I’ve been following the outbreak since January 25th when I first heard about it.
Occasionally I travel the Los Angeles area as a freelance makeup artist for a department store cosmetics line. On January 25th, I worked at Nordstrom in Arcadia near the Santa Anita Racetrack. During the Chinese Lunar New Year, this Nordstrom celebrates with dragons, acrobats and traditional Chinese drums. It’s a spectacular site and one I was thrilled to witness this year.
It was then that I first heard of a mysterious virus that had shut down Wuhan, China. One of my customers, a medical student and Chinese National, had decided against traveling home for the Lunar New Year on January 8th. While the Communist Party had downplayed the outbreak, even lying about its existence, the first recorded case of the mysterious virus was on December 8th. She said, somewhat conspiratorially, “That means, the virus has been spreading throughout the country rampantly. Now hospitals are overwhelmed, and trust me, it’s already here.”
She was right, the problem was so much more serious than the Chinese government had said. On January 23rd China locked down all travel in and out of the country and quarantined Wuhan, the largest quarantine in human history.
That night I returned home and started learning everything I could about China, the virus and the possible cause or causes of the outbreak. Knowing it could already be in the U.S. at this point, having had more than a month to arrive, it would only be a matter of days or weeks before cases here emerged.
I obsessively began washing my hands, limiting my time in large gatherings and trying like mad to get my husband to understand the emergency. You see, whenever he gets sick, I get sick. Like most Americans at that time might, he just laughed, until he got irritated and then he finally got mad when, on March 3rd after voting, we went to lunch at a Subway that had no public restroom and he refused to return home to wash his hands before we ate. Home was a mere five minutes away. No, he wanted to eat his sandwich then go to Starbuck’s for his regular afternoon coffee.
“What is washing our hands going to do? Tell me?” He snapped.
