I count in my head the number of touches I need to accomplish anything outside of my apartment.
- the door to the laundry room, coming and going, washing and drying: four.
- to the grocery store: the two doors for my building, coming and going (4), the basket (1-ish?). Minimizing the handling of goods: five minimum, but not accounting for proximity to people in the aisles.
- going for a walk: the four for my building door as above, although if I’m lucky I can draft on the doors that use mechanical assistance to stay open longer while still maintaining social distance.
- to the garage below my building: the breezeway door, the door at the top of the stairwell, the door at the bottom of the stairwell. I debate whether it’s better to touch or hip-bump the first of those, which has a horizontal press-bar to open from the inside. In any case, yikes, that’s six touches just to go to the car.
And so it goes. As of March 20, we’ve not been ordered locked down, or quarantined, or “shelter in place”, in either the Empire State of New York or the great city of New York, but I have essentially been practicing that. I was already working from home before the outbreak occurred, so it’s been easy for me to simply stay inside as much as possible.
That said – when our mayor, who resisted closing public schools and was still going to the gym hours before a ban on that went into effect, said that New Yorkers might want to plan to shelter in place, that was the one moment of true panic I had. What groceries did I have on hand? Would there be a run at the market as nine million people across five boroughs rushed to stock up? Should I get in my car and evacuate to the suburbs, where my significant other has a house?
I decided to stay, mostly on two key assumptions. One is that, despite living in an apartment building in one of the largest cities in the world, I am alone in my apartment, as isolated as a person can get. The other is that, while David and I were planning to spend next week together, which we both have off, it’s not clear whether I’d be able to come back home afterwards, and the nature of his job is such that he is out and around people constantly.
Even at that, the job has changed just in the past couple of days. He works in television news, driving the truck, shooting and editing video, then transmitting it back to the station. They stopped having reporters do “man on the street” interviews, since that inherently breaks social distancing, and recently, he’s not been driving with reporters – alone in a truck.
A shared truck, mind you, though even that appears to be about to change.
This was the hardest decision of all. I was looking forward to a long week with my loved one, neither of us having to go to work, spending time with each other, and maybe getting some work done ’round the house. Even here I counted touches: the keypad on the lock, and visits to the grocery stores there.
It’s clear we’re in a different world now, and it’s one that will continue, in varying degrees, for months to come.