Peggy Noonan

We’re easing up. Good, it’s time. Spring is here, summer’s coming. You can pass any well-meaning restriction and do your best to enforce it, but great leaders work with human nature, not against it. People need to be together, out in the air, in the sun, and if you don’t let them they’ll find a way anyhow, and then everybody will have to fight.

All 50 states are to varying degree unlocking. How citizens do this will determine the size and severity of second and third waves. It’s almost all in our hands. A report this week from a scientist who helped discover SARS said that a lab experiment confirms what common sense always suggested: Wearing a mask can substantially reduce disease transmission and viral loads. If we all do that one small thing, chances are we’ll get through OK.

How could we not? Especially after we’ve just done something so big.

What we did—essentially shut down a great, complex, modern nation for two months out of concern that people would become sick—had never been tried before. It’s something new in history. We will look back on it, however it turns out, with a certain wonder.

In those two months we learned a lot. How intertwined and interconnected our economy is, how provisional, how this thing depended on that. And how whisperingly thin were everybody’s profit margins. The well-being of the West Side block depends on human traffic, which depends on restaurants and bars, which depend on the theater being open. It was a George Bailey economy: “Every man on that transport died. Harry wasn’t there to save them, because you weren’t there to save Harry.” Every economy is, in the end, and if you’re interested in economics you knew this, but not the way you know it after the business catastrophe of 2020.

But the biggest things I suspect we learned were internal. No matter what you do for a living, when you weren’t busy introspection knocked on the door and settled in. Two different men, professionals, both blinked with surprise as they reported, unasked, that they can’t believe they have their college-age kids home again and they’re all together and they have dinner every night and play board games. They were so grateful. They had no idea this was possible, that it would make them so happy. That it had been missing.

People have suffered. They’ve been afraid. The ground on which they stand has shifted. Many have been reviewing their lives, thinking not only of “what’s important” or “what makes me happy” but “what was I designed to do?” They’ve been conducting a kind of internal life review, reflecting on the decision that seemed small and turned out to be crucial, wondering about paths not taken, recognizing strokes of luck. They’ve been thinking about their religious faith or lack of it, about their relationships. Phone calls have been longer, love more easily expressed, its lack more admitted.

It has been a dramatic time. We have stopped and thought about our lives, and our society’s arrangements. We have applauded together, for the first time, those whose jobs kept our towns up and operating, from nurses to truckers. We’ve rethought not only what is “essential” but who is important. All this will change you as a nation.

Here is what I am certain of. We will emerge a plainer people in a plainer country, and maybe a deeper one. Something big inside us shifted.

Superficially, the hair is scruffier, the roots grew out, but you can almost hear people thinking eh, our time is finite, our money limited—maybe that’s not gray, it’s silver. Maybe that new fringe is my silver lining. We’ve grown used to soft clothes, gym clothes. I have three outfits in daily rotation and I keep them folded on a window ledge, like a child laying out her clothes for school. I like the simplicity of this. I shared it with a friend. “That’s what I do!” he said. “And I don’t want to stop!” We watch TV news and home studios, light makeup and spectral lighting and think OK, sign of the times.

The world has admired and imitated America’s crisp chic, but I see an altering of the national style. For reasons economic and existential a new simplicity is coming, glitz leaving. (All this would be especially true for those over 40, but according to the Census Bureau that’s more than half the country.)

Fashion is a sliver of life. Maybe you approach it as the fun of glamour; maybe you see it as a way of paying tribute to life by making it even more beautiful. Maybe you see it as vanity, chasing youth. But it’s a leading indicator of a nation’s mood, and it will be changed by what we’ve experienced.

We’re getting pared down. We’re paring ourselves down.

I asked Andre Leon Talley, former creative director at Vogue, whose new memoir, “The Chiffon Trenches,” is about more than fashion, if he saw it as I did, knowing he’d disagree. But no. “I think more people will be dressed, when we come out of this pandemic, in almost Amish stoicism—a simple uniform of basic wash and dry. It’s going to be difficult for fashion to exist as a mainstream addiction.”

Vogue, he noted by email, has just published a new issue. “For the first time in ages there is no celebrity cover choice, no high-fashion model in near perfection of dress and grooming. There is a red rose, photographed by the late Irving Penn, which symbolizes more than a mere trend of dress.” He called the cover “iconic.” To him it symbolizes “the larger issues of life”—nature, gardens, fresh flowers.

When he speaks to people in fashion, “they are not even concerned with acquiring the new.” “Women are wearing neat, coordinated exercise gear or track suits as they walk off the extra pounds gained from self-quarantine.”

This, he said, is the mood: “I recently saw a video of Amish men moving a big red barn across a field. Instead of having it raised on a flatbed, 300 men wearing black simply picked up the full-size barn and moved it across a field. That was so moving to me. The idea of how humans can be so resourceful, based on strength and their cultural roots. Amish people are elegant, yet they adhere to traditions that have been passed down generation to generation.”

Women “will always want to look smart, neat and well groomed,” he said. “There’s nothing like a woman who has put on a simple white cotton button-front shirt, a simple skirt, and she has taken a beautiful cotton or linen or silk scarf and neatly knotted it at the chin or the nape of her neck. That is what I mean when I say Amish stoicism. The pioneer genes shall prevail, and women will focus on the essentials: nurturing their children in the arc of safety (homes and schools) providing food (driving to breadlines and food banks) and making do with what is already in the closet. Everything old will be suddenly new again.”

We will lose, for a while, our old patina. We will not much miss it.

America is about to become a plainer place. Maybe a deeper one, too. Maybe that’s good.

I think there’s a growing sense that we have to find a way to live with this thing, manage it the best we can, and muddle through. Covid-19 is not going away anytime soon. Summer may give us a break, late fall probably not. Vaccines are likely far off, new therapies and treatments might help a lot, but keeping things closed up tight until there are enough tests isn’t a viable plan. There will never be enough tests, it was botched from the beginning, if we ever catch up it will probably be at the point tests are no longer urgently needed.

Meantime, we must ease up and manage. We should go forward with a new national commitment to masks, social distancing, hand washing. These simple things have proved the most valuable tools in the tool chest. We have to enter each day armored up. At the same time we can’t allow alertness to become exhaustion. We can’t let an appropriate sense of caution turn into an anxiety formation. We can’t become a nation of agoraphobics. We’ll just have to live, carefully.

Here’s something we should stop. There’s a class element in the public debate. It’s been there the whole time but it’s getting worse, and few in public life are acting as if they’re sensitive to it. Our news professionals the past three months have made plenty of room for medical and professionals warning of the illness. Good, we needed it, it was news. They are not now paying an equal degree of sympathetic attention to those living the economic story, such as the Dallas woman who pushed back, opened her hair salon, and was thrown in jail by a preening judge. He wanted an apology. She said she couldn’t apologize for trying to feed her family.

