For all intents and purposes, March 11 is when the coronavirus started to get real for all of us here.
That’s the night the first pro sports league shut down its season. Dominoes tumbled quickly over the next four days.
It had been just 10 days since New York had its first case, and just over two months since the first mention of 41 causes of a mysterious pneumonia connected to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China.
Today, our country has more cases than any other. New York City, the epicenter, has had more than 3,000 deaths.
Coast to coast that second weekend in March, American life grinded to a halt. Begrudgingly at that. Most of the country was in denial.
A national emergency was declared that Friday.
“Can’t happen to me” or “won’t happen to me” was a prevailing opinion. Just keep an eye on the chart, the one that shows its rise and peak. It’ll come soon, so we thought. And then it’ll be gone. We’ll be OK.
Some will. But the death toll is rocketing up. Here in North Carolina, it escalated in the past week by more than five times. It’ll get worse before it gets better, and over the weekend, we were told to brace for it.
“This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment,’’ Surgeon General Jerome Adams said.
The voice we’ve come to know we can trust, that of Dr. Anthony Fauci, was in agreement. He said the next eight or nine days would be “shocking to some.”
“Things are going to get bad, and we need to be prepared for that,” Fauci said.
The coronavirus is a killer disease. We’re learning more about it each day. Researchers are burning the midnight oil to figure out a vaccine, to develop quicker and reliable testing methods.
We’ve lost all sense of normalcy. Elizabethtown, where parking spaces on the 100 block of West Broad Street are always at a premium, is practically a ghost town. Throughout last week, there was hardly ever more than a half dozen cars parked on the main drag.
There’s some commerce happening, but it’s little and far between what we’re used to seeing. And we’re not the only place. Recession is here, and nobody knows for how long because in this age of information and technology we don’t know enough about the enemy. Imagine that?
Hurricanes and housing market bubbles we can forecast. A disease that we’ve never dealt with before is an entirely different matter.
We’re not giving in.
We’ll listen to medical experts, heed their warnings, and encourage everyone else to do the same. Our heroes are working in medicine, both practicing it and researching it.
They will take care of us. Doing our part will help us take care of them.
We’re all in this together.