Gesundheit

Imagine that you are a world traveler and you drop into Oakland for a few days, only to come down with a severe cold and sore throat that hijacks the last two days of your visit. You are a foreigner on American soil and you appear to "have come down with something." Your hosts insist that there is nothing to fret about. It's the cold and flu season, after all, and people all across this great land of ours have succumbed to one sort of sniffles, cough or combinations thereof.
In our non-hypothetical version of this scenario, this suggestion came as little or no consolation to our guest. He was convinced that the police would see him coming, wiping at his nose, and pull him aside. A cursory look at his carry on luggage would provide all the evidence they needed: cough drops, Alka Seltzer cold medicine. Obviously a carrier. He would be handcuffed and taken off to isolation someplace where he could not infect any of the healthy Americans who were in danger of contracting whatever vile strain of plague he had dragged into our country.
He didn't have to say it.
Coronavirus.
His cruise had come to a somewhat abrupt stop at our doorstep, and when he was ready to attempt to push off on the next leg of his journey he had a real concern that he might be kept from moving freely about the planet due to his depleted condition.
It was just a cold, after all. It wasn't something more deadly or rampant. We were sure. My wife and I assured him. Nothing to worry about.
And then these little twinges came to me: The same twinges that appear each time there is a case of lice at our school, even though I haven't had any hair north of my eyebrows for decades. That and the one that causes me to sneeze every time I open a copy of Stephen King's The Stand. No one expects to be patient zero. Or patient lebenty-seven. We expect to take our Alka Seltzer and drink plenty of fluids and eventually this too shall pass. Except when it doesn't. And that's the one that gets you. That's the one that reaches out and grabs you by the ankle and won't let go. That's the one they make the movies about. That's the one you don't want to get when you have to be at work bright and early on Thursday morning. If you can call to say that you won't be in, you're still fine. It's when you can't make that call. Because the flu police came and took you away.