Running from Coronavirus (Part 1)

I write this splayed on a grey sectional couch on the 3rd floor of the Chauncey Square apartments in West Lafayette, Indiana. Today is a Saturday, the one day off of online teaching that I take for myself each week. This morning, now that the gym is closed, I went for a run down the hill, across the traffic intersections and the bridge, and ran along the trail that parallels the Wabash river until an reaching an impasse due to the water spilling over from the river. It happens every Spring as the Wabash swells beyond its banks, the rains from upstream draining into its massive brown body. The last time I lived here was a little less than three years ago. Since then I moved to China and now am back temporarily because my girlfriend still lives here, finishing her PhD. I left China on January 31st, spent twelve or so days in Australia and then flew to Indianapolis, arriving on February 12th.

I first heard about the virus sometime in December. Or was it early January? I don't remember. The last two months have been a marathon of travel and adjustments, reading and judging and talking and thinking and trying to anticipate where I might get stuck or where the virus might find me. At this point, with routes back to China now almost completely closed off, I've resigned myself to riding out whatever this will bring here in Indiana. Of course (of course) I wouldn't leave my girlfriend behind now that I'm here and being with her makes the existential and physical threat easier to live with. Like everyone else, "I'm not afraid of getting sick," but am more concerned about the fallout; either being quarantined indefinitely in China or trampled in a toilet paper stampede at Walmart. And then there is the master fear underlying all this movement and change, e.g. dying alone under a canopy of plastic sheets, sedated with a ventilator down my throat. Or being responsible for bringing the virus to my parents or someone else who's immune system has decided it's of the 20% (or is it 15?) that might develop significant symptoms. But that's not something one can plan around.

But even if I were planning one more trip; that is, to go back to China, which ironically or surprisingly or assuredly or obviously is probably the safest country in the world in relation to the virus (minus small island nations who have closed their borders), I'd have to undergo a two-week mandatory quarantine. I'd like to avoid that, though a rate of 300 RMB per day in a Ministry of Health run hotel (about $42.28 at the current exchange) seems not so bad a price; though, two-weeks in a big-bedded jail seems off-putting and and dangerously lonely. Plus it's unclear when my campus will open or what the day to day will be like there for the foreseeable future. Yes, things have drastically improved and opened up in China in terms of movement within and between cities, but I'd like to wait and see how China will weather the rest of the world blowing up with infection rates. Probably forcefully and without mercy as the Chinese government is wont to do. Meanwhile, here in Tippecanoe county, only two cases have been diagnosed and the governor has said that although folks should say in their homes, there is no barrier on folks going out into the world. If there is one thing that I've been learning about the virus though, it's that what happened in one place will inevitably happen in another. And so it seems to me just a matter of time before West Lafayette is in the same boat as New York or Italy or Wuhan.