Via Stethoscope on Rome:
Rome’s streets are empty, the supermarket shelves loaded with food. My fellow denizens, for once free of the tourist hordes, are enjoying their lives in a state of limbo, waiting for coronavirus to come crashing down around their heads before they start stocking their larders and hunkering down.
At least that’s what things were like yesterday. I can’t say about today, because I just arrived in San Francisco to begin a two-week book tour cum working vacation scheduled months before that damned virus jumped the species barrier deep into China. We were biting our nails until the last moment – would the Americans impose a 15-day quarantine on all travellers from Italy? – and felt some relief at getting away, like Boccaccio’s fictional pals who fled to the hills outside Florence to escape the Black Death. But the first New York Times headline I see on landing is California Declared a State of Emergency, and it’s entirely possible that all the events we’ve come for will be cancelled in the spreading panic.
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