A reader sent this in as a Pandemic Diary. I’m going to take it out of the normal PD rotation because the things she brings up are worth a post of their own. She asks me to hide some personal details so she doesn’t risk losing her job. I’ve done a little bit of editing to make it harder for her to be identified by location:

I wanted to share our “pandemic diary” mostly because I think writing this will be helpful for me to process.

My husband and I live around a major Midwestern city with our 3 kids (ages 6, 5 and 2). We are very fortunate in that we are both “essential” right now. He is a [government job] and I am a nurse. Even more fortunate for us, because of the nature of my role in the hospital, I can work from home.

I work at a big hospital in our city, and part of what I do involves some contract work for the pharmaceutical industry. You and Wyoming Doc were the first ones to alert me to the supply issues. I voiced out loud to my office, the fact that so many of our client’s products are made, at least partly, in China. The first response I got was a scoff that no one was going to catch the coronavirus from medications manufactured in China. Believe it or not, without rolling my eyes, I patiently explained that the sick Chinese workers were not making the medications. THAT was the concern. Eyes widened around the room as the realization set in. I texted my husband that day and told him to buy all the children’s Tylenol and ibuprofen that Kroger had.

Your reporting continues to be a couple steps ahead of everyone else and I thank you for that. Last week I had a call from a large wholesaler requesting a drop ship of some Albuterol inhalers. That evening I checked your blog and saw your title included “Albuterol shortage.” My heart sank into my chest and I cried. Everything suddenly felt so heavy.

My parents are my biggest source of worry right now. Twenty years ago, God told my parents to open a Christian daycare center in our small, rural town. They were obedient and while it has had struggles (my brothers and I jokingly refer to those early years as the “dark ages” of hand me downs and vacation-less summers and store brand everything) they have been blessed. My mother has the strongest faith of anyone I know. Two years ago, they expanded and added a Christian elementary school. They did this at the urging of my brother after he read your book The Benedict Option. They employed sixteen people and enrolled over 50 students until last week when the state closed everything. My mother has cried every day since.

Both of my parents are “boomers” who won’t acknowledge their fragility. My brother has nicknamed this pandemic “the boomer remover.” My father, who is a Marine veteran was diagnosed with bladder cancer five years ago. A direct result of the contaminated water he drank during bootcamp at Parris Island. He has recovered well, after having his bladder removed and several rounds of chemo. He refuses to give up his side hustle as a paramedic and volunteer firefighter and I can’t completely fault him. Most of the other guys are also his age. And in their small town if he doesn’t go, who will? I told him I hope he catches it now before the ventilators are all used up.

I have read they are coaching doctors for when the time comes of choosing who lives and dies. Obviously, it’s a terrible situation to be in. However, I’ll admit that the current utilitarian recommendation of the ventilators going to the youngest upsets me. My father spends his nights “running squad” and has 16 employees and over 50 children depending on his business, plus his own family. I know 30 year olds who don’t even pay their own cell phone bills and mom still does their laundry. Anyway, this is a selfish side rant.

In the small town I grew up in there is a lot of poverty. I find a huge disconnect between my small town and the upper class suburban world in which I work. In my office, most of my coworkers are pharmacists and make roughly three times my salary. I am routinely shocked by how oblivious they are to what is happening in rural and small town America. As a side note, none of them can comprehend WHY anyone voted for Trump ever. They really just don’t get it.

I was in the office the day the schools were ordered closed. One coworker across from me was almost hyperventilating watching the stock markets. “Do you know how much money we just lost?!” she screeched on the phone to her husband. Others were checking their retirement accounts. My heart is heavy for the kids whose only safe place is school. Once this is all said and done, and the schools open back up, there will be children who won’t come back. They will have vanished and no one will have known what happened to them.

The darkness that will be hidden in homes, locked up for quarantine’s sake, makes me nauseous. Fort Worth has already reported a spike in child abuse cases in their ER. Bad dog bites, head trauma, and kids left in closets and thrown against walls by parents who are stressed, have lost jobs, and don’t have a school to send them to. My husband and I adopted our oldest from foster care. I know what those kids go through. My husband volunteered last week to deliver meals to kids. Of course it was to apartment buildings that reeked of weed, and for the sake of kids who had been waiting all day for him to get there to eat. Some of them wouldn’t open the door until they knew for sure he wasn’t a cop. What will happen to those kids when the economy sinks even more?

Anyway, I’ll wrap this up. We have a yard and a trampoline and a membership to Sam’s Club and two paychecks. We are doing significantly better than a lot of people right now. I sometimes worry, selfishly, that I may get pulled back to work the floor. If it wasn’t for my children I would have offered to already but my family comes first. If that happens I will do what I can.

I appreciate this so much. My first thought — my urgent thought — is, “What can we do for those kids?” And then my second thought: probably not a lot. God knows I don’t say that as an excuse, but just as a stone cold look at reality. If these kids are going to school, at least teachers and others there can keep an eye out for evidence of abuse. But if they’re quarantined? If their parents have no work? If their parents, or parent, are of no account? A firefighter friend who serves the inner city once told me that in terms of parental neglect, the world that he works in is like another planet. People from solid middle and working class families, he said, cannot imagine how broken the family systems are there. And this was in normal times!

What is the alternative, though, to leaving those kids in their homes? To open the economy and the schools back up, and spread this virus around more, overwhelming hospitals in more places, and killing a bunch more people — including the caregivers of some of those children?

We have run right into the reality of the limits of what money and technology can do. We are having our noses ground into the reality that life is tragic. I realized as I typed that that I never finished commenting on The Plague here — that I finished the Camus novel last week, but was so caught up in all the other drama that I never wrote about the rest of it here. Now the electronic edition I borrowed from the library has ended, and I can’t get it back. I’m so sorry, readers. I dropped the ball on that one. Anyway, the reason I thought about The Plague is because it’s about one’s moral duty to do what one can to cure, and if one can’t cure, then to abide with the suffering, and accompany them. I’m thinking about how angry my sister’s cancer made all of us around her, how it humiliated us: there was not a damn thing we could do to stop it. Doctors were throwing everything they had at it, but still, it wasn’t enough. In this plague, this cancer, we can’t save all those children locked behind those doors. Maybe we can save some, serve some? What does it mean to bear with those children? I’m asking for ideas in total sincerity, because my heart is breaking here, and the impotence one feels in the face of this pandemic is enraging.

In The Plague, there’s this character, Rambert, a Parisian journalist who spends a lot of his time and energy trying to figure out how to get himself smuggled out of the quarantined city, so he can go back to Paris and the woman he loves. He keeps being frustrated in that. Eventually he learns that his place is there in Oran, helping Dr. Rieux care for the sick and the dying. That there is more meaning in sharing the suffering of others than in escaping pain. That is our guide for this time — but how in the world do we relieve the pain and suffering of those children, and their families?

Seriously, what can we do?  How can we support workers and organizations who are on the front lines trying to help?

(By the way, though I made all my commentary about the child abuse and neglect question, readers should feel free to comment on other things this reader brought up, including the plight of small towns and rural areas, and worry about parents.)

UPDATE: If you haven’t done so already, now would be a very, very good time to buy Chris Arnade’s book Dignity, which is about the lives of the American poor.