There is a class divide between those who are hard-line on lockdowns and those who are pushing back. We see the professionals on one side—those James Burnham called the managerial elite, and Michael Lind, in “The New Class War,” calls “the overclass”—and regular people on the other. The overclass are highly educated and exert outsize influence as managers and leaders of important institutions—hospitals, companies, statehouses. The normal people aren’t connected through professional or social lines to power structures, and they have regular jobs—service worker, small-business owner.

Since the pandemic began, the overclass has been in charge—scientists, doctors, political figures, consultants—calling the shots for the average people. But personally they have less skin in the game. The National Institutes of Health scientist won’t lose his livelihood over what’s happened. Neither will the midday anchor.

I’ve called this divide the protected versus the unprotected. There is an aspect of it that is not much discussed but bears on current arguments. How you have experienced life has a lot to do with how you experience the pandemic and its strictures. I think it’s fair to say citizens of red states have been pushing back harder than those of blue states.

It’s not that those in red states don’t think there’s a pandemic. They’ve heard all about it! They realize it will continue, they know they may get sick themselves. But they also figure this way: Hundreds of thousands could die and the American economy taken down, which would mean millions of other casualties, economic ones. Or, hundreds of thousands could die and the American economy is damaged but still stands, in which case there will be fewer economic casualties—fewer bankruptcies and foreclosures, fewer unemployed and ruined.

They’ll take the latter. It’s a loss either way but one loss is worse than the other. They know the politicians and scientists can’t really weigh all this on a scale with any precision because life is a messy thing that doesn’t want to be quantified.

Here’s a generalization based on a lifetime of experience and observation. The working-class people who are pushing back have had harder lives than those now determining their fate. They haven’t had familial or economic ease. No one sent them to Yale. They often come from considerable family dysfunction. This has left them tougher or harder, you choose the word.

They’re more fatalistic about life because life has taught them to be fatalistic. And they look at these scientists and reporters making their warnings about how tough it’s going to be if we lift shutdowns and they don’t think, “Oh what informed, caring observers.” They think, “You have no idea what tough is. You don’t know what painful is.” And if you don’t know, why should you have so much say?

The overclass says, “Wait three months before we’re safe.” They reply, “There’s no such thing as safe.”

Something else is true about those pushing back. They live life closer to the ground and pick up other damage. Everyone knows the societal costs in the abstract—“domestic violence,” “child abuse.” Here’s something concrete. In Dallas this week police received a tip and found a 6-year-old boy tied up by his grandmother and living in a shed. The child told police he’d been sleeping there since school ended “for this corona thing.” According to the arrest affidavit, he was found “standing alone in a pitch-black shed in a blue storage bin with his hands tied behind his back.” The grandmother and her lover were arrested on felony child-endangerment charges. The Texas Department of Family Protective Service said calls to its abuse hotline have gone down since the lockdowns because teachers and other professionals aren’t regularly seeing children.

A lot of bad things happen behind America’s closed doors. The pandemic has made those doors thicker.

Meanwhile some governors are playing into every stereotype of “the overclass.” On Tuesday Pennsylvania’s Tom Wolf said in a press briefing that those pushing against the shutdown are cowards. Local officials who “cave in to this coronavirus” will pay a price in state funding. “These folks are choosing to desert in the face of the enemy. In the middle of a war.” He said he’ll pull state certificates such as liquor licenses for any businesses that open. He must have thought he sounded uncompromising, like Gen. George Patton. He seemed more like Patton slapping the soldier. No sympathy, no respect, only judgment.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called anti-lockdown demonstrations “racist and misogynistic.” She called the entire movement “political.” It was, in part—there have been plenty of Trump signs, and she’s a possible Democratic vice presidential nominee. But the clamor in her state is real, and serious. People are in economic distress and worry that the foundations of their lives are being swept away. How does name-calling help? She might as well have called them “deplorables.” She said the protests may only make the lockdowns last longer, which sounded less like irony than a threat.

When you are reasonable with people and show them respect, they will want to respond in kind. But when they feel those calling the shots are being disrespectful, they will push back hard and rebel even in ways that hurt them.

This is no time to make our divisions worse. The pandemic is a story not only about our health but our humanity.

New jobless claims came out this week, putting American unemployment at an estimated 33.4 million. ADP, the payroll-processing company, reports the private sector lost more than 20 million jobs in April alone. Earnings reports are dreadful, and whole sectors—air travel, hospitality—are being wiped out. Nothing will turn around soon.

It is a catastrophe. But you know all that.

What’s needed now? A certain shift in stance and attitude that allows a broader appreciation of our predicament.

Our economy is experiencing a great contraction, a seizing up; it’s becoming smaller, tighter, more airless. As a nation we have rightly focused on the illness that caused all this and the fight to beat it back. That fight can’t let up. When the disease goes down in one place it shows up in another, and a second or third wave is likely; viruses like this don’t knock on the door just once.

But the economic contraction will have repercussions as destructive as the virus itself. People will die and sicken because of lost jobs, lost income and a feeling of no opportunity, no possibility. Alcoholism, drug abuse, anxiety, suicide, strife within families—all these things will follow. And there’s a feeling of terrible generational injustice. My generation is on pause, but the young are on stall, and it’s no good for them. People need to operate in the world to become themselves.

A doctor in New York, who was right from the start and ahead of the curve in his warnings in February, told the patients in his practice this week that social distancing worked. The hospitals reached full capacity but weren’t overwhelmed; against the odds they stood their ground. But he was honest. The victory came with “grave consequences” for employees and businesses and “an increase in domestic violence and child abuse.” People with life-threatening symptoms like chest pain avoided the emergency room, and parents delayed vaccinating their children for measles and meningitis. Patients with mental illness experienced severe increases in their symptoms. “The full extent of these costs will take years to fully understand.”

We have to see the unfolding economic calamity in a new, more present and urgent way, and think about its impact on our culture, our ability to fund things, our standing in the world, our morale.

We can’t grapple only with the illness, we have to grapple with the crash. The bias now should be toward opening, doing everything we can to allow the economy to become itself again, to the degree that’s possible.

Toward that end, two thoughts from two wise men. The first is that we must unleash the creativity of businessmen and -women, an uncalled-on brigade in this battle. Not only doctors and scientists will get us out of this, business must be on the lines, too.

Second, we have to cooperate by doing the things that contain the illness so that businesses can stay open and functioning. A mask isn’t a sign of submission as some idiots claim. It’s a sign of respect, responsibility and economic encouragement. It says, “I’ll do my small part.”

The first wise man is George Shultz, a participant in and observer of history to whom I spoke by phone. “It is a catastrophe,” the former secretary of state and of labor said of the virus and the economy. “The government shuts things down, the government has all the money and is dealing it out, so there’s an expectation the government can get us out of this.” But no government has that power.

Where is the hope? “We have a potentially vibrant private sector. There’s an immense amount of energy and ingenuity and fresh thinking there. They think about how to get themselves in a profitable position, and to do that they have to take into account a lot—supply chains, the health of their employees, the safety of customers. We have to open things up and say to the private sector, ‘Do your job.’ They have creativity, they want to get things up and going again.”

