About the same time as the first case of coronavirus was reported in Canada, I came down with the flu. Yes, I’d got my flu shot. It doesn’t always work.

I thought I had a cold. A bad cold, but a cold. I only went into my family practice last week when I felt I was getting an ear infection. Flu, the doctor said. No ear infection, but you’re infectious for a few more days. Stay at home for everyone’s sake, including your own.

That means I started self-isolating a bit early. Fortunately, I’d started hoarding early, too. Feeling lousy, not really wanting to go out—and obsessively reading the news—I’d stocked up the day before seeing the doctor, doing a massive supermarket shop when shelves were still full.

Now here we are, a week later, with everything shutting down. Schools, musical events, theatre, conventions, major league sports, travel. People are working from home, self-isolating the way I’ve been doing. I’m sufficiently used to it by now to find what’s going on not quite panic-making but horrifically interesting. 

Even though the doctors say both my husband and I are at high risk. 

Me, because I’m debilitated from a bad virus. More seriously, my husband because he has progressive MS. It’s one of the underlying conditions they talk about when they say, People with underlying conditions don’t want to get this thing. He’s at home, too. 

So I thought I’d write about it. What else am I going to do?

This morning, for instance, I went back to my family practice, covering my nose and mouth with a scarf while I took the subway downtown. I’m speaking of the Toronto subway, which is usually full even outside rush hour, in this case at 8:45 a.m. 

Now it was barren, no one standing, people sitting well apart from each other in the few occupied seats. I was conscious of trying not to cough, although I’m still bothered by a dry cough, and had to hack once or twice into my bent elbow.

Query: What’s one sign of the coronavirus?

A dry cough. 

People flinched as I hacked. No one was wearing a mask, including me, since I think we’ve all figured out that the masks you buy at hardware stores don’t work. But I wished I had a big sign, one written on the poster board panhandlers use, and saying roughly the same thing. 

I’m harmless. I won’t hurt you. It’s okay. 

At the family practice, the elevator opened on a big table blocking entrance to the intake desks. Signs, hand sanitizer, a form you had to fill out about symptoms and recent travel, a far bigger version of the smaller display I’d seen there one week before.

Behind the table, they’d blocked off close access to the intake desks. To the left, where my doctor’s assistant works, chairs had been set up keeping people a couple of feet away. To the right, they’d managed to come up with half a dozen bright yellow Caution barriers.

I checked in, talking loudly to the assistant over the gap. Directed into the adjacent waiting room, I found most of the chairs removed. It usually has a classroom’s worth of plain black-and-metal chairs set up in ranks. Now there were maybe ten, widely spaced, all filled with uneasy-looking people working their phones. None of us stayed there long, the nurse summoning us quickly into consultation rooms.

Not long after she took me through, my harried-looking doctor stalked in, saying, “On top of everything else, we have to take training in how to do e-consultations for what’s coming. Now, you have an ear infection?”

I explained that I’d seen her on-call colleague the previous week, but I still felt…

She grabbed a scope. Bad ear infection. Working quickly, she printed out a prescription for steroid drops and antibiotic tablets. Then she paused for just one second, looking concerned and saying, “Self-isolate. Both of you. That’s advice, not an order. But do it.”

My husband couldn’t even go to physio? Which for him is the gym, twice a week, all the social and physical energy you get there. “Definitely not to physio,” she said. “Stay home.” 

I admit one thing. After taking the subway to the pharmacy for my scrips, I grabbed the car and drove back to the supermarket to stock up on a few things I’d forgotten the previous week.

Pulling into the parking lot–which was jammed–the first thing I saw was a woman pushing a huge cart entirely filled with toilet paper, maybe ten or twelve packages of between twelve and twenty-four rolls apiece. She stopped to look behind her, and was soon joined by a man pushing another huge cart packed with food, crammed with it, mostly canned and frozen.

Last week was normal, Now, when I went inside the supermarket, I found a long line-up snaking toward the cash that one woman told me was half an hour long. I didn’t want to wait for half an hour. Anyway, supplies seemed to be disappearing fast, with most of the people in the line-up pushing carts as crammed as the two I’d seen in the parking lot. 

Instead, I decided to take a flyer on Home Depot, since all I needed were the cleaning supplies they stock, too. It proved to be a good guess. The branch I went to was nearly empty, and it still had plenty of cleaner, dish detergent, toilet paper, leaf-blowers; all of that. I wonder how long it will last. (Maybe the leaf-blowers.)

So here we are in 2020, the year of the plague.

What’s next?