I went to the supermarket today and bought two bags of potato chips and an extra large bar of chocolate. My neighborhood feels the way it did around Hurricane Sandy and the blackout in 2003—we’re in disaster mode, hunkered down and emerging only when necessary. It’s sunny out, the daffodils and hyacinths in full bloom, which somehow makes everything even more bizarre.
I’m at the tail end of a cold I’ve had for nearly three weeks. It started with a sore throat, then progressed to a runny nose and a cough I still haven’t been able to shake. Through extensive Googling, I know that my symptoms don’t align with those of COVID-19, but these are strange times to be sick, and a few weeks ago my anxiety propelled me to call the New York State coronavirus hotline. The woman I spoke with was kind and reassuring, but she had no more information than what I’d been able to find online. She told me to monitor my symptoms and if I got worse, to call the NYC Department of Health and find out where I could get a coronavirus test. I know now that I probably wouldn’t have been able to get one, even if I’d had textbook symptoms, since I hadn’t returned from a Level 3 country or been in contact with someone who had tested positive. Perhaps it’ll turn out that I’ve had a mild case of COVID-19 this whole time, but in the absence of a test for antibodies to the virus, it’s likely I’ll never know.
In the evenings, we watch the news from France. The country has been in lockdown for over a week, with strict rules on when and for how long people may leave their homes. Photos of empty vistas across Paris reinforce the ways in which this pandemic has altered our sense of the ordinary. The Trocadéro, the Place du Louvre, Sacré-Cœur, normally teeming with tourists, are now deserted save for police officers on patrol.
In English, we say that someone has tested positive for the coronavirus. In French, the word is more direct, more alarming: infecté. It connotes an invasion by a foreign substance. It is an act of violence, yet described in terms that are curiously passive: one is infected, one becomes infected. As a species, we have now been polluted by this virus, and before we eradicate it, it will have taken over not only our physical bodies, but our social ones, as well. Nous sommes infectés.