The second wise man: Ken Langone, a founder of Home Depot. If you hear his name a lot lately it’s because he endowed a hospital at the center of New York’s struggle with coronavirus, NYU Langone Medical Center. He said if we do everything we can to make people safe, we’ll be doing everything to get business going.

“There is a bigger risk in business not being open than in staying closed,” he said by phone. “Why? Look, you’re looking at depression, financial problems, taxes will have to go up to pay for all this.” Taxes pay for public services—including the operation of hospitals.

“It isn’t safety or business, it’s safety right now which allows business.” Every American can contribute by observing the protocols we now know by heart—washing hands, maintaining social distance, wearing masks, using hand sanitizer. “If the American people want to be cavalier about this they should be ashamed.”

Last Sunday afternoon he drove to the Home Depot store in Jericho, N.Y. Home Depots have stayed open as essential businesses. “I go up and down the aisle. There wasn’t an empty space in the parking lot. They were buying flowers, garden tools, seedlings—people were all over. People aren’t gonna sit and vegetate at home. The wife says, ‘Don’t sit around on your ass, go buy some paint, paint the house.’ American energy, this is our advantage.”

But the store is careful. “We have distancing. All wore masks. People will have to stand 6 feet away and yell a little. OK with me, I like to yell!”

“We’re not gonna be the same,” he said. “We’re gonna be challenged like never before, but we will pass the test with flying colors. . . . Capitalism brought America to the party. It’s what gonna get us out of this mess.”

But a “big readjustment” in business thinking will be needed to get through the crisis. If a restaurant reopens with half as many customers due to distancing protocols, the owner will have to hike prices, but that will hurt business. The answer is that the landlord needs to lower the restaurant’s rent, and the landlord’s lenders need to adapt in turn. “The financial chain’s gotta be readjusted, concessions up and down the line.”

Fine. We can all be patient with each other as we try to come back, together.

I want to get back to the national morale. All these dreadful economic numbers—you can’t let people sink into defeatism. You can’t let them think there is no hope, or that things in the future are just going to be bad. They are Americans, they know how to suffer—even the ones who’ve never suffered a day in their lives, it’s still in their genes. But they’re like the pioneers, they have to be able to believe while they’re on the long trek that there’s some fertile area around the next bend, or the one after that. They have to know there’s a safe place where they can finally settle.

People need hope. Americans live on it. We must return to life. That is where the bias must be.

I’ve been trying to get a sense of the economic effects of the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed an estimated 675,000 Americans. Government record-keeping in those days wasn’t what it is now; there’s not much data. You see references in academic papers to factories closed, businesses shuttered. You see newspaper pictures of people in masks and clippings about people dying in hallways. Yet what followed was the Roaring ’20s—expansive, even ecstatic economic growth.

Conditions were different. The shutdowns then weren’t national but local, and varied in severity. The pandemic was less of a psychic shock because people were more used to death: Tuberculosis, gastrointestinal infections and syphilis killed; there were no antibiotics, no chemotherapy; infant mortality was twice what it is now. Men just back from the war had seen carnage. The economic historian Amity Shlaes noted in an interview that there was a sharp economic downturn at the beginning of the 1920s, “but it was very brief, and not an outcome of the pandemic.” “We came out of it in part because of optimism, public policy choices, and also realizing for the first time, post-war, that we could become an economic superpower.”

Today’s American economy is massive, complex, interdependent, a varied consumer-based economy with service and communications sectors. Everything changes in a century. But maybe there are things to learn from a study there, a history of how America dug itself out of that crisis.

For now I think the employment impact of what we’re going through will be more dramatic than perhaps we understand. The first-quarter numbers released this week felt almost encouraging—economic output shrank at an annual rate of only 4.8%. Terrible, but absorbable—again, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” But the second quarter, which will be reported in July, is the one everyone fears, because it’s when the dimensions of the catastrophe will become clear.

The administration says the economy will explode with pent-up energy after the lockdown. It’s part of their job to cheerlead in this way, to say there’s nothing to fear. But recovery will surely be tentative. Health fears will change habits. A lot of people will have no money to spend; many will be careful with what they have.

Thirty million have filed for unemployment. Here is a fear based on the vibrations coming from CEOs and other captains of great entities: They’ll use the 2020 crash as cover to do things they’ve long wanted to do, which is get rid of costly people in their corporations, especially in the middle levels. Some will speed up artificial intelligence and robotics. They’ll announce they’re “redefining their mission.” They’ll be shaking off people they’ve wanted to shake off.

All this will happen within a context of political change. Progressives see opportunity. They lost on Bernie Sanders but will seek a bigger breakthrough in a restive, battered country full of people reconsidering their loyalties. They won’t let this crisis go to waste. Right now I’d watch the Democratic Party. Tara Reade’s allegations, true or not, offer cover for the left to try to dislodge a non-revolutionary. Also for a party establishment that fears Joe Biden will blow up in the general election because he has trouble following his own thoughts.

That takes place within another, possibly countering context. Right now, in political terms, the federal government doesn’t look so good: failures to mobilize early, claims that didn’t materialize, chaotic and divisive daily briefings.

Who led most strikingly, most vividly? Governors, who, though they may not know it, have provided a daily commercial for federalism—for the states as independent entities, 50 different laboratories of democracy operating within a constitutional structure of separated powers. Remember when the president announced that he was in charge of ending the quarantine, not the states? In response, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo gave a classic lecture based on federalist principles, on the rights and responsibilities of the states. He won. There’s been a whole shifting of the argument there.

Columnists often say things like “the tectonic plates are shifting.” They are shifting as never before and all at the same time. We have never seen this earthquake.

What is essential now from our political class? I find inspiration in a monumental work, the journalist Charles Moore’s three-volume biography of Margaret Thatcher. It is a masterpiece of fairness and insight. It is also something new, a work of justice done to a woman in modern politics.

At its heart it is not a story about political survival but about seriousness—about the purpose of politics, which is to guide your nation safely through the world while creating the conditions and arrangements by which your people can flourish. It is about winning the argument about how to achieve safety and flourishing.

In his stirring epilogue, Mr. Moore sums up Thatcher’s career, legacy, and essential nature. She cannot be understood, he writes, based only on her public statements. She must be seen also in light of her character: “Its contradictions were striking. She was high-minded and highly educated, yet had a common touch. She was fierce, but kind; rude, and courteous; calculating, yet principled; matter-of-fact, yet romantic; frank, yet secretive; astute, yet innocent; rational, yet capricious; puritanical, yet flirtatious.” She “combined an immense assurance about following her own way with a permanent uneasiness in life.”

A friend is quoted saying she’d “not been allowed the time to be happy” in childhood. Mr. Moore: “She sought the laurels of fame and power, but could never rest on them. She applied her high standards to herself and, for all her pride in her own achievements, found herself wanting. Her only solution was to press ever onwards.”

