Many years ago I read Jill Paton Walsh’s book, A Parcel of Patterns. It is based on a true story. In 1666, in Eyam, a village in England that had long been free of the plague, a tailor received a parcel of patterns from London. Within a week he was dead of the plague. Over the next 14 months the plague killed 273 people, according to the church register, either three quarters of the population, or over half, depending on what source you read. The remarkable thing about Eyam is that when the plague struck, they decided to quarantine themselves, and no one from the village was allowed to leave, and no one to enter. Thus, it is said, they prevented the plague from spreading to the villages around, and farther out.
It is the parcel that sticks in my mind.
According to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, by the NIH, UCLA, CDC, and Princeton, Covid19 can hang in still air for up to three hours. It can persist on copper 4 hours. That is important because doorknobs are made of copper-containing materials like brass because copper is antibacterial. But not, it seems, anti-viral.
Covid19 persists on cardboard for 24 hours, on plastic for three days, and on stainless steel for three days.
One of my students tells me that she may have trouble keeping up with class assignments because she is a stock clerk at her local store, and her hours have been greatly increased.
I have been thinking about how everyone’s health depends on Desiree (of course it’s not her real name) not being sick. It is not enough to hope, if she is sick, that she will wash her hands. If she is sick, she will shed virus. It is not enough to hope that if she is sick she will stay home. She probably can’t afford to stay home. In any case, she can be a-symptomatic for days, and still be shedding coronavirus. Or, she could only be mildly ill, and so assume she does not have coronavirus, as it could be a cold, or allergies, or a mild case of the flu.
The lesson for me is that walking into anyplace where people have been in the last three hours is a risk for Covid19 transfer. Buying a box of cereal that a stock clerk handled less than 24 hours ago is a risk for the virus. Or a plastic bag of potatoes. Or the mail that has been handled by three or four people in the post office.
I have been thinking about how we all depend on Desiree, moving things from a place where we can’t get to them, to a place where we can. We depend on her being there, and we depend on her being healthy.
I’ve had a long-running discussion with a friend of mine about health care. She tells me she is against public health care because she does not want to pay, with her tax dollars, for someone else’s medical expenses. Someone else who can’t afford to pay for their own medical expenses, or for the insurance to cover them. This reasoning suggests that poor people are not worthy of health care. People who aren’t capable of making enough money shouldn’t be looked after.
And yet it is clear now that our own health depends on Desiree. And it always has.