parents have been on one since March 1 out of Uruguay.  I told them they were idiots for even considering still going but that was mid February before shit really hit the fan/news here in large part. It was a two week cruise that’s turned into a month plus because no one would let them unboard. On their way to San Diego now and I assume a quarantine is possible once they get there.  Surprisingly they may be better off staying on the ship for the time being since at this point to date no one shows symptoms or positive diagnosis.

23 minutes ago, HenryJames said:

Jesus.

You said it, man .gif 

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Onboard 2.0

Onboard 2.0 9083

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1 hour ago, Mother mopar said:

We have continued the pipeline of air force training through all this as we have been deemed mission essential. We were dreading this day but we knew it was coming. Basic and technical training is a petre dish just waiting to explode.

 

The son is AF and has been home (in his apt.) for over a week, and restricted from Travel till at least May 11

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Modessit

Modessit 5601

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It going to be optional activities for a long time. As soon as it’s required or grades are taken then we have to fulfill special education requirements. We have no capability to do that at this time. We are basically providing resources for kids as well as ways for them to connect with their teachers and each other. 
We were wondering that. Wife is PPCD and had a Zoom conference call and told me they're still trying to figure out what to do about special education. She's trying to figure out how they're going to get ARDs and other required stuff done.
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Onboard 2.0

Onboard 2.0 9083

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2 minutes ago, MissingInAction said:

9 months active was the requirment when I was done.. I think... been a long time.

Sucks for the kid.  He didn't get his chance to go blow that first pay in the PX on a big screen TV, and make a down payment on a car he probably can't afford.

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Trey3216

Trey3216 15346

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4 minutes ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

Sucks for the kid.  He didn't get his chance to go blow that first pay in the PX on a big screen TV, and make a down payment on a car he probably can't afford.

Or marry a woman bound to cheat on him with a local bartender 

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Hate

Hate 20108

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We were wondering that. Wife is PPCD and had a Zoom conference call and told me they're still trying to figure out what to do about special education. She's trying to figure out how they're going to get ARDs and other required stuff done.

My wife is an SLP and they’ve decided to do ARD’s using Zoom. They are still figuring out how to do therapy.
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Modessit

Modessit 5601

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Good lord, what the hell is going to happen to the electric grid this summer if people are still working from home and all running the AC? Can we fire up that bio fuel plant we just bought? 
COA Utilities sent us an email saying we used 4% more electricity this week over last week.
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T’Boo Ted Marshall

T’Boo Ted Marshall 2732

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21 minutes ago, Hate said:


My wife is an SLP and they’ve decided to do ARD’s using Zoom. They are still figuring out how to do therapy.

Same.  wife is a supervisor that works PT and if the parents of kids decline therapy, ARD's by Zoom are required.  This is DISD so most either don't speak English or have no internet.  Trying to get them on Zoom is challenging and time consuming.  

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Hmmm

Hmmm 155

Posted
Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, ShaggyBevo RIP said:

I said Raspberry Pi a couple days ago for cheap readily available circuit boards/base computer.  
Anyone know what platform LEGO EV3 is on? That’s another widely available computing source   

You certainly did, and I countered a bit.  People like you thinking outside the box, along with those building the open-source ventilators.  There's not much different between the Raspberry Pi (you suggested) compared to the Arduino used for the open-source ventilators.  Both are primarily used for open-source projects, as I understand.

Edited by Hmmm
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Hmmm

Hmmm 155

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, InkaUtexas said:

Give him or her the patent. 

They declined.  Patent would probably make it impossible to open-source.  Guy has 41 patents already so is probably doing ok.  Though, most if not all patents created by an individual working for a company, are owned by the company.

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32393

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Heartbreaking:

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/magazine/coronavirus-family.html?referringSource=articleShare

 

Quote

“How are you doing, love?” I call to my husband from the living-room floor, where I now sleep each night on a roll-up foam sleeping pad that my daughter has used on camping trips, topped with a couple of thin blankets. It’s quite literally hard to sleep on the floor, but after trying the couch and then, on the floor, the couch mattress — a bit of fabric stretched over some coiled rings — the floor itself has been a relief.

