Peggy Noonan

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.

This coronavirus is new to our species—it is “novel.” It spreads more easily than the flu—“exponentially,” as we now say—and is estimated to be at least 10 times as lethal.

Testing in the U.S. has been wholly inadequate; history may come to see this as the great scandal of the epidemic. “Anybody that needs a test gets a test; they’re there, they have the tests, and the tests are beautiful,” as the president said last weekend, is on a par with “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor” as a great, clueless lie.

Because of the general lack of testing we don’t have a firm sense of the number of the infected and the speed and geography of spread. Many people would be working sick, afraid of losing pay or job security if they take time off. Some would be at home, unable for financial or other reasons to see a doctor or go to a hospital.

In the past few days the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. The physician used by Congress reportedly said behind closed doors that 70 million to 150 million Americans will be infected. The Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch estimated 20% to 60% of adults world-wide might catch the disease. Cases are rising in Spain, France and Germany, where Prime Minister Angela Merkel warned that 70% of the nation could wind up infected. The president gave a major Oval Office address Wednesday night aimed at quelling fears; it was generally labeled “unsettling.” Immediately after, Tom Hanks announced that he and wife Rita Wilson have tested positive, and the National Basketball Association suspended its season after a player tested positive.

Health professionals and scientists have been on TV explaining what they know, and they’ve been impressive—crisply professional, helpful in conveying the contour of things. This week I spoke to a physician with a small practice on Long Island who’s dealing with problems on the ground.

He spoke of his biggest immediate challenge: Local health authorities are offering little practical information on how to handle patients or receive personal protective equipment—masks, gowns and gloves. “Regular doctors in a regular practice don’t have big numbers of these things,” he said. “The hospital sent out an email saying, ‘Go here if you’re having equipment trouble.’ So I did. And within an hour they said, ‘We can’t help you.’ ”

“At this point we get an email every few days, and what they’re doing is planning a seminar on Covid-19, which is no practical help.” Doctors are already read in on the disease, they know what viruses are, they keep track of what’s happening in the larger sphere.

His biggest worry is that local hospitals aren’t ready—and aren’t readying—for a surge in patients. When he looks at the projections, he fears “health facility inundation and fatigue.” He worries that “routine life-threatening illnesses will not be treated adequately.” He means heart attacks, strokes, infections; he fears such patients won’t receive timely treatment “in overstressed systems.” The great danger to the elderly and immune-compromised is viral pneumonia. “They will need mechanical help, ventilators and ECMO machines”—oxygen pumps. “This system probably doesn’t have enough. Who is thinking about this?”

Hospitals need to “prepare to be inundated,” he says. “When I talk to doctors and administrators, they’re only thinking within their own walls and own offices. They’re not imagining being overrun.”

After we spoke, something came to mind I’d written months after 9/11. Everyone was asking how we could have missed the signs. I remembered the words of astronaut Frank Borman when he was asked in 1967 why NASA had not been prepared for the catastrophic launchpad fire that killed three astronauts. It was “a failure of imagination,” he said. No one imagined such a thing could happen on the ground.

That’s where I think we have been the past few weeks in this epidemic, a failure of imagination.

Scientists and doctors say the next few weeks are crucial, that the virus’s spread must be slowed. We have to slow it. We have to be health hawks.

Bite the bullet, close the schools a few weeks, and see where we are. Cancel celebrations. Marry, but have the wedding party later. Make the birthday bash twice as good next year. Put everything on pause. The need for social distancing may at this point make the difference between a hard time and hell. Work from home if you have a job that allows you to.

Get money to people who are now working sick. This is an emergency, that’s your job if you’re in Washington, make it work.

Get. The. Tests.

The most obvious advice in the world is still the most helpful. Don’t “wash your hands”; wash your hands like Lady Macbeth with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Wash your face. Carry hand sanitizers and use them after every interaction. Wear protective gloves—don’t be embarrassed. If you can’t get gloves, don’t touch keypads and screens at the bank or store without covering your finger with tissue. Try to cough or sneeze into two or three tissues. If you don’t have them, do it in the crook of your arm, as they say, but stop patting the other person’s coat sleeves affectionately when you don’t shake hands. That’s where their germs are.