Her sex was “the key factor” in her complicated political rise in the Conservative Party. “To succeed, she knew she would have to do everything twice as well as the others, virtually all of whom were men. If she failed, no chums would save her. It was the privilege of the ruling class and the ruling sex,” both of which dominated her party, “to be almost careless about their own careers and quite unobservant of others who did not share their advantages. They knew they would be more or less all right in the end. This sense of ease made some of them condescending to Mrs. Thatcher and others friendly and encouraging. What none of them felt was her anguish—about what to wear, how to speak, how to look after her husband and children while she climbed to power, how to survive. Friend or foe, they understood very little about her.” She was alone.

What at bottom drove her? “If there was one uniting force in everything Mrs. Thatcher did, it was her love for her country.” All truly great political leaders have this love, which involves a heightened vision of their nation. Thatcher’s love was not always requited. “But great loves such as hers go beyond reason, which is why they stir others, as leaders must if they are to achieve anything out of the ordinary.”

We will all need to achieve much out of the ordinary in the next few years. Leaders, including CEOs and politicians, will have to get us through this thing. Love of country is the only place to start.

‘We are not all in the same boat. We are all in the same storm.” That succinct summation came from the writer Damian Barr this week, on Twitter. He’s right. Some are in yachts, he said, and “some have just the one oar.”

Some will sail through, health and profession intact, some will lose one or both. Some of us get to feel we’re part of a substantial crew. Some of us feel we’re rowing alone.

We can move forward through this crisis experiencing our country as an embittered navy waiting to fight it out on shore. Or, alternatively, as a big crazy armada with millions of people throwing and catching millions of lifelines. Which I suppose is how a lot of us tend to see this country of deep inequalities and glittering possibilities. The latter attitude will be more helpful in getting us through, and as Lincoln observed, attitude is everything.

We have all been told to be protective of each other—stay inside—and supportive. What is the nightly 7 p.m. pot-banging but a spontaneous show of appreciation? But I am thinking of how much we actually just like each other, admire each other, and barely notice. The Washington Post Thursday had a story about the release of 43 men who lived for a month inside the Braskem petrochemical plant in Marcus Hook, Pa. Braskem produces raw material for face masks and surgical gowns. The workers figured if they got sick it would slow production, so they volunteered to stay in the plant, work long shifts, and sleep on air mattresses. They called it a “live-in.” At one point their families held a drive-by parade so they could wave through the windows.

“We were just happy to be able to help,” Joe Boyce, a shift supervisor, told Post reporter Meagan Flynn. When the story broke they were flooded with grateful messages from doctors and nurses. “But we want to thank them for what they did and are continuing to do,” Mr. Boyce said.

’Murcans, baby.

The subject now is state and regional reopening. We’re fighting about who’s going too early or moving too slowly, which is understandable, as we’re all interrelated and germs don’t respect state lines. But we should try hard not to be harsh in our judgments as each state chooses different times and ways. Opening is what we all want to do. We’ve got to be patient with each other, observe with good faith, hope lifting restrictions succeeds but be quick to point out—and admit—danger areas and failures.

No one is certain what to do. Everyone’s acting on insufficient information. No plan will come without cost. A lot will become clear in retrospect. The bias should be opening as soon as possible as safely as possible. Don’t sacrifice safe for soon. Have a solid, sophisticated, mature definition of “safe.”

What will hurt us is secretly rooting for disaster for those who don’t share our priors. Everyone is trying to live. It doesn’t help to be a Northerner who looks down on Southerners, or a securely employed professional in a national corporation who has no clue what it means when a small-town business crashes. People who can work remotely probably don’t feel the same urgency to reopen as those who must be physically present, in retail and at diner counters.

Conspiracy nuts who think the virus was a hoax to bring down Donald Trump will always be with us. So will grim leftists who take pleasure in every death of a guy who called the threat overblown.

But we’re too quick to categorize, and ungenerous in our categorizations. Everybody isn’t only the role they’re playing at the moment. They came from something—us. Hate that young guy with the smart mouth in the MAGA hat honking his horn in the demonstration in Austin? In another time and a different struggle he was Audie Murphy, the guy who jumps on the tank, starts shooting, and saves every life in the convoy. Hate the scientist in rimless glasses repeating his endless warnings on TV? He’s Jonas Salk, who saved our children. We’re all more than what we seem. We all require some give.

We forget we are 50 different states with different histories, ways and attitudes, even different cultures. New Jersey isn’t Wyoming; Colorado isn’t Arkansas. This used to be called “regional differences.” We can’t tamp them all down, and we don’t want to. So people will do things at different speeds in different ways. The thing is to watch, judge fairly and move to countermand what proves dangerous.

Governors who make the decision should stay aware of the creativity of their citizens. A guy who runs a hair salon shared with me this week his reopening plans: face shields for stylists, masks for workers and clients, gloves, gun thermometers for everyone who walks in. “Robes will be individually wrapped and there will be someone wiping door handles.” He knows business starts only when people feel safe. He’s going to see they do for their sake and his.

*   *   *

I close with the psychology of the current moment. The novelty has worn off. We’ve absorbed the pandemic and the lockdown. We’ve marveled, complained and made jokes. Now we’re absorbing that the America we stepped away from when we walked into the house, isn’t the America into which we’ll re-emerge. It may look the same, but it will be different. A lot more people will need a lot more help. Twenty-six million people are unemployed. And little normalities of life that we once took for granted—some will be gone.

Two examples: Retail has been struggling for years—small stores closing from rising costs and Amazon. Now more will close, or rather never reopen, which will change Main Street and how we experience our towns. The big department stores too are in peril. JCPenney’s stores closed in March, its 85,000 employees furloughed. Since the pandemic, CNBC reports, its market capitalization has fallen 75%, and it just skipped an interest payment on its debt. Macy’s is struggling after closing its stores and furloughing 130,000 workers. A ratings agency downgraded its debt to junk status. Nordstrom and Kohl’s too are having a hard time.

We’ve all been thinking we can’t wait to get back to movies, concerts and shows. Now we’re admitting it may be a while before we want to sit with a thousand strangers. Warner Bros. just pulled one of its big summer movies from release in theaters; it will go straight to video-on-demand. Universal did the same. It’s reflects the lockdown but also what Screencrush.com called “audience’s increasing dependence on (and perhaps even preference for) home viewing.” John Stankey, COO of AT&T, which owns Warner Bros., said in an earnings call that the studio is “rethinking the theatrical model.”

Imagine an America without the expression: “Let’s go to the movies.”

Anyway, what a resettling of things. What effort, patience and creativity it will take to reach safe haven. How much easier it will be if we see ourselves not as separate ships but members of the most brilliant, raucous and varied armada.

