Do you remember duck and cover drills? Always a pleasant break. I recall us all crouched down like little Muslims facing Mecca on the floor of the marble windowless hallway of our convent-housed grammar school, boys on one side, girls on the other. The Commies wanted to fry us, a concept as abstract as the church’s triple threat of limbo, purgatory, hell. I found the purported godlessness of the bad guys alluring.

From duck and cover to shelter in place, not a bomb but a microbe this time. That macro/micro-spectrum thing again. One difference this time around is that the biggest threat to yourself is yourself and your neighbors, not some foreign impersonal power. Do not touch your fucking face! Your hands can kill you. Death by your own (unscrubbed) hand. Don’t crouch down together, keep your distance, a marble hallway’s width apart at least. And not just until the nuns tell you that you can get up, but for this present’s equivalent of forever.