Sometimes paranoia is just good sense.

Is all this an overreaction? If it is, we’ll recover. If we’re too cautious we’ll realize after a while and we’ll all get angry at the economic cost of it and have big arguments and fights. But we’ll be here to argue and fight.

I wrote in February that I believed the coronavirus will be bad, that it will have a bigger impact on America than we imagine, and that a lot of people will be exposed and a significant number endangered. I was beaten up a bit and fair enough—to make a prophecy is to summon animosity, especially when men are scared and especially when they see everything as political. My assertions were based on a long reading of history and a close reading of what had happened in China, then Italy.

Now it’s time to lose the two most famous phrases of the moment. One is “Don’t panic!” The other is “an abundance of caution.”

“Don’t panic” is what nervous, defensive people say when someone warns of coming trouble. They don’t want to hear it, so their message is “Don’t worry like a coward, be blithely unconcerned like a brave person.”

One way or another we’ve heard it a lot from administration people.

This is how I’ve experienced it:

“Captain, that appears to be an iceberg.” “Don’t panic, officer, full steam ahead.”

“Admiral, concentrating our entire fleet in one port seems tempting fate.” “We don’t need your alarmist fantasies, ensign.”

“We’re picking up increased chatter about an al Qaeda action.” “Your hand-wringing is duly noted.”

“Don’t panic,” in the current atmosphere, is a way of shutting up people who are using their imaginations as a protective tool. It’s an implication of cowardice by cowards.

As for “abundance of caution,” at this point, in a world-wide crisis, the cautions we must take aren’t abundant, they’re reasonable and realistic.

Reason and realism are good.

No one has seen anything like it. It will live in our political lore. There’ll be some bright 32-year-old kid running a campaign in 2056 and his guy will be down three in a row and the elders will take him to the Marriott bar and tell him, “Ya gotta get out, handwriting’s on the wall,” and he’ll nod, slump-shouldered. Then he’ll get this steely look, this young-wild-James-Carville look, and he’ll say, “Joe Biden was over in ’20. Nothing is written.”

There were many elements to what happened. Democrats love to say they’re not members of any organized political party, they’re Democrats; they love to say Democrats fall in love while Republicans fall in line. That’s their self conception and their story line and it’s mostly malarkey, as someone would say. You don’t get these staggered endorsements and coordinated statements without organization, power centers and money lines.

But this is about the human part, the historic part, the speech Rep. Jim Clyburn gave that saved Mr. Biden. It was Wednesday morning. Feb. 26, in the College Center at Trident Technical College on Rivers Avenue in North Charleston, S.C. Mr. Clyburn, the highest-ranking African-American in Congress, spoke without text or notes, just a man at a mic with a blank wall behind him.

He spoke of his late wife, Emily. They met as students at South Carolina State after both were arrested at a civil-rights demonstration. “I met her in jail on that day.” Their marriage lasted 58 years. “I remember her telling about her experiences, walking 2½ miles to school every morning, 2½ back home every afternoon.” She lived on a small farm. “She learned how to drive in a pickup truck. She came to South Carolina State in that pickup truck, with her luggage on the bed.”

Her father walked town to town in the off season, 15 miles a day, to cut pulp wood. “We talked about what our parents sacrificed for us and what we owed to our children and all other children similarly situated.” They often talked about American leaders. “There’s nobody who Emily loved as a leader of this country more than she loved Joe Biden, and we talked about Joe all the time.”

He’d wrestled with whether to make a public endorsement. Then a friend died. He arrived early to the funeral and walked around talking to people he hadn’t seen in a while. “There was an elderly lady in her upper 80s sitting on the front pew of the church, just a few seats away from the coffin. And she looked at me and she beckoned to me. Didn’t say a word, just beckoned.” He joined her. “She said, ‘Lean down, I need to ask you a question.’ And I leaned down. She said, ‘You don’t have to say it out loud, but you just whisper into my ear. Who are you gonna vote for next Saturday? I been waiting to hear from you. I need to hear from you. This community wants to hear from you.’ I decided then and there that I would not stay silent.”

He quoted Martin Luther King Jr., who wrote that “he was coming to the conclusion that the people of ill will in our society was making a much better use of time than the people of good will, and he feared that he would [have] regret—not just for the vitriolic words and deeds of bad people but for the appalling silence from good people.”