It looks at the moment as if coronavirus wasn’t a huge tsunami wave that was going to knock down skyscrapers but a big, welling wave that came, filled the city, changed the waterline, will recede somewhat and well upward again. Maybe it’s not a curve but a curve within a roller coaster. Testimony from those who’ve recovered is not that when it’s over they feel 100%. Recovery takes time. It’s a sneaky, freaky pathogen. There have been reports on the disease’s possible effects on the heart and unanticipated neurological aspects. Early reports of individuals who’d gotten sick, tested positive, recovered, tested negative, then tested positive again were originally dismissed as problems in the testing. But scientists now wonder about reinfection, degrees of virulence, and whether new strains will be milder or more severe. Again, we are discovering the facts of the illness as we experience it.

The hellish thing is that when things open up on some coming Monday in May or June and people start to move around and interact with each other again, there will be an increase in new infections, followed by increases in hospital and ICU admissions. There seems no way to avoid this. On the other hand each day America is closed down more people will be out of work and lose a sense of hope. We have to be attentive to that too. What was most disturbing about the 10,000 people who showed up before Easter at a San Antonio food bank is this: They were people in cars. They were not “the poor.” They were working and middle-class people in line for free eggs and bread in America. Twenty-two million have applied for unemployment since the pandemic began, and it’s going to get worse. This is a never-before-seen level of national economic calamity; history doesn’t get bigger than this.

People need to support their families. They need to have lives. They know how tentative and provisional a sense of security is in the best of times. They see the numbers, they get the implications, and they think yes, there is a terrible sickness out there, but we cannot commit suicide out of a fear of dying. We’ve got to get this thing up and going again.

Ending the lockdown won’t involve easy decisions. The White House will lean toward getting business going again, while a lot of governors will lean toward safety. Both intentions are legitimate, honorable, right. Each side will have more than one motive. The president needs to forestall depression—the election is coming, and he wants to be Mr. Recovery. The governors have been praised in the media, including this space, for farsightedness and early lockdowns. In politics when you’re praised for something it becomes your move, then your only move.

Here are two small things that might help us get to a good decision and through the next few weeks.

One is integrity, the other is a sense of give.

On give: The governors, while generally impressive, are human, are experiencing new power and fame, and can give in to the lure of the dumb. What is needed is a sense of proportion and, crucially, respect for your people. Michigan’s governor misstepped this week when she ordered among other things restrictions on the sale of garden supplies in big-box stores. The aim was to reduce store traffic. Her enemies pounced: She’s banning gardening. She wasn’t. But she made a mistake.

Everyone’s chafing under lockdown. Everyone’s online, where rumors run rampant. Also one of the best things you can do right now is plant a garden in the backyard by yourself in the sun, getting some vitamin D.

Governors shouldn’t be so granular. Leaders need to think big and have some give. When rules seem punitive and capricious trust thins, and people who are already under pressure get mad.

People got mad last week when the mayor of Louisville, Ky., announced that congregants of an evangelical church couldn’t drive to the church parking lot for Easter services, stay in their cars with the windows rolled up, wave to each other, and listen to the pastor on the radio.

Why not? You can go to a Walmart parking lot, get out and shop.

A judge ruled against the mayor on religious-freedom grounds, but I think you could fairly detect an air of cultural condescension in the mayor’s decision. Those holy rollers gonna roll out of their cars if the spirit moves them; those snake handlers think a pathogen won’t bite. Is this a good time to add cultural antagonism to the mix? No.

Proportion, everyone. Respect people. Have a sense of give.

Since we’re on religious observance, governors are crowing that the Catholic bishops are fully supportive of all restrictions, they’re on the team. Yes, but they’re human too. After a quarter-century of searing church scandal, they’re aware they don’t have the standing to push back if they wanted to. And they’re enjoying the approval they’re getting for once from the press.

They were and are right to cooperate with pandemic strictures. The church is a citizen, too. But they need to show a little give. Their anxieties about the church’s standing have left them slow to think creatively about how to get the sacraments to the people in ways that are in line with public policy. Young priests who’ve inaugurated socially distanced parking-lot confession have offered a way, but more is surely possible. It might be inspiring to see normally nervous bishops begin this conversation with governmental authorities.

Eminences, cooperation is beautiful but don’t forget who you are. Don’t align too utterly with the state. Keep a safe social distance. You’re not in the same business.

Here’s the part about integrity. Our federal government has to stop making empty and misleading claims about testing.

Leave to history how much the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration were allowed to screw up. Since then, White House announcements on testing have been all showbiz. Tests are always coming in 10 days, they’re in the pipeline and being shipped next week, we’re scaling up. Wednesday Mike Pence crowed at the daily White House briefing: “We have conducted and completed 3,324,000 tests across the nation.” That’s barely 1% of the population three months into a crisis. That’s not an achievement, it’s a scandal.

President Trump said, “We have the best tests in the world.” If so, poor world.

There’s a complete disconnect between the numbers with which Washington mesmerizes itself and facts on the ground. Operatives give credulous cable hosts excited reports of new tests: You spit in a vial and results are immediate—it’s like a gender reveal, they shoot cannons with colors! We’re developing a home test that’s a pinprick. Elizabeth Holmes comes to your house; Theranos is on the case!

Ha ha, kidding, not true I think.

Testing is a national responsibility because a pandemic is a national problem. From the beginning it needed to be priority No. 1. It was never priority No. 1. If it had been, we’d have tests.

The federal government’s lack of integrity has been destructive. No opening of America will be sustained until it’s got right.

It is Holy Week. Easter is coming, Passover here. We are perhaps halfway through the big pause and fully conscious we are living big history. We’ve never experienced a time like this before—a global pandemic, a national shutdown—and may never again. When it’s over most of us will look back on it as a life-changing event.

What have we learned so far? What can we glean from what we’re going through?

As a nation we’ve learned that as a corporate entity of 330 million diverse souls we could quickly absorb, adapt and adjust to widespread disruption. I’m not sure we knew that. Crazy cowboy nation cooperated with the authorities. America has comported itself as exactly what you thought it was or hoped it was but weren’t sure: compassionate, empathetic, committed, hard-working, creative and, as a friend said, funny as hell. Under great and immediate stress there’s been broad peacefulness and civility.

So far we done ourselves proud.

There’s been a lot of pondering going on about deeper meanings and higher purposes. Is all this some kind of wake-up call? What is asked of us? Do we need to change, personally? Should our country change and in what ways? What should we learn from this?

“You did not come back from hell with empty hands,” said André Malraux to Whittaker Chambers after reading the galleys of “Witness.” None of us want to come back from this time without having gained some insight, some wisdom that we can use to gain greater purchase on reality.

A good resource in looking for societal wisdom is Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and author, among other books, of “The Righteous Mind.”

“This is a time for us to reflect,” he said by phone, “and choose a better story. Right now stories are being rewritten all around us, nationally, individually, and we all get a chance to do some of the rewriting.”

