7
"Nothing Can Stop What's Coming"
While this was happening, I was in Houston, in rehearsals for Camp David, a play I had written about the Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin, and Anwar Sadat summit in 1978. Oskar Eustis, of New York's Public Theater, was directing. Oskar is a big man with a barking laugh, flowing brown hair, and a full, bristling beard I associate with Falstaff, which he strokes when he's cogitating. He directed the first production of Angels in America. Under his leadership, the Public has given birth to some of the most important works of the modern stage, notably including Hamilton. Few people in the theater world have made such an imprint as he.
We were presenting Camp David at the Alley Theatre with expectations that we would take it to New York. It was the third play Oskar and I had worked on together, and we had become good friends. So I was concerned when he seemed listless, especially at the end of rehearsal. We went for a walk along Buffalo Bayou and he was breathless. One could see the effort required to regain the heartiness that was always so natural to him.
I have a memory of that production that later came back to me charged with significance. The players were performing in the round, allowing the audience an intimacy one doesn't get with a conventional stage. Often, the actors would be only a few feet away. The slanted lighting created a dramatic portraiture, highlighting the faces of the cast against the shadowy figures of the audience in the seats across the way; and in that lighting, I noticed that, when one particular actor expostulated, bursts of saliva flew from his mouth. Some droplets arced and tumbled, but evanescent particles lingered, forming a dim cloud. At the time, I thought it was interestingly dramatic, adding to the forcefulness of the character. Later, I thought this is what a superspreader looks like.
As far as I know, none of my actors were ill or contagious. I have no idea how Oskar got sick. But on February 20, when he flew back to New York, missing opening night, I knew something was wrong.
Texas was thought to be out of the danger zone that month, but retrospective modeling showed that the disease likely had been infecting at least ten people a day since the middle of the month. That was also true for California, Washington, Illinois, New York, and Florida. By the end of February, there was probable local transmission in thirty-eight states.
***
On the night of February 26, Lawrence Garbuz, an attorney in New Rochelle, New York, awakened with a cough and a low-grade fever. He was an apparently healthy man with no underlying conditions. The next morning, he went to the doctor, who sent him immediately to the emergency room.
During the four days Garbuz was at NewYork-Presbyterian/Lawrence Hospital in Bronxville, he was attended by doctors and nurses; his room was crowded with friends and family; orderlies and janitorial staff freely came and went with no special precautions. An X-ray showed that Garbuz had pneumonia, but the severity was confounding; one person described his lungs as "full of cobwebs." A nurse in the intensive care unit ventured "I think this patient is Covid," but her concerns were considered alarmist. By the weekend, Garbuz was too weak to speak. He handed a note to a doctor, asking, "Am I going to die?"
On March 1, Garbuz was put on a ventilator. The next day, he was transferred to NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center in Manhattan, where he was finally tested for Covid-19. He was positive. By that time, members of his family, nursing staff, healthcare workers and their families were beginning to show symptoms. So was the neighbor who drove him to the emergency room. Governor Andrew Cuomo tagged Garbuz "Patient Zero" in New York, but he was just one case of a cluster of more than ninety people in New Rochelle, where he had recently attended a funeral and a b'nai mitzvah. The synagogue was shut down, and the National Guard enforced a containment zone in a mile radius around it.
While Lawrence Garbuz lay unconscious, the coronavirus cast a kind of anesthesia over the entire country. It was a striking contrast to 2014, when there had been a small outbreak of Ebola in the U.S. Two people died, a Liberian national who brought the disease with him and a doctor who had contracted Ebola in Sierra Leone. Out of the eleven people treated, nine had contracted the disease in Africa and neither of the two people who were infected by the disease in the U.S. died. And yet the country was near hysteria. Governors in a number of states imposed mandatory twenty-one-day quarantines for anyone who had contact with an Ebola patient—mainly, healthcare workers—whether they had symptoms or not. Schools were closed even in districts where there had been no exposure. Donald Trump, then a private citizen, attacked the Obama administration's decision to send the U.S. military to West Africa to fight Ebola. "STOP THE FLIGHTS!" he tweeted. "NO VISAS FROM EBOLA STRICKEN COUNTRIES!" He wouldn't spare doctors, either. "People that go to far away places to help out are great—but must suffer the consequences!"
Where Ebola banged pans and tossed firecrackers in its path, the coronavirus slipped in on cat's paws. The virus hitchhiked on passengers coming from hotspots. Five million people had left Wuhan before Chinese authorities locked the city down. From December to March, there were 3,200 direct flights from China to the U.S., arriving mainly in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. Sixty percent of flights from Italy to the U.S. landed in New York. They brought a new mutation of SARS-CoV-2 that would prove to be even more contagious than the Chinese original. Travel continued until Italy went into a nationwide lockdown on March 10. The next day, the WHO finally declared a pandemic. By that time there were more than 100,000 cases in 114 countries, and 4,291 had lost their lives. "It will go away," the president remarked. "Just stay calm. It will go away."
