6 THENEWYORKER,MARCH23, 2020
QUARANTINESDEPT.
COOPEDUP
A
s millions of people in the United
States begin self-quarantining, in
order to prevent the spread of the new
coronavirus, China, the first country to
shut down, is in the process of opening
back up. In Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi
Province, more than ten million people
were placed under lockdown. When re-
strictions were eased, earlier this month,
the city’s divorce rate spiked. One offi-
cial blamed it, in part, on the quarantine.
“Many couples have been bound with
each other at home for over a month,
which evoked the underlying conflicts,”
he told the Global Times, a Chinese state-
run tabloid. Perhaps global pandemic
and marital strife go together; in the 2011
film “Contagion,” Gwyneth Paltrow dies
a horrible death from a virus after cheat-
ing on her dutiful husband, Matt Damon.
Lawrence Birnbach, a psychoanalyst
who practices in Greenwich Village and
in Westport, Connecticut, predicts that
the divorce rate will also rise in the U.S.
as the pandemic unfolds. (He co-wrote
a book with his wife, called “How to
Know If It’s Time to Go.”) Two of his
patients are married, and are self-quar-
antining together, and both have re-
ported trouble at home. “They’ve been
arguing more than usual because one
person doesn’t take precautions exactly
the way the other one wants them to,”
he explained. “‘You didn’t wash your
hands long enough. You took the sub-
way. Don’t you care about me?’ ” (Birn-
bach’s wife had told him to stop touch-
ing doorknobs.)
Laura Wasser, a Los Angeles divorce
attorney who inspired, in part, Laura
Dern’s character in “Marriage Story,”
weighed in: “A quarantine experience,
particularly where there are underlying
issues of resentment and poor commu-
nication, could be devastating to a mar-
ital relationship.” She compared the sit-
uation to couples who, after enduring
the forced togetherness of the holidays,
seek divorce in January—a busy month
for matrimonial lawyers.
Does every quarantine scenario have
to resemble Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat”?
Might some couples grow closer? “That
takes couples with real empathy,” Birn-
bach said, adding that that quality was
in short supply. Wasser was more optimis-
tic. “It could be an excellent opportunity
to reconnect with your spouse,” she said,noting that, if a couple is on lockdown,
it could reanimate their sex life.
How about some case studies? Kath-
erine Codekas and Matt Smith, both
fifty-seven, and both divorce lawyers,
have been married for twenty-one years.
In February, they were trapped together
for two weeks in a not-large suite on
board the Diamond Princess, the cruise
ship that was quarantined in the port
of Yokohama, Japan, following a coro-
navirus outbreak. “We got along fa-
mously,” Codekas said. “There were no
outside influences to argue about. No
‘You gotta get groceries’ or ‘You gotta
clean the litter box.’ ” She passed the time
by watching “Say Yes to the Dress”—
a show that she had never seen before,
and which she called “completely mind-
numbing.” Smith spent his days on so-
cial media, trying to contact the outside
world. Codekas’s main tip for the quar-
antined: carve out a space of your own,
away from your partner. “When Matt
was on Skype, I went into the closet,”
she said. Think of it as a quarantine
within a quarantine.
Tyler and Rachel Torres were one of
the youngest couples on the Diamond
Princess. Both twenty-four, they were
on their honeymoon when they were
forced into quarantine. Rachel cross-
stitched a Christmas ornament; Tylercountries (the United Kingdom and Ire-
land, among a few other countries, were
excepted—a decision with no ground-
ing in science), implied that he was de-
fending the nation from the epidemio-
logical equivalent of a European invasion.
He reportedly did not consult the E.U.
before announcing his restrictions, a
churlish decision that will do nothing
to ease European leaders’ exasperation
with him. On this, as on so much else
in his foreign policy, Trump’s needless
provocations have undermined U.S. se-
curity; it is absurd to suggest that the
United States can contain this pandemic
behind its own borders without exten-
sive help from allies in Europe, Asia,
and Latin America.
On Thursday, Joe Biden gave a speech
on the crisis that sounded like the start
of his presumptive general-election cam-
paign to unseat the President. “This
virus laid bare the severe shortcomings
of the current Administration,” he said.
“Public fears are being compounded by
pervasive lack of trust in this President.”
Biden’s victory over Bernie Sanders on
Super Tuesday was one of the great Hou-
dini acts of American politics, the re-
sult of his strong support among Afri-
can-Americans as well as, evidently, the
desperate desire of many Democrats to
be rid of Trump by whatever means may
be the most plausible. But, in the life
cycle of a Presidential campaign, No-
vember is a very long way off, and the
role of the present crisis in the election
is no easier to predict than the trajec-
tory of the pandemic itself. The prom-
ise of Biden’s normalcy—his respect for
science, knowledge of world affairs, ca-
pacity for gentleness and empathy, bor-
ing social-media feeds—will surely be
enough for many voters, come what may.
Yet it is unusual to win the White House
simply by not being the man who cur-
rently occupies it.
In 2014, as a Twitter provocateur andfearmonger during the Ebola epidemic,
Trump auditioned a political voice that
he now exercises in full, to extraordi-
nary effect. He presides over a social-
media and talk-radio ecosystem that
inspires intense devotion among his fol-
lowing, even as it spreads misinforma-
tion that will inevitably complicate the
efforts of those who seek to navigate
the pandemic by searching out reliable
facts. On Friday, at a White House press
conference, he declared a national emer-
gency—“Two very big words”—a move
that, he said, would free up fifty billion
dollars to fight the outbreak in this coun-
try. He added, “I don’t take responsibil-
ity at all” for the slow testing rate. The
President is steering the country through
a challenge of yet unknown magnitude,
one in which honesty and accountabil-
ity will be at a premium. We know that
he will not change. One way to survive
the pandemic may be to tune him out.
—Steve Coll