The first case of “community transmitted” Covid-19 in the United States popped up just a few miles north of my home in San Francisco. That means the person who is sick with the new coronavirus has no known connection to China or travelers from there — she got it from someone in her local Northern California community. My community. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said the arrival of Covid-19 is “inevitable.” Because the disease has an incubation period of at least two weeks, I could be surrounded by the infected and not know. Hell, I could be infected.
I’m low-key terrified. And yet stores are open, the sun is shining, and kids are playing in the park near my house. The city feels completely normal, despite headlines warning us that San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, has declared a state of emergency. In my city, where we’re constantly braced for earthquakes and wildfires, looming existential threats are normal. In fact, they’re so normal that, ironically, we rarely think about them, and most of us prepare for disaster only sporadically.
But as these threats become more frequent, our everyday lives will have to change. We’ll need to embrace the idea of survivalism. It’s a loaded word. It brings to mind militias in rural areas, or unhinged preppers posting conspiracy theories on YouTube. I’m describing a new kind of survivalism, one that’s pragmatic, urban and focused on community rather than rugged individuals.
It’s an old fashioned idea — planning for the worst and hoping for the best. When a Covid-19 case appeared in Hawaii a couple of weeks ago, I created a shared online document for my family: “prepper list.” We added everything we thought we’d need if the virus hit California: medicines, canned vegetables, face masks, rice. But we kept realizing there were random things we hadn’t thought about: cat food, toilet paper, coffee. The prepper list started as a whimsical thought experiment, but today I checked off the final items. Then I started texting my neighbors and friends about pooling our resources. When I showed a friend my cabinets full of prepper supplies, she looked at me quizzically and asked, “So … you went to Trader Joe’s?”
Yes, it may look like a little cozy shopping, but the raw psychological reality is that everyone I know is vacillating between freak-out and denial. One night, my friends and I talked about “plague news” in such grisly detail that one of us had to declare a moratorium because he was getting too upset. So we watched three episodes of “Brooklyn 99” instead of figuring out whether we had enough medical supplies to survive two weeks of mandatory lockdown.
This isn’t some meme-corroded, cynical response. We’re coping the same way people did in previous plaguey times. News blackouts during the 1918 Spanish flu prevented people from understanding how deadly it was. And even afterward, when it was known that it had claimed 50 million to 100 million lives, only a few people wrote documentary accounts of the pandemic — Katherine Anne Porter explored it in fiction with her novel “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” It was as if an entire generation just wanted to forget. Only in the 1970s did Alfred Crosby write a history of the devastating disease in a book called, tellingly, “America’s Forgotten Pandemic.”
Back in the late 1340s, the English poet and essayist Geoffrey Chaucer survived the first wave of the Black Death that killed off 50 percent of London’s population. He grew up in a world forever changed by a pandemic, and yet he mentions the plague only once in his enormous body of work. My point is that people have been trying to forget about pandemics for almost a millennium — the urge to hide from the truth and binge watch comedy (or write “The Canterbury Tales”) is strong.
As a science journalist, I’ve been following news of this outbreak carefully and warning my friends of its coming. I thought I was ready. After all, my family still has boxes of N95 masks left over from two years ago, when San Franciscans dealt with heavy smoke from the California wildfires. But what I’ve realized over the past few days is that I’m ready for a world-ending disaster — and that’s very different from being ready to survive in a world that’s damaged but still going.
Sure, that’s partly because of my human urge to push the fear out of my mind. But it doesn’t help that the White House is downplaying the risks of a pandemic, leaving most of us feeling like we’ll have to rely on ourselves if things get seriously apocalyptic. And what does that look like? Will we be hiding out in our homes, eating Trader Joe’s boxed soup and watching sitcoms? Will we lose power and water? Will there be martial law, grounded planes and forced evacuations?
To cope with these uncertainties, we have to turn preparation for survival into the new normal. Instead of freaking ourselves out with unimaginably dark scenarios, we need to plan for a difficult future every day. Start washing your hands before eating and after riding public transit. Have a supply of nonperishable food in your cabinets, along with a box of face masks and medicines. Talk to friends and family about how you’ll work together to get through this. Do a little every day. Each tiny thing you do to prepare is a small act of hope. We are going to survive, and when we do, we’ll really be glad to have those canned tomatoes and dried pasta. And all those TV episodes you downloaded for a rainy day.
Normalizing survival is the opposite of normalizing disaster. When we get scared, we forget that it’s normal to be ready for bad things to happen. It’s not overreacting; it’s just how we get through life. When the disaster is over, we will want to obliterate it from memory, and that’s fine. All we need to remember is how to get ready for the next one.
Annalee Newitz (@Annaleen) is a contributing opinion writer and the author, most recently, of “The Future of Another Timeline.”
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