What Virginia Woolf Told Me About This Pandemic

If you think this COVID-19 ordeal is all-new, try reading Boccacio’s 14th century stories or Defoe’s 18th century account of the plague and you’ll see: Humanity has been here before

- AA Patawaran

No one alive has experienced this before. Since World War II, our idea of danger has mostly been one we cannot defeat by hiding from it. But this enemy is different. It has neither conscience nor prejudice. Its only agenda is to multiply itself. Should we emerge from the trenches, like a swashbuckler in a fit of suicidal boldness, the enemy is sure to jump for joy, literally leaping to us and from us to many others.

This is how the virus wins. We don’t die a hero, if we die at all. In most cases, we only become an unwitting carrier of the virus and its insidious army of trillions, whose tactic for invasion is via the most loving of our actions—hugs and kisses and holding hands, even just close proximity or presence.

So yes, staying home is the best defense, at least until we develop a medical arsenal, whether preventive, curative, or inoculative. Our ability to suspend our lives, to withstand the pressure of being holed up in the trenches, trying to be as unseen as the enemy, is an act of courage.

“The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits,” wrote French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus in his 1947 novel The Plague, and I believe, other than our need for food, our overdependence on commerce, and our ignorance of the full extent of the danger, restlessness is the chink in our armor.

Thank technology for our modern-day armaments, consisting of whatever it is that keeps us sane while on lockdown and they’re mostly technology-driven devices like streaming services, online gaming, and social media.