 

Quote

“I need some help,” he whispers hoarsely, shivering inside the wool undershirt and sweater he insists on wearing. “I didn’t want to wake you.” I forgot to put the Advil in the plastic dish in the bathroom that is now his. I can’t leave the bottle in there; it has to stay uncontaminated in the other bathroom, so that I can dispense the capsules into the dish and keep the bottle protected. Anything my husband, T, touches has to stay in his room or be carefully taken from his room to the kitchen, where I stand holding dishes while our 16-year-old daughter, CK, opens the dishwasher and pulls out the racks so I don’t have to touch anything before she closes it again. She turns on the faucet for me, and I hit the soap dispenser with my elbow to wash my hands.

 

Quote

My husband, a tall, robust 56-year-old who regularly goes — who regularly went — on five-hour bike rides from our Brooklyn neighborhood to Jamaica Bay in Queens and back, has been lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, or curled on his side, wearing the same pajama bottoms for days because it is too hard to change out of them, too hard to stay that long on his feet, too cold outside the sheets and blankets he huddles beneath. It has been 12 days since T woke up in the middle of the night on March 12 with chills. The next day, just as reports were growing more urgent about the coronavirus spreading in the United States, he thought he felt better, but then the chills came back, along with aches and a fever of 100.4.

 

Spoiler

Since then, T has been confined alone in our bedroom at the front of the apartment, where he complains of hearing trucks idling at the curb just outside and long blasts from the ships in New York Harbor a few blocks west. He creeps out only to go to the bathroom. The bedroom door stays firmly shut to keep out the cat, who is determined to get in and who howls outside it at night. “What to do if you are sick with coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19)” reads the sheet T is handed at the clinic two days after his symptoms begin. “Separate yourself from other people and animals in your home.” By then he has a fever of 101.5. He tests negative for the flu. Then, because he is considered high risk with what his medical chart calls “severe” asthma that sent him to the emergency room with an acute attack a few months ago, he is tested for Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus — just days before a national shortage of testing supplies emerged and the restrictions were tightened further.

Now we live in a world in which I have planned with his doctor which emergency room we should head to if T suddenly gets worse, a world in which I am suddenly afraid we won’t have enough of the few things tempering the raging fever and soaking sweats and severe aches wracking him — the Advil and Tylenol that the doctors advise us to layer, one after the other, and that I scroll through websites searching for, seeing “out of stock” again and again. We are living inside the news stories of testing, quarantine, shortages and the disease’s progression. A friend scours the nearby stores and drops off a bunch of bodega packets of Tylenol. Another finds a bottle at a more remote pharmacy and drops it off, a golden prize I treasure against the feverish nights to come.

His doctor calls three days later to say the test is positive. I find T lying on his side, reading an article about the surge in confirmed cases in New York State. He is reading stories of people being hospitalized, people being put on ventilators to breathe, people dying, sick with the same virus that is attacking him from the inside now.

CK and I had settled in to watch “Chernobyl,” the HBO series about the 1986 nuclear accident and its aftermath, when T first felt sick and went to lie down in the bedroom. We stopped after three episodes. That time, when we would sit on the couch watching something together, is behind us. Now there is too much rushing back and forth, making sure T has a little dinner — just a tiny bowl of soup, just an appetizer, really, that he is unable to smell, that he fights nausea to choke down — taking his temperature, monitoring his oxygen-saturation levels with the fingertip pulse oximeter brought by a friend from the drugstore on the doctor’s advice, taking him tea, dispensing his meds, washing my hands over and over, texting the doctor to say T is worse again, standing next to him while he coughs into the covers, rubbing his knees through the blankets.

“You shouldn’t stay here,” he says, but he gets more frightened as night comes, dreading the long hours of fever and soaking sweats and shivering and terrible aches. “This thing grinds you like a mortar,” he says.

CK’s high school, closed on March 13, is now preparing with the rest of New York City’s public schools to begin distance learning. For days she and her classmates have received instructions about what to expect, turning administrator and teacher directives into endless memes, feeds filling with repeated admonitions: This is regular school. This is not vacation. I start an email to her principal, guidance counselors and teachers. “I am writing to let you know what CK has been going through at home.” The draft sits open all day.

I am texting the doctor. I am texting T’s five siblings on a group chat, texting my parents and my brother, texting T’s business partner and employees and his dearest friends and mine, in loops and loops, with hearts and thankful prayer-hands emoji. He is too exhausted, too weak, to answer all the missives winging to him at all hours. “Don’t sugarcoat it for my family,” he tells me. He has asked for the gray sweater that was his father’s, that his father wore when he was alive. He will not take it off.

