I don’t write a lot about the benefits of being very old. I come from a line of people who are dragged into each succeeding year, kicking and screaming. Frankly, about the only real benefit we see to aging is that it does, as they say, beat the alternative.

However, the current pestilence has made me admit that there are advantages to being old. For instance, since I don’t have a job, I didn’t have to worry about losing it. Similarly, since I don’t get a paycheck, I’m not missing one. And when your nightlife decisions are generally whether to watch a one-hour or a two-hour TV show, it doesn’t matter if they’ve closed the bars and clubs.

And since I’m a practicing Orthodox Introvert, social distancing hasn’t been a problem. I’ve been doing that most of my life.

However, last week I came face-to-face, or rather face-to-mask with Coronavirus, and it gave me a glimpse of what others are going through. I had occasion to spend some time in the hospital because of a problem unrelated to the virus. Over the years, I’ve used their services several times, and I’m familiar with their ways. But this time, it was different.

This was my first hospital stay when I never saw a nurse’s face. It was also the first one where Linda wasn’t at my bedside at least part of the time. The big double doors in the corridors were barricaded and taped, separating the space for those with the virus from those of us with more run-of-the-mill problems.

I didn’t see the worst of it. However, I did see the ragged edges that the Coronavirus had created for those who had to deal with the health of other people while wondering about their own. All of my nurses were, I think, young. However, their eyes above their masks were tired. They unfailingly maintained a professional cheerfulness, but more than once, I saw one slow down, slump her shoulders, straighten them up and start off again.

I can only imagine how other nurses on the other side of the barricaded doors felt. Or the doctors. Or the technicians. And I can only imagine how it feels for a person who was employed last month to spend hours trying to apply for unemployment this month. Or for parents to try to continue their work while small children demand their attention. I can only imagine how a business owner might feel, wondering if—when this mess is at least temporarily over—he or she will still have a business.

And I can only imagine how a family feels watching a mother or father go to work at one of the essential businesses, not knowing what they might contract, or that mother or father not knowing what they might bring home to their family.

Lying on a hospital bed without much to do is a fertile place for such imaginings. And for feeling grateful that none of those things rest on my shoulders. Then feeling more than a little guilty at my gratefulness.

I’ve lived through several epidemics. A couple of them I worked on when I was with the CDC.  My father lived through the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918; it killed more than a half-million Americans. My great-grandfather died of typhoid. The point is that we have always had and will always have plague and pestilence with us. Whenever we fought them before, we did what was necessary to beat them.

But this one, just like my trip to the hospital, is different. I truly believe that although this one could not have been avoided, it did not have to be this bad. We were not prepared. We were warned, and we did not prepare. We are now months after the first confirmed cases, and we still don’t have adequate testing or contact tracing programs. The level of discussion seems to be more economic than human.

We are a divided country, probably the most divided in my lifetime. And lacking cohesion and leadership, I’m afraid that instead of looking at the beginning of the end of the Coronavirus plague, we are looking at the beginning.

Pray for the Republic.