Coping Alone

Sobering read, this essay by a New Yorker about coping with the virus while managing two young children. What the author describes of her family's situation is being replayed with various degrees of intensity everywhere:

The overwhelming feeling of New York City in the pandemic is, for me, the fact of our aloneness. There is no doctor to see, no tests to confirm what we already know. We have nothing but a few screens, the walls of our apartment, our bodily fluids seeping onto fabrics of all kinds. New Yorkers can feel the curtains falling. We are at the mercy of an idiot president and choked hospitals, watching a governor we used to hate like he’s the son of Zeus. For a lot of the city, none of this is news. Authority’s failures have been reality the whole time. But this virus offers a special dark symmetry: It asks us to practice “social distancing” and then forces people to die in isolation. It divides, and conquers.

The variables are about same no matter which part of the world you live in - barring a few countries that seem to have done it right. Inept political leadership, a staggering lack of preparation and foresight about a crisis like this (despite many warnings from experts of all stripes) and finally a haphazard and un-coordinated response as the situation unravels by the hour.