It’s as if we are in a time warp, in which we have accelerated at 1½ time speed, while everyone around us remains in the present — already the past to us — and they, blissfully, unconsciously, go about their ordinary lives, experiencing the growing news, the more urgent advisories and directives, as a vast communal experience, sharing posts and memes about cabin fever, about home-schooling, about social distancing, about how hard it all is, while we’re living in our makeshift sick ward, living in what will soon be the present for more and more of them. “I took out the kitty litter,” CK says, “and I saw some people standing on the corner, and I was like, I want to see strangers! And then I heard them saying: ‘It’s actually been really nice. It’s been a chance to connect as a family.’ And I was like, No, actually, I don’t want to see strangers, and I came back in.”

CK and I confine ourselves to the half bathroom, the one with the litter box, which she is now in charge of. Over the past days and days, drifty, dreamy CK has become my chief assistant on my nursing/housekeeping/kitchen rotations, feeding the cat and cleaning the litter box, folding laundry, preparing T’s small meals, washing dishes and pots, coordinating with me in a complicated choreography when I come out of the sickroom holding dishes so we can get them into the dishwasher without my touching the handles or having to wash my dry, raw hands even more. “I feel like we’re talking to each other more like equals now,” she says. She is right.

I am consumed with trying to keep us safe. I wipe down the doorknobs, the light switches, the faucets, the handles, the counters with disinfectant. I swab my phone with alcohol. I throw the day’s hoodie into the laundry at night as if it were my scrubs. I wash all our towels, again and again. When CK wants to shower, I wipe down the whole main bathroom — where T refills his water cup, where he has had diarrhea, where he coughs and spits out phlegm — with bleach, take out T’s washcloth, towels and bathmat and replace them with clean ones, telling CK to try not to touch anything, to shower and go right back to her room. Then I do the same. If T needs to use the bathroom before we’re ready to shower, I do the whole bleach routine again before we go in. Twice, in the first week of the illness, I eased him into an Epsom-salt bath. But not since then. He is too weak. It would be too much. There is no way. When he shuffles down the hall from the bedroom to the bathroom, he lists against the wall. He splashes water on his face in the bathroom, and that has to be enough.

I run through possibilities. I’m not so worried about CK getting sick. I can nurse her too. It’s if I get sick. I show her how to do more things, where things go, what to remember, what to do if — What if T is hospitalized? What if I am? Could a 16-year-old be left to fend for herself at home, alone? How would she get what she needed? Could she do it? For how long?

The one thing I know is that I could not send her to my parents, 78 years old and nearby on Long Island. They would want her to come, but she could kill them, their dear grandchild coming forward to their embrace, radioactive, glowing with invisible incubating virus cells. No. Not them. Someone else would have to take her, someone who has a bedroom and a bathroom where she could isolate and be cared for. Someone would. I lie awake at 4 a.m., on the floor, listening, thinking, wide awake with adrenaline.

The nights are hardest, when the fear and dread descend, T feverish, lying on his back, murmuring hoarsely about “anomie,” saying he almost just called CK by the name of his 20-years-ago ex-girlfriend. Three times we have tried to decide whether we need to go to the emergency room while on speakerphone with the doctor, once after I burst into sobs in the bathroom, saying out loud, “I’m afraid to make the wrong call.” Each time we decided to stay at home. He doesn’t have trouble breathing, and that would be the reason to go to the hospital.

We do a video call on one of these nights with a New York University emergency-room doctor, one of 250 who have been mobilized to do urgent-care video calls with patients who have flulike symptoms. She tells us that they are seeing this illness run two to three weeks. She tells us that T is OK to stay home if his oxygen-saturation reading doesn’t get too low, if he is not struggling to breathe. He is not. When I open the bedroom door to check on him and find him sleeping, I tiptoe closer and bend to make sure he is alive, to make sure he is still breathing, as I used to do when CK was an infant, asleep in her crib.

On one of the worst nights, I stay next to the bed, rubbing his body through the piled-on blankets, trying to comfort him. I hear myself start to hum, low, the only song I would: the song both my mother and my grandmother used to sing to me. When my mother sang it, it was “Tura Lura Lura,” with “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” cut into it after the words “That’s an Irish lullaby.” When my grandmother sang it to me, it was “Tura Lura Lura” with the words changed to “That’s a Russian lullaby.” That is the song of my early childhood, and more than four decades later I am humming it to my gravely ill husband.

“Now we live in a dystopian story,” I say to CK in the kitchen.

“Yeah,” she says. And then: “Lots of people already did.”

