In the US it doesn’t hurt to inject a bit of humour into coronavirus

Holly Baxter is trying to look at the positive side of Covid-19 – a seat on the metro in rush hour, more space at yoga classes, after all there’s little else you can do when you live with America’s private healthcare system

A traveller wears a medical mask at Grand Central station (Getty)

This morning, for the first time ever during the morning rush hour, I got a seat on the subway. It was a pleasing Monday moment, even if I was squashed in between two people wearing medical-grade masks (one the classic “dental nurse” kind; the other a proper, full-on N29 type with a respirator.) When the train pulled in to Union Square station in Manhattan, I didn’t have to jostle to get out or wait as a crowd filed up the stairs to the exit. New York declared a state of emergency over the weekend, you see, and coronavirus panic has made my commute so much more bearable.

In a time of pandemic-fuelled crisis, it doesn’t hurt to inject a little humour. There are many, many reasons I could collapse into a spiral of despair, I told my friend and colleague Clemence this lunchtime as we spread out in a large booth in our favourite cafe, where we are usually lucky to even find a rogue chair to perch on. My wedding is planned for this September, and about half the people invited – including myself and the groom – are travelling to be there from abroad. My mother and her husband just returned from a holiday in Singapore which they refused to cancel, much to my consternation. My father has a heart condition and a blase attitude towards everything, and has already merrily concluded that he’ll “probably get it so there’s no point taking precautions”. If I wanted to, I could even start panicking about the fact that they’ve said the virus might be able to spread to pets, considering my cat is (with apologies to my family members and fiance) the absolute light of my life.

But I choose to take the road less travelled, the one where I sing “Covid-19” to the tune of “Come on Eileen“ and otherwise blithely ignore the chaos. I will not stockpile toilet paper or hand sanitiser. I will not do a “just-in-case” big shop. I will not text my mother every hour asking whether she’s developed a fever.

That’s not to say that I haven’t been affected already. My best friend, who lives in Zurich, was due to stay with me over the weekend at the end of a work trip – but that has now been cancelled by a company which has banned all non-essential travel. I’ve started scrubbing my hands and my engagement ring when I get off public transport. We pored over the details of our wedding insurance after a reminder note from our venue a few days ago; luckily, we took out our policy before the coronavirus became an issue, since our insurer has stopped providing wedding insurance to any new brides- and grooms-to-be as the pandemic mania reaches its crescendo.

Late last week, friends in London were sending me pictures of empty supermarket shelves at their local Tesco and Sainsbury’s and I was laughing at the knee-jerk hysteria of the British public. Here in the US, grocery stores were fully stocked and people were still attending packed yoga classes and queueing up for croissant-doughnuts, or “cronuts”, in the street. What’s the fuss, I wondered?

Between testing kits that don’t work and a president who says he’s qualified to make predictions because he feels he has a ‘natural talent for science’, I have very little faith in the system

But at the beginning of this week, I’ve definitely noticed fewer people on the streets. Coffee cups and plastic cutlery no longer stand at the front of lunch places; instead, they are dispensed at the front of the store one by one by people wearing gloves. Cinema tickets and cheap international flight tickets home are suddenly very easy to come by (I wish I hadn’t been responsible and bought a slew of them in January). You get more room to stretch than usual in those yoga classes. Hand gel dispensers now line every corridor in our building.

Am I afraid of what might happen if I do get Covid-19? Not especially. I’m half-convinced I had it a couple of weeks ago while Trump was still denying it had reached American soil. At that point, in my humble opinion, it had probably been circulating in the community for weeks. The good thing is that I can get a quick antibody test to let me know if my theory is true because of the competitive, modernizing force of private healthcare.

Just kidding. Obviously private healthcare has proven itself utterly unsuitable in the circumstances, and utterly inferior to the NHS. Between testing kits that don’t work and a president who says he’s qualified to make predictions because he feels he has a “natural talent for science”, I have very little faith in the system here. Doctors I know have told me that coronavirus vaccine research was making great strides a couple of years ago but was blocked on ideological grounds by Republicans who didn’t like that it made use of foetal cells; the US health secretary has refused to say that any vaccine developed now would be affordable enough for most of the population to use.

I presume that at some point, I will get and recover from coronavirus and never be any the wiser. After all, this is a country with no minimum wage for service workers and no mandatory sick pay; a country where people sometimes die or give birth during their shift because they can’t afford not to turn up to work.

Of course I expect to contract a virus sweeping the earth from a barista, a grocery store till operator, a pizza delivery guy or somebody serving me brunch. And would I blame them for one second for coming to work in America while sick? Absolutely not. I choose to accept my fate cheerfully and cross my fingers that this will all blow over in time for my fully paid-off, non-refundable honeymoon in Thailand.

Sing it with me now: Covid-19, ta-loo-rye-ay, Covid-19, ta-loo-rye-ay…