***
"We are coordinated, we are fully mobilized, and we are fully prepared to deal with the situation as it develops," Governor Cuomo said. "This isn't our first rodeo." Mayor Bill de Blasio also sought to assure his constituents. "I'm encouraging New Yorkers to go on with your lives + get out on the town despite Coronavirus," he tweeted.
The New York City Health Department turned to Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard University, to create a model that would give them some framework for how to respond. On February 24, Lipsitch and one of his students, Rebecca Kahn, presented the model, which allowed health authorities to plug in different factors, such as how many infected travelers had entered the city, what the rate of infection was, how many were asymptomatic. Lipsitch thought it might help the officials set guidelines despite the lack of political urgency, which he characterized as "if you don't see a problem, you don't have a problem."
The health authorities knew what an epidemic curve with exponential growth looked like. It measures the rate of doubling of the infections. Still, the graph was sobering. If there were five infections at the beginning of February, there could be more than 50,000 cases by the end of April.
The New York City Emergency Management Department was headed by Deanne Criswell, a former National Guard firefighter from Aurora, Colorado. Starting in January 2020, as soon as the new virus appeared on the horizon, Criswell conducted a series of tabletop exercises, involving the hospitals, schools, the police and fire departments, the health department, sanitation commissioner, the mayor's office, and other agencies. They were gaming worst-case scenarios. From the beginning, the main obstacle the city faced was the still-unknown nature of the virus. Added to that was the daunting responsibility of making decisions that would disrupt the lives of 8.6 million New Yorkers—decisions that would have cascading impacts across the region, the country, and the world—and what's more, they were being made before there were any known cases in the city. The nightmare scenarios included overwhelmed hospitals, staff reductions up to 40 percent, economic collapse, and mass fatalities. Reality would soon outstrip their worst imaginings.
The governor was giving mixed signals, demanding on the one hand that health departments in New York quarantine anyone who had been in contact with an infected person or had traveled to a country with an outbreak, which included much of the world. On the other hand, Cuomo was "a little perturbed" by the anxiety that was beginning to spread across his state. "The more people you test, the more positives you are going to find," he said, a complaint many politicians, not least the president, would echo.
All through February, the country remained unaware of the spread of the infection because of the faulty CDC test. Weeks had passed from the point when containment was possible. On February 25, Nancy Messonnier, a senior director at the CDC, warned that the situation was "rapidly evolving and expanding." She painted a sobering picture of the future: "Ultimately, we expect we will see community spread in this country. It's not so much a question of if this will happen anymore but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness." Without a vaccine or treatment for the disease, communities would have to rely on nonpharmaceutical interventions, including school closures, social distancing, disinfecting surfaces, teleworking, canceling mass gatherings, and delaying elective surgeries. People should expect missed work and loss of income. Parents should consider what to do about childcare. "I understand this whole situation may seem overwhelming and that disruption to everyday life may be severe, but these are things that people need to start thinking about now."
Messonnier's straight talk crashed the stock market, the Dow Jones Industrial Average losing 12 percent of its value in one week. The president was enraged. He appointed Vice President Pence to head the White House Coronavirus Task Force, shoving aside Alex Azar, who remained on the force. But for the first time, America got an accurate diagnosis of its condition. The next time Messonnier spoke publicly, she was quick to praise the president, saying that the country had acted "incredibly quickly."
***
Amy Klobuchar dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination on March 2, hours before Super Tuesday voting began, and flew to Dallas to endorse Joe Biden. The stage was jammed with supporters, ranks of them, shoulder to shoulder, waving blue Texas for Biden signs. "I believe, and it's the reason I'm up here, we are never going to out-divide the divider-in-chief," Klobuchar said to the crowd. "If we spend the next four months dividing our party and going at each other, we will spend the next four years watching Donald Trump tear apart this country." She embraced Biden as the crowd cried, "Let's go, Joe!" But as she did so, she was thinking, "Joe Biden shouldn't get Covid." She warned his advisers to begin taking greater precautions.
The following Friday she went to a Biden rally in Detroit. That night employees of the Wayne County sheriff's office gathered for an annual party at Bert's, a beloved soul food and jazz venue. They had been meeting there for twenty years. Most of them were Black, some were retired. Three weeks later, seven of the attendees had Covid and dozens more in the sheriff's office were ill. Three law-enforcement officials would be dead before the end of the month.
At the rally, Klobuchar noticed that people had become more careful. "I put on gloves," she said. "We didn't know about masks at the time."
The Democratic rallies soon came to a halt after Michigan, but people from all over the country flocked to New Orleans for Mardi Gras—some 1.4 million of them.