Out on the street, T somehow looks even more frail, his 6-foot-1 frame stooped and swaddled in his winter jacket over another jacket over his father’s gray wool sweater over a Duofold wool undershirt over a white ribbed tank. He says it’s cold, blinking in the March sun over the white surgical mask he wore at the clinic when he was tested.

We both wear disposable gloves. I put my hand through the crook of his arm, and we slowly start for the clinic. The day before was one of the harder ones, with T lightheaded and nauseated most of the day, eating only if I spoon-fed him, coughing more and using his albuterol inhaler more, then coughing more again. He was soaked in sweat in the morning and by evening was lying curled up, looking apprehensive. “I coughed up blood just now,” he told me quietly.

We talked to his doctor on speakerphone. “We are all kind of working blind,” he told us. Many patients, he said, seem to begin to feel better after a week. But others, the more serious and severe cases, take a downturn, and the risks rise as the virus targets the lungs. Pneumonia is a common next step in that downward progression. We read about it in the patients admitted to the hospital. Now the doctor called in a prescription for antibiotics to the CVS pharmacy that would close in less than an hour. I texted T’s friend down the block, and he texted back that he would pick up the medicine. I asked if he would get oranges too; T has been accepting a little fresh-squeezed juice or cut-up pieces, and we were down to one last orange. They suddenly seemed an unimaginably exotic treat.

The doctor told us to go back to the clinic for a chest X-ray first thing in the morning. Now we slowly walk the three blocks, T coughing behind his mask. As we move along the street, we see some other people too — fewer than a few days ago, before Gov. Andrew Cuomo directed New Yorkers to stay indoors as much as possible. Some joggers go by. Just over a week ago, that was still me. Now I point out the buds about to bloom on the branches we pass, drawing T’s attention away from the few passers-by so we won’t see if they start or turn around. A few are wearing their own masks, but they are walking upright, striding along, using them as protection for themselves. Not like us.

At the clinic, another couple wearing masks opens the door and walks in. A man in a mask sits in the waiting area. T eases into a chair and leans against the wall with his eyes closed. I go to the desk. “My husband has already tested positive for Covid-19,” I tell the attendant, whose eyes meet mine over her mask.

She hands me a mask. T’s doctor is working at a different clinic today, so we’ll see another doctor, and they will compare notes. We wait, wearing our masks. T’s eyes are still closed. I look out the window behind us, where people on the street are walking along as if it were an ordinary day. A man opens the door of a tiny cafe across the street with his bare hand and goes inside.

Another attendant comes to the desk, and the first attendant murmurs quietly to her. The second attendant puts on a mask.

We’re called inside. The nurses, in masks, check T’s vitals. He has a slight fever, just over 99 degrees, but that may be lowered because of the recent ibuprofen and acetaminophen in his system. His blood pressure is fine. His pulse is fine. His oxygen saturation is fine. We tell them about the fevers, the sweats, the nausea, the coughing, the spots of blood he is continuing to cough up, the lower oxygen-saturation number we recorded at home this morning.

When the nurses leave, T leans back in the examination chair, resting his head with his eyes closed. Out in the hall, I hear someone telling a patient that he has been sick for a long time. It’s time to go to the hospital five blocks away.

The doctor comes in, wearing a mask and a plastic shield over it. T, shivering in a paper gown, follows her out for the X-ray. “That was strangely difficult,” he says when he returns. “Just holding my arms above my head.” The X-ray looks different from the one a week ago, the doctor tells us after consulting with the radiologist. Now it shows pneumonia in the left lung. T’s doctor was right to order the antibiotics last night. T’s lungs sound all right when she listens through a stethoscope — he is not wheezing. He is not having breathing problems. He can keep being treated at home. “But now we’re going to be watching you even more closely,” she says.

At the door of the clinic, we stand looking out at two older women chatting outside the doorway, oblivious. Do I wave them away? Call out that they should get far away, go home, wash their hands, stay inside? Instead we just stand there, awkwardly, until they move on. Only then do we step outside to begin the long three-block walk home. I point out the early magnolia, the forsythia. T says he is cold. The untrimmed hairs on his neck, under his beard, are white. The few people walking past us on the sidewalk don’t know that we are visitors from the future. A vision, a premonition, a walking visitation. This will be them: Either T, in the mask, or — if they’re lucky — me, tending to him.

Jessica Lustig is a deputy editor of The New York Times Magazine.

 

 

Edited by Francisco 2.0
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