A series of brief dispatches by New York Review writers documenting the coronavirus outbreak around the world

Pandemic Journal

“Today was the first day of the lockdown in Paris, or as the French call it, le confinement. From my window, as I write this, I can see a completely empty rue de Fleurus (where almost a century ago, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas received so many artists and writers). There are no pedestrians.”

Pandemic Journal: Eduardo Halfon, Paris, France, March 17, 2020

“By Thursday afternoon, downtown San Francisco, already void of tourists, had turned ghostlier still. On street corners, people who, less than a month ago, had been lining up to spot Keanu Reeves shooting his new Matrix movie were now loading computer towers and monitors into their Uber and Lyft rides; they’d been told to work remotely."

Pandemic Journal: Anastasia Edel, Oakland, California, March 17, 2020

“Moments ago, the Israeli Health Ministry released urgent new orders. Public parks are from now on forbidden. So are beaches and nature reserves—forget about museums or cafés, which have been closed for several days. Walks are to be limited to ten minutes at a time: one parent and one child only. There are to be no playdates. No congregations of more than ten people. No medical services except for emergencies. A world the size of our living room.”

Pandemic Journal: Ruth Margalit, Tel Aviv, Israel, March 18, 2020

“Since the Spanish government ordered the whole country to lock ourselves up in our homes for—in principle—two weeks, this has been in the back of many minds, and certainly mine: What if we are already infected? The stern robotic voice on the radio announcement constantly repeats that, in that case, we shouldn’t go to a hospital. Hospitals are at breaking point.”

Pandemic Journal: Miguel-Anxo Murado, Madrid, Spain, March 18, 2020

“I’ve been having a feeling, on and off, that I can’t describe—my inability to name it is its most distinguishing feature. I can’t decide if the symptom is confusing or confusion is the symptom. I feel it mostly in my head, but it isn’t a headache.”

Pandemic Journal: Elisa Gabbert, Denver, Colorado, March 20, 2020

“As I write, I’m listening on YouTube to a “virtual chorus” of Verdi’s Va Pensiero—Italy’s unofficial anthem of national unity. Its soaring music and lyrics are soothing in this bleak time of solitude and anxiety. On Day One of the lockdown here in Rome, the first thing I noticed was a totally new urban soundtrack. The nearby Lungotevere Farnesina that flanks the Tiber River, is normally a chaotic, screeching rumble of cars, buses and motorcycles. It’s now on mute.”

Pandemic Journal: Sylvia Poggioli, Rome, Italy, March 23, 2020

“From the enclosure of my house, I am afraid of the suffering that isn’t present before me, the people running out of money and food or drowning in the fluid in their lungs, the deaths of health-care workers now growing ill while performing their duties. I fear the federal government, which the right wing has so—intentionally—weakened that not only is it insufficient to help its people, it is actively standing in help’s way.”

Pandemic Journal: Lauren Groff, Gainesville, Florida, March 21, 2020

“Most of the cases, to date, are people who have travelled abroad, but this is changing. And the consequences of this could be catastrophic—given a large population with immunity already compromised by HIV and tuberculosis, an already-strained health system, and the impossibility of social distancing in densely packed townships and rural villages. Nearly half of young South Africans do not have a job, and many live in impossibly crowded situations without running water or toilets.”

Pandemic Journal: Mark Gevisser, Cape Town, South Africa, March 19, 2020

“I am a reluctant biker, but on Monday night I rode from downtown Brooklyn, where I live, to upper Manhattan, where my mother claimed to be having trouble downloading Skype. The road was empty. Two finance bros discussed going to ‘Nick’s aunt’s townhouse in South Beach.’ A few joggers retreated into their AirPods. There were no children on the street.”

Pandemic Journal: Madeleine Schwartz, Brooklyn, New York, March 22, 2020

“Sometime around the end of the first week in February, I woke up to a familiar sort of buzzing from my cellphone—a distinctive burst of noise and vibration that brought to mind the mobile alerts for an earthquake in Japan, where I worked for several years as a foreign correspondent. In this case, the buzzing signaled a different kind of disaster: new Covid-19 infections.”

Pandemic Journal: Joshua Hunt, Busan, South Korea, March 22, 2020

“Only literature can help us get a handle on the present pandemic—we have no personal experience to guide us. We vainly scan the pages of Camus, whose plague is metaphorical, and Defoe, in which it is an ingenious daily, hourly enemy. But this one is different, more like a transparent fog, leaving its traces everywhere and anywhere, to be accidentally picked up and passed on, until it finds its ideal destination in the elderly and ailing, whom it steadily, unerringly destroys. And short of sealing ourselves up in plastic bags and never setting foot outside our disinfected homes, we can do nothing about it.”

Pandemic Journal: Simon Callow, London, England, March 19, 2020

“I deal in words for a living, but I have had difficulty forming them, since that moment, whether to describe or analyze. I don’t really understand them anymore. I understand touch, breath, contact. I understand plane tickets—I booked one as the price rose under me, the morning after Trump’s address.”

Pandemic Journal: Anne Enright, Dublin, Ireland, March 22, 2020

“Quarantine suits my father. He wipes down all the doorknobs in the apartment with Lysol. Working from a Japanese template he found online, he has cut up one of his shirts and sits at the kitchen table sewing the scraps into masks. I spent some time last semester hanging around a biophysics lab where sterilization was reflexive, every pipette tip and glove used once and then chucked into a biohazard bin to be incinerated. MIT labs are now turning off their machines, freezing their cultures, and donating protective gear and testing equipment to Mass General.”

Pandemic Journal: Lucy Jakub, Northampton, Massachusetts, March 24, 2020

Pandemic Journal: Alma Guillermoprieto, Bogotá, Colombia, March 24, 2020

Pandemic Journal: Hari Kunzru, Brooklyn, New York, March 23, 2020

“I realized what I had been experiencing the whole day of my outing: a heightened appreciation of our ordinary lives, as if they were something extraordinary—something almost like a miracle. I knew that the feeling would disappear as the virus faded away, or, in the worst-case scenario, as we resigned ourselves to living with it. And I thought about the role of literature, how it can make us appreciate our ordinary lives as if they were a miracle—and do so even in a time of boring normalcy.”

Pandemic Journal: Minae Mizumura, Tokyo, Japan, March 23, 2020

“I came to Ethiopia for book research that has to do with displacement and Eden, and tracing our beginnings as humans. How could I have known that the trip I had meticulously planned for months would be so ill-timed, that the world would be so anxious about endings?”

Pandemic Journal: Anna Badkhen, Lalibela, Ethopia, March 21, 2020

“In early March, at a faculty meeting, the coronavirus was third on my list of agenda items, after facilities improvements and fundraising progress. I mentioned a colleague’s suggestion that Wesleyan, where I am president, should cancel the upcoming Spring Break so as to finish the semester early. The room erupted in laughter, and I joined in. Students have their theses, professors their research—ridiculous to contemplate disrupting everyone’s plans.”

Pandemic Journal: Michael S. Roth, Middletown, Connecticut, March 24, 2020

“Along the boardwalk there are people walking, jogging, walking their dogs, singly or in couples. They are sensibly spaced, intentionally or not. I keep my own distance: all of them are potential carriers. It feels new, this very old way of looking at the world and fearing the unseen, suspecting dybbuks and devils inside people, lurking on door handles, hovering in the air.”

Pandemic Journal: Adam Foulds, Toronto, Canada, March 27, 2020

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Pandemic Journal

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