He said, “South Carolina should be voting for Joe Biden, and here’s why.” Because the purpose of politics isn’t lofty and abstract but simpler, plainer: “Making the greatness of this country accessible and affordable for all. We don’t need to make this country great again—this country is great, that’s not what our challenge is.” The challenge is making greatness available to everybody. Are people able to get education, health care, housing? “Nobody with whom I’ve ever worked in public life is any more committed” to that goal “than Joe Biden.”

They got to know each other “doing TV stuff together,” he said. “I know Joe. . . . But most importantly, Joe knows us.” They used to talk a lot about Brown v. Board of Education, which consolidated five lawsuits against school segregation. One was from Joe’s Delaware. They went over it a lot. “That’s how well I know this man. I know his heart. I know who he is. I know what he is.”

Mr. Clyburn said that during his day in jail, “I was never fearful of the future. As I stand before you today I am fearful of the future of this country. I’m fearful for my daughters.” We have to “restore this country’s dignity, this country’s respect—that is what is at stake this year.” And there is “no one better suited, better prepared,” for the fight “than my good friend, my late wife’s great friend, Joe Biden.”

It was beautiful.

He wasn’t just giving Mr. Biden an endorsement, he was giving him a template: This is what to talk about, this is your subject matter.

It was a speech about the price you’ll pay to stand where you stand. In outlining his life he was saying: I didn’t talk the talk; I walked the walk, and on that basis I claim something called authority.

But what would the impact be? America is in a crisis not only of leadership but of followership. Leaders in all areas—business, the church, politics, other institutions—don’t know if they have the clout anymore to guide and advise their constituencies, they don’t know if they have the heft, the sway. Surely Mr. Clyburn wondered too.

And what followed was astounding, a throwback. What needed saying had been said, and spread. Three days later South Carolina didn’t endorse Joe Biden, it gave him a wave that wouldn’t break, that swept across the South and beyond.

After Super Tuesday, some progressives on social media clearly resented the black vote and the Biden wave. I detected in a few of them a whiff of “Who are these old Southern black ladies to be calling the shots?” It took me aback.

You couldn’t carry their sandals, sonnyboys.

A shooter came to Charleston a few years ago and they were in the Bible study. He kills, and they go to the bail hearing and, in the great incandescent moment of the last decade, say “I forgive you.”

They make everything happen; they’re the ones who’ve long made the prudential judgments on which way the party will go.

For half a century it has been telling them, “We feel your pain, we’re going to save you.” On Tuesday, after coolly surveying the facts and the field, they said to the Democratic Party, “Honey, you’re confused. We see your pain and we’re gonna save you.”

And they did. It was something—a turning of the tables, a doing what others up North and out West couldn’t quite do, and that was saying, “We are not socialists, we’re Democrats.”

The party should thank its lucky stars. It should kiss those ladies’ hands.

Punditry 101: It’s bad when you don’t write about what you’re thinking about. All week I was taking notes knowing I’d be looking at South Carolina, Super Tuesday and this week’s debate. I was thinking about polls and Rep. Jim Clyburn’s beautiful remarks in support of Joe Biden. They were beautiful because they were highly personal without being manipulative, which is now something unusual in American politics. But my mind kept tugging in another direction. So I’ll write what I’m thinking, and it may be ragged but here goes.

I’ve got a feeling the coronavirus is going to be bad, that it will have a big impact on America, more than we imagine, and therefore on its politics. As this is written the virus is reported in 48 nations. We’ve had a first case with no known source, in California, and the state is monitoring some 8,400 others for possible infection. Canada has 13 cases. There have been outbreaks in Iran and Italy; in Rome, there are worries because Pope Francis had to cancel a Lenten Mass due to what the Vatican called a “slight indisposition.”
The Biden Resurgence/Is the Coronavirus the New Russia?
Subscribe

There’s a lot we don’t know but much we do. We know coronavirus is highly communicable, that person-to-person transmission is easy and quick. Most who get it won’t even know they’re sick—it feels like a cold and passes. But about 20% will get really sick. Among them, mortality rates are low but higher than for the flu, and higher still among those who are older or impaired.

