Wash Your Hands, Don’t Touch Your Face

6 min readMar 8, 2020

This week: we’re talking about the novel coronavirus with Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, Frank Snowden, Jamie Heywood, and Kyle Harper. Listen today at 2 pm or anytime at our website.

Fear alternates with dismissiveness in our popular conversation about the deadly coronavirus pandemic. It’s hard to balance our attention between those two extremes. So we assembled guests for a show to give us perspective—on the history of pandemics, on the challenges of fear, and the risks of a lack of preparedness.

Frank Snowden of Yale, a historian of plagues, describes how pandemics and plagues provide a mirror, telling us something about ourselves. This pandemic’s moment, for instance, reveals our shoddy, limited healthcare system. Universal healthcare, Snowden points out, seems necessary to address viral outbreaks:

Everything that I read and see indicates to me that if we don’t have health care as a right for every person, that we will not have health for the whole of us. And that is to say that if there are people who are beyond medical care, the state doesn’t even know when they’re sick or when they’re not. And therefore, the public health depends on the accurate, timely, rapid information. And if there are 30 million Americans who are outside the system, that means there’s 30 million people among whom a disease like coronavirus could spread rampant before anyone knew about it, because those people would not seek medical care. And no one would know that they were sick. It would be like having the Titanic sinking in your own backyard and not knowing it.

This is the reality of viral pandemics: they reveal that we’re all linked, something certain political interests might wish weren’t so. At a moment like this, it’s obvious that we’re all responsible for each other, we all affect each other, and that we all “breathe the same air,” as JFK said.

For medical insight, we spoke to Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious diseases specialist who has worked on the Ebola outbreak in Africa. “We know that we’re in the middle of a public health emergency,” she said on our show. “All of us . . . will have to take actions to change our everyday processes.”

Kyle Harper, professor at the University of Oklahoma, described the history of plagues and the fall of the Roman Empire, the connection between disease and social-political calamity. He says on our show that we can learn from Rome how “the evolution of pathogens is highly unpredictable and has been a destabilizing force in human history.” Mechanical engineer and CEO Jamie Heywood looked forward, describing the need for preparing without panicking: “We live under the assumptions that when we go the grocery store there will be food . . . that electricity will always be on. History shows that that’s not actually particularly true. . . Be prepared to live without support.”

Read: Pale Horse, Pale Rider

Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider tells a story of the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918. Its descriptions of the sickness are horrifying, powerful:

Silenced she sank easily through deeps under deeps of darkness until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of life, knowing herself to be blind, deaf, speechless, no longer aware of the members of her own body, entirely withdrawn from all human concerns, yet alive with a peculiar lucidity and coherence; all notions of the mind, the reasonable inquiries of doubt, all ties of blood and the desires of the heart, dissolved and fell away from her, and there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of being that knew itself alone, that relied upon nothing beyond itself for its strength; not susceptible to any appeal or inducement, being itself composed entirely of one single motive, the stubborn will to live.

Watch: Contagion

Stephen Soderbergh’s Contagion is a few years old, but it’s a freshly scary story. It’s about a deadly pandemic, and in its own way oddly uplifting: human diligence and care strive mightily here. But, fundamentally, it’s scary.

From Manohla Dargis’s NY Times review:

Once it may have been hard to buy the swift collapse of order that is made palpably real in “Contagion,” if Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath had not already set the stage. Mr. Soderbergh doesn’t milk your tears as things fall apart, but a passion that can feel like cold rage is inscribed in his images of men and women isolated in the frame, in the blurred point of view of the dying and in the insistent stillness of a visual style that seems like an exhortation to look. The virus seriously rattles your nerves, and you may want to start stockpiling antibacterial soap now. Yet what’s really scary in “Contagion” is how fast once-humming airports and offices, homes and cities empty out when push comes to shove comes to panic in the streets.

Listen: Viral

Nick Quah writes, “Much like the wave of impeachment pods that spread across the United States a few months ago, a wave of coronavirus pods feels imminent.” Here’s one of the new ones:

The Stats

We learned about the Worldometer, a web site that catalogues the numbers that matter, across the world. The numbers constantly tick away, and they’re almost all fascinating.

Read/Watch: How to Survive a Plague

How to Survive a Plague, David France’s definitive history of the successful battle to halt the AIDS epidemic (based on the Oscar-nominated documentary of the same name) tells the story of the grassroots activists, almost universally ignored in the face of tragic apathy and homophobia, who took matters into their own hands and turned the tide of the AIDS crisis. “This courage didn’t just end a plague,” said The New York Times in its review, published 35 years after its first shameful report. “[I]t revolutionized medicine and, in turn, became the indispensable moral force that led, as the plague abated, to the greatest civil rights revolution of our time.”

Possible Reading for Extended Confinement

If the battle against coronavirus means we all end up spending a lot more time in our homes, what would you read? The situation could call for comfort reading, or it could be an opportunity for extended reading of colossal books.

Some contenders:

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

Written while Proust was bed-ridden, likely good for reading while house-bound. It’s moving and funny and philosophical—it gives you access to a whole world, focalized within the reflective mind.

Clarice Lispector, Complete Stories

This could be time to catch up on the hundreds of pages of stories from this writer whose brilliance became especially widely recognized only in the last few years.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov