More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
new rules for everyone on Mei’s floor. No leaving. This is the main thing. Just for now, they say, just to be safe. No visitors, either.
On the first day of the confinement,
And it seems to Mei that the kids are multiplying. Their hands on the doorknobs. Their fingers flicking the light switches.
It obsesses them immediately: what they cannot do and whom they cannot see. “It would be easier if we were used to being apart,” says one girl,
Already the days seem longer than before, only twenty-four hours deep,
with masks stretched tight across their faces.
“Hey,” she says through her mask, her green scrubs swishing as she walks, her green-gloved finger wagging. “That’s too close, you two. Five feet apart at all times.”
They talk endlessly of the weather. The sky is enormous, and the sun so appealing,
How swiftly it comes over them, the feeling that this containment will never end.
But the symptoms don’t quite fit. It isn’t bird flu or swine flu or SARS. It is not mononucleosis. What they do know is that this sickness is unusually contagious,
There is, after all, a mathematics of disease: how one case grows to three or four, and each of those four to four more.
Isolation—that’s what the doctors call it: the separation of the sick from the well.
In the annals of infectious disease, there is a phenomenon known as a super-spreader:
Politicians—from mayors to the president—rush to fill the vacuum with press conferences, while talk show hosts devote whole hours to the subject.
Questions are being raised: Why didn’t the CDC respond sooner? Are the health workers wearing the right protective gear?
“We’re out of masks,” he calls to Nathaniel as soon as he steps inside. “No more gloves, either.”
Health department, she hears. Isolation. Mandatory. “The whole town?” Mei asks.
“They’re not waving their guns,” says Mei, though she can see them, the guns, long and black and resting in their laps. Do not gather in large groups, says the message. Avoid public places.
canned fruit. They have toilet paper—stacks and stacks of toilet
Could she catch it from breathing in that smell? Now she’s at the sink. Now she’s washing her hands. She washes her hands for five minutes.
She holds it out to him through the cuffs of her sweatshirt, no contact with her skin.
people are stockpiling food in case the sickness spreads.
The hair grows. The fingernails curl. There are not enough workers to keep the toenails clipped or the faces shaved.
