scenes from a pandemic, pt. i

I live in Seattle, the city where COVID-19 first touched down in the US. I work downtown as a bike messenger, doing food delivery, mainly to office workers. There isn't a nonpretentious way to say that this means that while I'm at work I have a finger on the pulse of the city, but I do. It's far from perfect--things that happen outside of my delivery area are usually off my radar, for instance--but I see and hear a lot. And when something noteworthy happens, people occasionally talk to me about it. The news cycle is happening quickly and I'm not going to try to replicate it or keep up to date, but I want to chronicle what I've seen and what's happening.

I'd been following the news for a while, because it's 2020 and everything bad that can happen will happen. Still, it felt distant as Governor Inslee declared an emergency--I knew that at some point I would probably get sick, that there would be runs on supplies, but it didn't feel real. Then, on March 4th, two days before I was supposed to go out of town on vacation, Amazon, a corporation with a massive percentage of the office space downtown and therefore a primary source of business, asked their employees to start working from home until the end of the month.

The day after that, downtown felt subdued. It wasn't as desolate as I expected, but traffic was lighter than usual, business was quite slow despite multiple coworkers being home sick. There was a sense of something big coming, but overall people seemed to be fairly cheerful about the whole thing. The reality of our situation, I think, had not set in.

Allergies were also quite bad that day. Bad enough that, worrying that the symptoms might be the onset of the virus, I cancelled my trip plans and stayed home for the time I had scheduled to take off. I didn't know what to expect when I returned to work the following Wednesday (the 11th of March). I returned to find that the company was slashing hours for employees across the board; sales were down to something like twenty percent of usual. Many of the restaurants I passed were closed indefinitely. The city had come to the realization that this was going to hurt even those who are lucky enough to avoid infection, or who don't suffer major distress from it.

People in Seattle are famously polite but aloof; the so-called Seattle chill, or Seattle freeze, is legendary, even if it really does vary from person to person. But everyone I encounter at work I'll ask "how's it going?" by way of greeting, and on Thursday, instead of just saying "fine" or "it's going", people answered. "It's quiet out there." "My commute this morning was amazingly fast." "Business is dying." And so on.

I should note that most of the people I encountered at that point were self-selecting for people who were willing to go downtown during a pandemic, but people were worried about what this would mean for our futures, economically. And they're right to; many food service and hospitality workers live paycheck to paycheck, and those paychecks have unexpectedly dried up for them.

The city and state governments have been trying to patch our social safety net to help workers who are affected by this. I'm worried it won't be enough.

***

It's 5:50 am right now and I'm still awake from yesterday. I spent most of Friday wondering if this malaise and mild cough were the virus or just a combination of stress and allergies and bad sleep, but by now I'm fairly certain I'm sick. I'm tired but I'm not tired. I can focus well enough to write. It's hard to say if it will get any worse; right now it feels like a flu that lost interest. It's probably time to start the process of telling people that I'm sick.

It feels weird doing more than just calling work and saying I'm not feeling well. All of this feels weird, which I suppose is why I'm writing it down. I already feel like I should have been doing this a while ago--the conversations and thoughts I was having in the lead-up to this are lost now.

I remember that people were concerned but not alarmed. I remember someone at my fencing class telling me that one of his coworkers was using 'Are you afraid of coronavirus?' as a conversation starter; that coworker, he said, didn't know what to do when he responded with 'No.' I remember feeling like it was strange that the buses weren't emptier.

I plan on writing more of these as time wears, but I don't know when there will be more; I don't expect a lot to happen while I'm home sick, but who knows?