Spillover, revisited

“You’re overreacting. Look at how many people die from the flu every year,” my mom said. This was a couple weeks ago, and we were on the phone discussing my plans to visit home. My parents live in Houston, I live in Portland, Oregon, and my annual work trip to SXSW in Austin presented an all too rare opportunity to visit Texas. I was expressing my doubts that the trip was going to happen. There was this new coronavirus, and it sounded serious.

My mom, like many at the time and some even now, thought the media might be blowing the whole thing out of proportion. She mentioned my own writing, which has often focused on debunking media-driven health panics. Could this be more of the same? At first, it seemed unthinkable to cancel an event as massive as SXSW. Then it began to feel inevitable. Today, the idea that they could have done anything less feels recklessly irresponsible.

The events I’d been planning for months were called off, but I still had plane tickets and an expensive, non-refundable hotel room. I still had parents who wanted me to visit. I still had a hunger for breakfast tacos and Texas barbecue. But I also had vague yet evocative memories of a book I’d read eight years ago, a book in which ordinary people pick up extraordinary diseases, with often fatal consequences for themselves, their loved ones, and the doctors and nurses who care for them. Transporting my body and its invisible passengers into my parents’ house, where any sneeze, cough, or lick from an affectionate terrier could spread contagion, didn’t feel worth the risk. And so…