Getting Sick

Being the only person in my law school class still wearing a face-mask every day to ward off COVID-19, I have at times felt like a paranoid oddity. Classmates passing me on campus outdoors have been known to do a double-take when I wave hello. "Oh, it's you," they say. "I barely recognized you without the..." The reaction I get to the N95 around my nose and mouth is, I imagine, somewhat akin to what people who wear religious garb must experience. Thoughtful and enlightened people around them in society know they are supposed to not comment on it; certainly not negatively. But they notice it nonetheless. And the occasional comment slips through.

Given this uncomfortable situation, I have at times thought of following the lead of my classmates (and basically everyone else around me in public) in ditching the mask. The arguments in favor of doing so are familiar to all and have apparently proved convincing to the majority of Americans: so long as one is fully vaccinated, including with the Omicron-targeted booster, a case of COVID is only as likely to kill you as the flu (a disease that we ought to all vaccinate ourselves against, but which didn't prompt any of us to wear masks pre-pandemic). 

The arguments against doing so, however, are stronger, and are reviewed in the New York Times article linked above (though they hold off on reporting them until relatively late in the piece, rather burying the lede I should think): even a mild COVID infection carries currently unknown levels of risk of lasting cognitive damage; getting infected once provides very little protection against re-infection; and each new infection further multiplies the risk of lasting negative health effects. So the strategy of just unmasking and accepting that one will catch the disease about twice every year for the foreseeable future does not seem sound or healthy. 

Beyond the proven and likely negative side effects of getting COVID (even with multiple vaccinations under one's belt), the other reason I still can't bring myself to un-mask in public is more anecdotal. Sometimes, in the law school library, I would think to myself that there were relatively few people around; so I let down the mask for a spell. But invariably, as soon as I do so, I hear hacking and sneezing a few cubicles away. The mask promptly goes back on. Then I hear stories from friends and family members who have unmasked. Large gatherings lead predictably to outbreaks of the virus, and they all catch it. 

So far, everyone exposed to the virus during these minor outbreaks in my immediate circle has recovered without obvious lasting effects; but my masked existence over the past three years—a time during which I have not gotten sick with any virus, COVID or otherwise—has shown me that it is actually possible to simply avoid the dice roll on this. One can actually not get horribly ill with respiratory infections a couple times each year; one can achieve this just by taking minimal precautions—and I find I like this state of relative health, even if in my pre-pandemic state I would have accepted periodic sickness as inevitable. 

The only time when I let my guard down is when I am with family over the holidays; and lo and behold, this year, the universal and all-too-foreseeable pattern has unfolded. We got together; and everyone promptly fell sick. So far, we have all tested negative for COVID, so at least it is probably not that. But we are in the midst of a "tripledemic" of respiratory diseases, after all, including also the flu and RSV; so in trying to determine what we might all have caught, we can really take our pick. It's the first time I've actually been sick in almost three years, as I mentioned, and I find I am sorely out of practice. 

One might think that one would lack literary companionship in this plight. Not only is the COVID pandemic a recent occurrence the precise contours of which are unprecedented in cultural memory; but pandemics and illnesses have not generally been fruitful subjects for literature. In her essay, "On Being Ill," Virginia Woolf begins by observing that sickness has never taken its place among the great themes of the written word, despite the inherent drama it possesses. 

Susan Sontag, in "Illness as Metaphor," tries in part to dispel this notion by reviewing an informal bibliography of the literature of sickness; but even she says that there are precious few pandemic novels. The ghastly 1918 Influenza left remarkably little imprint on the world of letters, she points out, even though it was one of the great holocausts of the twentieth century. Sontag writes of the "near-total historical amnesia" about this catastrophic pandemic, and while this gap in our collective memory has been partially filled since she wrote her essay, it still does not figure anywhere near as prominently in the literature of the period as, say, the Great War that preceded it and likely caused it. 

Yesterday, though, I read one of the handful of exceptions to this general observation; and it did not disappoint my need for literary models to help make sense of our most recent collective experience. William Maxwell's They Came Like Swallows is an aching story of the 1918 flu pandemic—inspired by the author's loss of his own beloved mother during the disaster—and it shows that the influenza and the social responses it triggered were not so different from the COVID pandemic that arrived just over a full century after it. 

The people in the Midwestern town where the story is set at first discuss the influenza pandemic as something happening far away—something to read about and take notice of in the news as a matter of general humanitarian concern, but not something to concern oneself with directly. (Much as I and many others were still only vaguely following the news out of Wuhan in January 2020.)

Then, as cases begin to multiple locally, people have to wade through all the same social controversies that rocked the country again in 2020. Schools are shuttered temporarily, even as some parents resent the measure. Public health authorities order churches to stop meeting in person, and this triggers a lot of indignant harumphing from one of the boy's uncles, who sees in this a persecution of the Christian faith. "It is one thing to close the bowling-alley and the pool-hall," he says. "But to close the church of Jesus Christ is something else again."

Weirdly enough, bowling alleys would come up again in exactly the same context during the first year of COVID-19, when the Supreme Court ruled against pandemic restrictions that they felt disproportionately targeted religious gatherings without proportionately limiting secular ones. 

Reading the novel, I was grateful most of all that someone had recognized this chapter of American and global experience as worthy of artistic representation. If anything can help us make meaning of the tragedy of mass death and disability that has befallen us these past three years, and which appears to be just beginning in earnest in China, then it is surely catharsis: the pity and the identification evoked by realizing that what we have been through is not unique in human history. It, too, has its historical antecedents. As a character in Maxwell's novel reflects: "What happened to him had happened before. And it would happen again, more than once."

And so it did happen again, with COVID. And, alas, that too will probably not be the last time.