“The key concept everyone has to understand is hardship generally makes people stronger. Fear, challenge, threat—unless they are extreme—tend to produce growth, not damage.” He feels this could be a turning point for some of the young who have been “overprotected.” They are enduring “a giant shock and setbacks.” “This will make them experience, and deal. Many people will grow a lot from it.”

In a national emergency it becomes easier to fulfill the key human desire to be part of something—“to be part of Team Humanity, to be useful. That’s why it’s such a pleasure at 7 p.m. I hear the noise, we cheer, yell and bang pots” to honor New York’s health-care workers. “It’s a small thing, but it’s a chance to be part of something larger and know it.”

He is struck by “all the possibilities of heroism.” There is “the Brooklyn landlord who canceled the rent for working-class people in 80 apartments. Then there is the man caught hoarding N95 masks. These stories were next to each other, on the same page.

“Every society tells stories, and those stories involve good and evil, and these stories call us together.” They are stories about “moral leadership,” and they make clear that “we each of us get to provide it.”

By talking about these stories we teach the young what is admirable—this is who you want to be.

We are also as a society reminding ourselves of what we hold high—the selflessness of doctors and nurses, for instance, and how they keep doing their jobs because it’s a calling. This tells us what bravery looks like, but also what a vocation is, and how a vocation is a spiritual event.

“If you want to come out of this crisis,” Mr. Haidt says, “discuss these things.”

The crisis has helped us discover the importance of the human face. The explosion of Zoom, FaceTime and Google Hangouts meetings tells us people crave more than just the voice.

“The key insight we’re getting is that video communication is surprisingly satisfying,” Mr. Haidt says. Social media connections in which you’re looking for “likes”? “That’s just managing your brand. But talking to someone face to face, if only on a screen, is really good. It isn’t a beer or a campfire, but when we’re starving, it’s good!”

Could what we’re enduring leave us less polarized? Not at the top, not so far in Washington, which hasn’t distinguished itself, but across America? “People are doing so much locally and at the state level, there could be a hope for a kind of civic renewal.”

Mr. Haidt has been studying political polarization for years, and what he’s seen in the data is distressing. Yet he would always say at the end of his talks that if present trends continue we’re in trouble, “but present trends never continue. Something will happen to force this off the trajectory.”

He thinks this might be “the thing”: “It’s the end of a cycle, not the end of the world.” He hopes that in a shift “from I to we,” Americans may more deeply cultivate the virtues we need as a democracy, “which include the virtues of the Christian and Jewish traditions—humility, mercy. We are so quick to judge. We need to be easier on each other, turn down the judgment 80% or 90%.”

“The virus may do this. We have all been humbled by it, as a nation of institutions and of individuals, from the beginning.”

That, by the way, is where Lincoln wound up at the end of the Civil War, thinking we must turn down the judgment. A friend this week quoted from Edward Achorn’s “Every Drop of Blood,” a study of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. Mr. Achorn writes that Lincoln had come to think “it was time for Americans to stop thinking about self-righteousness. The only way forward was to recognize that all had been wrong and to treat each other with mercy.”

For now, we deal with disruption in even the most personal spheres. A friend’s mother, in her 90s, died weeks ago. No funeral Mass or wake was possible. He watched her brief graveside ceremony by video link. Another friend is arranging to sit shiva for his father on Zoom. A friend whose wife died could not have a gathering and is home by himself waiting for her ashes in the mail. Everyone is accepting, understanding, not complaining.

We’re all making do. The first night of Passover I attended a Zoom Seder with good friends. It’s always a pleasure, always moving, but this year more so. “You shall tell the Pesach story to your children in the days to come,” the leader read. “This is a holiday that was born in extremis.”

And of course Easter, the holiday that for Christians is the heart of it all. A friend sent a meme that captured this moment. It is Leonardo’s “The Last Supper,” only Jesus is alone at the table, a bottle of Purell at his left hand. But then you see he’s not alone—above him are the faces of the apostles in little boxes. They Zoomed in. They’re listening intently. “And Jesus took the bread, blessed it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, ‘This is my body . . .’ ”

It all continues. A radiant Easter, a happy Passover, and may God bless us all.

New York

I asked for the dateline in pride for my beloved city. For the third time in 20 years it’s been the epicenter of a world-class crisis—9/11, the 2008 financial crisis and now the 2020 pandemic. No one asks—not one person has asked—Why us? We think: Why not us? Of course us. The city of the skyscrapers draws the lightning. There are 8.6 million of us, we are compact, draw all the people of the world, and travel packed close in underground tubes. Of course we got sick here first. The crises are the price we pay for the privilege of living in the most exciting little landmass on the face of the Earth.

What do we know? That we’ll get through it. We’ll learn a lot and it will be hard but we’ll get through, just like all the last times.

You have seen the pictures of Manhattan—streets sparse, no traffic. You can hear the red light click. We feel a little concussed, not by a blow to the head, which is what daily life in New York is, but the lack of a blow to the head. We’re not used to quiet! Or rather silence interspersed by sirens.

And so the power of our communal moment, the phenomenon of what happens every night now at 7—people leaning out the windows, on their balconies, screaming, cheering, banging pots together and applauding our health-care workers, the doctors and nurses, orderlies and cleaning people who are getting us through it. The first time I heard it, early this week, it sounded like kids after school in a playground. Now it sounds like Yankee Stadium, like someone got a hit and you feel some new kind of roused tenderness.

Here’s who was being cheered:

A nurse in New Jersey, a friend, sent a series of texts. “Our dead are multiplying in my hospital. We have a refrigerated trailer behind the hospital for the bodies. We went from one to 3 to 9 in 3 days.”

I asked if she felt safe. “My fellow nurses, we are terrified. We now say ‘when we get sick’ not if.” They generally have personal protective gear, but it’s not always enough. The night before, a patient walked into the hospital and gave birth 14 minutes later. “No masks on, doc barely got gloves on. She is, we hope, negative, but if positive we were all exposed.”

My friend’s grown son, also a medical professional, asked her to get her will and her advance directive, stating end-of-life decisions, in order. She did.

I asked where they are. “Oh, it’s propped on my kitchen table.” So if things are hurried he can’t miss it.

When we spoke she told me everyone in her little town decided to get together on the edge of their property last Friday at dusk and wave to each other. It was nice, everyone came out, lifted a glass, yelled hellos.

“They applauded me,” she said.

I teased: “Because you’re cute and sexy.”

“No,” she said, with wonder. “Because I’m a nurse.”

She had never received applause for that before.

Our governor is a folk hero. You’re on the phone, you see the briefing, you say, “I gotta go, Cuomo’s on.” Andrew Cuomo has the latest, most pertinent information and knew a month ago what a ventilator is. He prioritizes problems, has command of the subject matter, is human, eloquent, tireless.

By rising to the moment he has become a unifying force.

Looking back maybe we’ll see some of the nation’s governors the way we speak of generals at Gettysburg—“And then there was Hogan of Maryland, who wouldn’t budge, and DeWine comes up the hill with the Ohio volunteers.”