So it’s serious: A lot of people will be exposed and a significant number will be endangered. And of course there’s no vaccine.

We live in a global world. Everybody’s going everyplace all the time. Nothing is contained in the ways it used to be. It seems to me impossible that there are not people walking along the streets in the U.S. who have it, don’t know it and are spreading it.

Americans are focusing. If you go to Amazon.com you famously find that the best face masks are no longer available, but check out the prices of hand sanitizers. They appear to be going up rather sharply! (Note to Jeff Bezos: if this turns bad and people start making accusations about price gouging and profiteers, public sentiment won’t just be hard on manufacturers, they’ll blame you too. Whatever downward pressure can be applied, do it now, not later.)

If you limit your focus to politics, to 2020 election outcomes, you find yourself thinking this: Maybe it’s all being decided not in the next few weeks of primaries but in the next few weeks of the virus, how much it spreads, and how it’s handled.

If coronavirus becomes a formally recognized world-wide pandemic, and if it hits America hard, it is going to change a lot—the national mood, our cultural habits, the economy.

The president has been buoyed the past few years by a kind of inflatable raft of good economic news and strengths. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 8,581 points from the day he took office to the beginning of 2020. Unemployment is down so far it feels like full employment. Minority employment is up, incomes are up. He’s running for re-election based on these things.

But the stock market is being hit hard by virus-driven concerns. If those fears continue—and there’s no reason to believe they won’t—the gains the president has enjoyed could be wiped out.

As for unemployment, if the virus spreads people will begin to self-distance. If they shop less, if they stay home more and eat out less, and begin to cancel personal gatherings—if big professional events and annual meetings are also canceled—it will carry a whole world of bad implications.

What I notice as a traveler in America is the number of people who make a traveler’s life easier, and whose jobs depend on heavy travel—all the people in the airport shops and concessions, and those who work in hotels. There’s the woman whose small flower shop makes the arrangements for the donor reception at the community forum, and the floor managers, waiters and waitresses at the charity fundraising dinner. Local contractors, drivers, the sound man who wires the dinner speaker. Many are part of the gig economy, operating without the protections of contracts and unions. If the virus spreads and events are canceled, they will be out of jobs. And that’s just one sliver of American life.

In a public-health crisis the role of government is key. The question will be—the question is—are the president and his administration up to it?

Our scientists and health professionals are. (I think people see Tony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health as the de facto president on this.) Is Donald Trump? Or has he finally met a problem he can’t talk his way out of? I have written in the past questioning whether he can lead and reassure the nation in a time of crisis. We are about to find out.

Leaders in crises function as many things. They are primary givers of information, so they have to know the facts. They have to be serious: They must master the data. Are they managerially competent? Most of all, are they trustworthy and credible?

Or do people get the sense they’re spinning, finagling, covering up failures and shading the facts?

It is in crisis that you see the difference between showmanship and leadership.

*   *   *

Early signs are not encouraging. The messaging early this week was childish—everything’s under control, everything’s fine. The president’s news conference Wednesday night was not reassuring. Stock market down? “I think the financial markets are very upset when they look at the Democratic candidates standing on that stage making fools out of themselves.” “The risk to the American people remains very low.” “Whatever happens we’re totally prepared.” “There’s no reason to panic, because we have done so good.”

It was inadequate to the task.

I wonder if the president understands what jeopardy he’s in, how delicate even strong economies are, and how provisional good fortune is.

If you want to talk about what could make a progressive win the presidency it couldn’t be a better constellation than this: an epidemic, an economic downturn, a broad sense of public anxiety, and an incumbent looking small. Especially if the progressive says he stands for one big thing, health care for everyone.

The only candidate to bring up the threat of coronavirus at the Democratic debate the other night was Mike Bloomberg. This is how you’ll know the fact of the virus has hit the political class: Politicians will stop doing what they’ve done for more than two centuries. They’ll stop shaking hands. It will be a new world of waving, nodding emphatically, and patting your chest with your hand.

Some kinda world, when the pols can’t even gladhand.

It would be extremely reassuring if a temporary armistice were called in the cold war between the White House and congressional Democrats. If the virus is as serious as I think it is, no one will look back kindly on anyone who acted small.