COVID threat becomes clear in grocery aisle

This post was published in the Wilson Times March 22, 2020.

The grocery store parking lot seemed a bit more crowded than usual when I arrived to pick up a few items we needed last Sunday, but the crowding didn’t seem so unusual until I got inside and found the aisles jammed with shoppers pushing overloaded carts along nearly empty shelves.

I felt a bit unnerved and shocked by what I was seeing. As I took in the scene, I realized what was disturbing me. The jammed aisles and empty shelves reminded me of newsreels and movies from 1939-40 depicting desperate Polish and French refugees scrambling to haul away as many of their possessions as they could carry just ahead of the Wehrmacht. The only thing missing was menacing commands spoken in German.

There was no army chasing those shoppers in Wilson, but they seemed just as desperate, and their shopping buggies were piled as high as the Joad family’s decrepit Model T leaving the Dust Bowl in “Grapes of Wrath.”

I checked out and drove home, still discomforted by what I had seen. The Corona Virus pandemic had inconvenienced me before this incident, but I had not recognized this new virus as a global crisis until my mind conflated the scene of the panicked shoppers with the desperation of World War II refugees.

We should have seen it coming. The COVID 19 virus leaped across China into Europe, Asia and the United States. We knew the virus was going to disrupt the American way of life.

Schools are closing, the NCAA basketball tournament (“March Madness”) has been canceled along with other collegiate activities. Major League Baseball is delaying its season. The NBA has canceled its season. All gatherings of people (first 100, then 50 and now 10) are strongly discouraged. The stock market has fallen off a cliff. Recession looms. Congress and the White House are working on stimulus packages to soften the economic damage. The numbers of infections and deaths are climbing rapidly.

Even churches are feeling the impact, and many are canceling services or altering their worship to limit human contact. Handshakes are forbidden, as is “the sharing of the peace.” But Holy Communion, the central act of liturgical churches’ worship, cannot be dodged or moved online. My wife and I “attended” church in Salisbury via a live online link Sunday morning. Despite its limitations, it gave us comfort.

So we are hunkered down, avoiding interactions with other humans as much as possible. We are washing our hands far more often. If the stores were not all out of them, we’d be using sanitary wipes and hand sanitizer, too. We have food enough to survive for a few weeks, but if the infections continue to grow for many months, we’ll have problems.

One benefit of this crisis has been that we’ve talked to our adult children more. All three have called at least once to check on their parents and engage in long conversations. We enjoyed the calls and appreciated their concerns, but I couldn’t help envisioning bedridden elders being cared for by adult children and grandchildren. Yes, we are in the demographic of more vulnerable populations. I look at mortality charts for COVID-19 and cringe.

It is inevitable that this pandemic will change our lives. Vacation trips have been canceled. Sensible precautions keep us away from restaurants, lectures, worship services, theaters, schools, sporting events, celebrations of birthdays, weddings, anniversaries and so on. When this is over, will we be able to transition back to the way things used to be? Will we be able to hug our grandchildren again?