Senators have never been so useless, or governors so valuable. What a status shift.

Everyone is fascinated that everything is closed but liquor stores remain open. This is because there isn’t a politician in the country stupid enough to prohibit alcohol in a national crisis. They may know on some level that no nation in the history of the world has closed both its churches and its liquor stores simultaneously and survived. Russia after the revolution closed the churches but did its best to keep vodka available because they wanted everyone drunk, which is the only way to get through communism. And how Russia did get through communism.

But we are outdoing ourselves. The AP reports alcoholic-beverage sales rose 55% in the week ending March 21. Online liquor sales were up 243%. An executive with the Nielsen market-research firm speculated that people were stocking up for a prolonged stay at home.

Those Zoom meetings are going to get fabulous.

Everyone is having thoughts about the meaning and implications of the pandemic. Here are two.

The first is that America’s immigration struggle will be prompted by circumstances nearer to resolution. Public sentiment will back harder borders and a new path to citizenship for illegal immigrants living here.

Global pandemics do nothing to encourage lax borders. As to illegal immigrants, you have seen who’s delivering the food, stocking the shelves, running the hospital ward, holding your hand when you’re on the ventilator. It is the newest Americans, immigrants, and some are here illegally.

They worked through an epidemic and kept America going. Some in the immigration debate have argued, “They have to demonstrate they deserve citizenship”—they need to pay punitive fines, jump through hoops. “They need to earn it.”

Ladies and gentlemen, look around. They did.

Here is where the debate is going. When it’s over, if you can show in any way you worked through the great pandemic of ’20, you will be given American citizenship. With a note printed on top: “With thanks from a grateful nation.”

Harder borders and compassionate resolution is what this column has asked for, for almost 20 years.

Good things can come from bad things.

Second thought. The hidden gift in this pandemic is that this isn’t the most terrible one, the next one or some other one down the road is. This is the one where we learn how to handle that coming pandemic. We are well into the age of global contagions but this is the first time we fully noticed, stopped short, actually reordered our country to fight it.

This is when we learn what worked, what decision made it better or worse, what stockpiles are needed, what can be warehoused, where research dollars must be targeted.

We’re on a shakedown cruise. Knowledge of how to handle a coming, more difficult pandemic is being gained now, by all of us.

People have asked about great speeches for hard moments. There are many. Here is Elizabeth I at Tilbury, England, in August 1588. The very existence of her nation was under challenge; her people needed faith in their leader. She waded into a crowd of common people saying she’d been told not to but she would never fear them, they were blood of her blood. Extemporaneously: “I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England, too.”

Always remember who you are. Never let anything—a germ, an armada—put you off your game.

or the first time in 21 days my temperature has been normal twice in a row, so as far as I’m concerned the fever is gone and the illness over. I still don’t know what I had. I got the coronavirus test March 17 and haven’t received the results.

If this is happening to me, it’s happening to others. A week and a half is a long time for suspense, especially when you’re sick, and speaks of a certain breakdown. In the early days of the pandemic the administration was embarrassed to have bungled the production and dissemination of tests. They say they’ve pumped millions of tests into the system, but if laboratories don’t have the gear or personnel to process the tests, the problem is not solved.

It is to be assumed, and some news reports imply, that the labs too are doing triage, as they should. Top priority would be those admitted to hospitals and exhibiting symptoms. Next might be doctors, nurses and other hospital personnel. Beyond that you’d hope they are thinking in terms of essential nonmedical personnel: firemen, cops, garbagemen, grid workers. I don’t remember being asked at the Northwell GoHealth urgent-care storefront on First Avenue if I was necessary, and I would have said, “No, alas,” if they’d asked. This reminds me of meeting a stooped old Marine with one eye in Washington in the 1980s. Somehow it came up that he’d fought at Guadalcanal. I asked if by chance he’d crossed paths with Richard Tregaskis. No, he said, who is he? He wrote an important account of the early days of the battle, “Guadalcanal Diary.”

The Marine gave me a steely one-eye look and said, “No, I was gone by the time the writers came.” This ever after gave me a subdued sense of my place in the order of things.

But with how poorly some government agencies have handled this thing in general, you have to wonder if the problem with reporting results is not only triage but other things, such as poor organization and planning and incompetent systems. Eight days in I entered the living hell of attempting to find my results through websites and patient portals. I downloaded unnavigable apps, was pressed for passwords I’d not been given, followed dead-end prompts. The whole system is built to winnow out the weak, to make you stop bothering them. This is what it’s like, in a robot voice: “How to get out of the forest: There will be trees. If you aren’t rescued in three to seven days, please try screaming into the void.”

Once I got through to an actual person who was assigned to another department at the clinic but kindly, furtively checked my name and date of birth. “We have no results for you on Covid-19,” she said. I asked if they were overwhelmed. She said they are “just trying to deal with the data. A lot.”

***

Here I’ll speak of my experience of whatever illness I had.

Various tests had eliminated flu and other possibilities early on, and my doctor and I concluded I likely had a virus, maybe a common one opportunistically piggybacking on a pandemic, maybe the more celebrated one. If it was a common one I suspect others are having it too and so it should have a name, but not a distinguished one like corona. Let’s call it the schmutz virus.

It came three weeks ago with a chill, the next morning I felt fine, that night chills again, and a temperature of 101. It bopped around from 99 to 101.5.

Symptoms seem to vary a lot and everyone asks about them. Here was my coronavirus or schmutz:

A dry cough that turned deep and then wracking. Bad sore throat. The first week I had a funny electrical headache that made me think of silent videos of lightning in the distance. These would come, go away, return. Early on I experienced something that some people are reporting, a racing heart. Just a minute or two of a fast-beating heart, mostly at night as I read. Looking back, this started in the days before the fever. I think it was my system flashing red: We are fighting something.

There are reports some lose their sense of taste and smell, and some have conjunctivitis—not me. Fatigue a week in, which I discovered after I stripped down and made up a bed and was so exhausted I had to nap.

There seems no accounting for how hard the virus hits one person and not another, nor for the duration of the illness. Mine stayed so long because I believe it heard I’m a charming host. If yours doesn’t linger you should ask yourself: Why?

From the beginning I took self-quarantine both literally and seriously, going out only for a doctor’s appointment, a virus test and a run to the bank. I haven’t been home for three weeks in 30 years.

There will be a lot of self-reckoning going on inside a lot of us in the coming months and years. For me there have been some surprises. One is that I didn’t do anything most of the time and yet each day sped by kind of satisfyingly. And I didn’t feel lonely—there’s been a lot of telephoning, texting, emailing, even FaceTiming.

