Saturday, March 14th: Eri!ta and Gino Brian stocll up on groceries in Queens.if anyone has .du-like symptoms, then
we are able to get a t.est, right now, at
Columbia Presbyt.erian. which is great.
All we can do is watch and move for-
ward, day by day."
P
anic-buying has been in evidence
all over town, if unevenly cxecut.ed.
Many chain supermarkets and food
stores are stripped bare of groceries, in
a way that calls to mind the days just
after 9fu. Back then, people gathered
"Armageddon baskets," filled with ex-
pensive things---steak and Perrie& Now
they assemble survival kits. Toilet paper
and canned beans are treasured. (There
is no chance, the grocers assure the city,
of running out of either.) Still, there's a
pattern to the emptying of the super-
markcts. Evcrypotato, evcry cmot,evcry
onion in a West Side Citarella is gone,
as is every package of pasta and every
jar of tomatoes in an uptown Whole
Foods. Yet many of the less tony super-
markets, the nearby Key Foods and
Gristedes, have remained well stocked
and serene throughout the rush.
"You realize what this means?" a
46 THE NEY~ MAl\CH 30, 2020college student who grew up in New
York said, about the depredations of
upscale shoppers. "It means they be-
lieve that it's every man for himself.
They don't really believe in commu-
nity or that people will or can share.
Their instinct, despite living in one
of the more aflluent spots in the
world, is that they're on their own."
The plague, as Camus insisted, ex-
poses existing fractures in societies,
in class structure and individual char-
act.er; under stress, we see who we re-
ally are. The secession of the~ rich,
the isolation of the well-off, the deg-
radation of social capital by inequal-
ity: these truths become sharply self-
evident now.T
he current crisis is, in some re-
spects, the mirror image of the
post-9/11 moment. That turned out to
be a time of retrospective anxiety about
a tragedy unforeseen. The anticipatory
jitters weren't entirely unfounckd---an-
thrax killed a hospital worker in Man-
hattan-but they arose from some-
thing that had already happened andwouldn't be repeat.ed. By contrast, the
COVID-19 crisis involves worries about
something we've been warned is on
the way. The social remedy is the op-
posite of the sort of coming together
that made the days and weeks after
9/11 endurable for so many, as they
shared dinners and embraced friends.
That basic human huddling is now
forbidden, with the recommendations
for "distancing" bearing down ever
tighter: no more than five hundred
people tog-ether, then two hundred and
:fifty, then fifty, then ten.
At the same time, the emphasis on
social distancing and even isolation is
part of an epidemiological study in
statistical probability. If we delay the
communication of the virus :from pa-
tient to patient, the curve of new cases
may flatten, so that fewer people at
any time will need hospitalization, re-
ducing the stress on the system and
keeping health services available for
all the other countless ailments that
strike a city of eight million. In a way,
the self-seclusions are exhibits not of
personal panic but of public-minded