Escape

Oceans of Anxiety

by Grace Gavazzi

A salt breeze and 48 degree ocean waves was all I had needed to calm my nerves. Slowly walking barefoot feeling the sand grains between my toes, I had to get some air from the four different news channels my grandad kept switching between. The newscasters all said the same thing the whole 5 days my grandparents and I had been here. The economy was suffering, the government was in shambles, and health care workers were scrambling to help the sick. Even though all three of us had escaped our landlocked town in favor of the deserted New Jersey shoreline, it seemed we could not do anything to escape this creeping phantom of a disease.

It was as if a silent acknowledgement had been agreed upon amongst everyone. No one dared speak its name, and yet the threat of COVID-19 was still there. It was almost like a feared name that had us whispering every time someone sneezed and staring daggers every time there was a cough out-of-the-blue. As an undergraduate science major myself, my grandparents expected me to be a bridge between the little knowledge they had about viruses, like COVID-19, and the vast swaths of knowledge they assumed I kept stored in my brain. “I think we’re gonna be ok,” I repeated like a mantra in my head and aloud to my grandparents. I took a microbiology class only once in my college career, so I had to dig deep into my memory of junior year.

Having some knowledge of microbes and disease did not give me confidence to tell my elderly, immunocompromised grandparents, “Everything is going to be fine!” Viruses scare me. Microscopic capsules full of RNA, a blueprint to make more viruses, they crawl into our immune systems undetected and hijack our cells in order to spread throughout our body. They are so mysterious to the point where there is a longstanding debate among scientists if viruses can even be considered actually living or not.

As I started to do some research, what is known about COVID-19 did not provide me much comfort. It is a zoonotic virus which means it can pass from an animal to a human, if conditions are right. The virus can lie waiting inside a wild animal and not cause any harm to the animal’s cells. Like a crouching tiger the virus pounces at the first opportunity that it can be successfully transmitted into the human immune system and begins to infect healthy cells. The virus hijacks the immune system by making infected cells unrecognizable to germ-fighting mechanisms in our body. The COVID-19 virus is a part of a larger lineage of coronaviruses. They are ancient viruses as they have had a few million years of evolution of perfecting their own spread and infection before humans were even present on the Earth. This is the threat that we humans are up against.

At first like many other people, we thought nothing of it. And then it started to spread. Whole cities shut down. We had to limit our time going out to stores. Our whole life was constantly evolving like that of the virus itself.

When my grandma went to get pizza from the Italian place down the street, she took a right instead of a left. I asked where we were going and she said she wanted to show me a bureau she was thinking of buying for my room. We pulled up to a furniture store. My throat dried up and as we walked into the store my palms started to sweat. I could see the death counter from MSNBC roll right across the front of my eyes, visions of hospitals crammed full with patients suffering, and infected people gasping for breath. I began to implore her to go back into the car and go home. Tears in my eyes, my grandmother finally complied as I led her out. The store manager had rolled her eyes and said that I was overreacting. Whether I was overreacting or not, I didn’t care. The day we left for our house in Pennsylvania, the state of New Jersey had urged people arriving to the shore to turn back and stay home. Their hospitals were at full capacity.