I wanted to read Trollope but instead mostly read the intellectual equivalent of comfort food—Honoria Murphy’s respectful memoir of her parents, Gerald and Sarah; A.E. Hotchner’s “Papa Hemingway,” which I hadn’t read since it first came out when I was a teenager and was important to me then. A lot of Lost Generation literature going on here. I read Jay Parini’s fair-minded biography of Robert Frost, whose work I more and more revere but whose nature and personality I somehow cannot warm to. It would irritate him to hear his effortful life makes you think of Carl Sandburg: “This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.”

That resonates, doesn’t it?

Let’s be inappropriately personal because what the hell. Through the larger drama of the past few weeks my spirits have been good but my emotions somehow closer to the surface. I found I didn’t want to binge on Netflix, I wanted to watch what other people were watching and watch it with them. “A League of Their Own,” and “Les Miserables” have been in cable rotation, and moments in them which in the past hadn’t moved me moved me now. I watched, “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” and in the restaurant scene when they all break into “I Say a Little Prayer for You”—it choked me up. I’m choked up now!

Man, what a time. Here is a real-life moment. I mentioned running out to the bank. We’re all tipping $20s in Manhattan and I ran low. I walked over in full regalia—N95 mask, sanitary gloves, high-necked coat and scarf. As I walked home I passed by the 90th Street Pharmacy, looked in the shining windows, and saw Hamidou and Barbara at the counter. I felt so grateful for them. I knocked on the glass, they looked, and I drew myself up and threw them a full, formal military salute. At exactly that moment I thought: Oh no, the mask, the gloves, they won’t recognize me! But they did, immediately, and we laughed and applauded each other.

How fiercely we love people we don’t know we love.

This is a quick piece that touches on where we are, where we may be going, and an attitude for the journey.

The screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan once said the films of Akira Kurosawa were distinguished by this dynamic: The villain has arrived while the hero is evolving. That’s what made his films great, the sense of an implacable bad guy encountering a good guy who is alive, capable of changing, who is in fact changing because of and in order to beat back the bad guy and make things safe again.

The villain is here in the form of an illness. A lot of the heroes of this story are evolving every day into something we’ll look back on months and years hence and say, “Wow, LOOK what she did.” “What guts that guy showed.” People are going to pull from themselves things they didn’t know were there.

But now, at this stage in the drama, most of the heroes are also busy absorbing. We are all of us every day trying to absorb the new reality, give it time to settle into us.

It’s all so big. We are discovering the illness as we experience it. We don’t know its secrets, how long it lasts, how long its incubation, whether you can be reinfected.

As for the economics: As the month began we had functional full employment. By the time it ends we will not, not at all. In the past week layoffs and let-gos have left state unemployment claim websites crashing. This is not “normal job disruption”; it is a cascade. The Treasury secretary reportedly said unemployment could hit 20%.

The market gains of the Trump era have been all but wiped out. Investors are selling gold. From this paper’s editorial Thursday: “American commerce is shutting down right before our eyes with no end in sight.” Flights are empty, hotel occupancy plummeting.

Where we are is a hard, bad place, stupid to deny it. Where we’re going looks to be difficult.

It’s a cliché to say we haven’t ever had a moment like this (a plague, a crash), but it’s true. As for New York, twice in 20 years we’ve been ground zero, epicenter of a national tragedy. Will we get through it? Of course. But it will change things, and change us, as 9/11 did.

The governmental instinct is right: stabilize things while everyone’s absorbing. Whatever is done will probably be an unholy mess. Do it anyway and see where we are. In the long term the best plan—the only plan—is one that attempts to keep people in their jobs. Meaning look to European models on how to help businesses hold on to their people.

There are a million warnings out there on a million serious things. We add one: Everything works—and will continue to work—as long as we have electricity. It’s what keeps the lights on, the oxygen flowing, the information going. Everything is the grid, the grid, the grid.

A general attitude for difficult times? Trust in God first and always. Talk to him.

Every time America’s in trouble I remember Adam Smith’s words. He wrote there’s “a great deal of ruin in a nation.” Especially a very great and prosperous one with a brilliant system and a creative citizenry.

And see this: We are surrounded by nobility.

Mike Luckovich had a cartoon this week of the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima. Only it wasn’t Marines—it was a doctor, a scientist, a nurse and a first responder anchoring Old Glory in this rocky soil. It was hokey and beautiful and true. In the next few weeks and months they’ll get us through and we should thank them every way possible. That includes everyone who can’t work at home, the cops and firefighters, the garbagemen and truckers, the people who stock the shelves and man the counters. A nurse told me Thursday that hospital workers all see themselves as sitting ducks for infection, but no one’s calling in sick. A journalist friend said maybe this will reorder things and we’ll start to pay people according to their real importance to society.

*   *   *

A personal note. As this is written I have been sick for two weeks. It started when I was finishing a column on Rep. Jim Clyburn—I got a chill and noticed the notepad on my knee was warm. The next night more chills, took my temperature: 101.

It may be a poorly timed ordinary virus, one of the dozen floating out there in America on any given day, or it may be the more interesting one.

But everything you’ve heard about the difficulty of getting a test is true. “There are none,” said my doctor. If he sent me to the emergency room, I wouldn’t meet their criteria. You can have every symptom, but if you answer no to two questions, you won’t be tested. The questions are: Have you traveled internationally? Have you recently been in contact with someone who tested positive?

My doctor instructed me to go home, self-quarantine, rest, report back. A week in, the fever spiked up, the headaches were joined by a cough and sore throat, and I called the local government number, where they couldn’t connect me to anyone who could help.

Everyone I dealt with was compassionate and overwhelmed. On day 12 my doctor got word of testing available at an urgent-care storefront on First Avenue. When I called I was connected to a woman in Long Island. She asked for my symptoms. Then: Have you traveled internationally? Have you had recent contact with anyone who’s infected? No and no. She said, “It’s OK, I’m sure they’ll accept you.” I could hear her click “send.” She paused and said, “I’m so sorry, you don’t meet the criteria.” By now we had made friends, and she was disappointed for me.

I said, “Let’s think together. Twelve days sick, almost all the symptoms, part of an endangered demographic.” Silence. Then a brainstorm. At this point I have known a person who’s tested positive; I saw him a while back; no one has defined “recently” because no one knows the incubation period.

I said: Can we do the interview again? She said, “Let’s go.”

She went down the list of questions, and when she said, “Have you recently had contact . . .,” I said, “I believe I can say yes.”

She said, “All right.” Silence as I listened to her tap the keys. “You meet the criteria,” she said, with the sweetest excitement.

And so Tuesday night I made my way (mask, gloves) to the urgent-care storefront, where I was tested by a garrulous physician’s assistant who said his office, or New York health authorities, or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will get back to me with results in three to seven days. (Yikes.)

At this point I suppose it’s academic. If it’s positive, they’ll tell me to continue what I’m doing. But if hospitalized it would save time—presumably I wouldn’t have to be tested again. Also it would be nice to think I wasn’t just home sick, I was home developing fighting Irish antibodies spoiling for a fight.

I just want to get out and help in some way. Isn’t that what you feel? We all just want to pitch in.