Journal of a Plague Year, Monday, March 9

Rio Arriba County reported its third case of Coronavirus yesterday. If it takes two weeks to gestate and four days to test, then the person contacted it on March 9.

This was the first day I came into contact with people who were reacting to televised stories about what was then a problem in Seattle, Washington. The World Health Organization didn’t declare it a pandemic until March 11.

I was in a drug store buying paper towels - not because I was hoarding, but because I was using my last roll and needed some.

Another woman in the aisle was buying cans of Lysol for every members of here family, including her father who didn’t go out much.

What was unusual wasn’t what she was buying, but that she was willing to talk. People in Española are reticent. They talk with friends when they meet in stores, but never with strangers. Anxiety was breaking down a barrier, at least temporarily.

I think she was acting on the concerns of a daughter who called to tell her the shelves were empty at the big box: no paper towels, no toilet paper, no hand cleaners.

She said people had also bought up the isopropyl alcohol. Apparently, Fox had broadcast a segment on how to make your own sanitizer with alcohol, aloe oil, and paper towels. She did let me know witch hazel would work as well.

While we were talking another woman stopped to listen. When the first left, the second began talking. She had allergies, and didn’t use chemicals.

One does wonder a bit about why one needs all the disinfectants at home. It’s public places that need to be washed down every fifteen minutes. But, if someone in your house has the virus, all the disinfectants aren’t going to help.

This woman was going to stick with her homeopathic remedies. The one she mentioned was rubbing the area around her eyes with a piece of aloe vera every night.

At the time I wondered, should I have talked to those women? Was I putting myself at risk? Again, such questions were still just vague apprehensions, not the serious concerns they would become.

Journal of a Plague Year was a novel written by Daniel Defoe in 1722 about the London plague of 1665. I also could have borrowed a title from a novel by Gabriel García Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera. Currently the García Marquez book ranks 736 on Amazon, while the Defoe ranks 1,323.