Analysis: With unease, Americans lurch into coronavirus era

So this is where we are: Major League Baseball’s opening day postponed. Broadway and Hollywood grinding to a halt, and March Madness canceled. Universities from Harvard to UCLA telling students to stay away. Most travelers from Europe banned. Tom Hanks, Hollywood’s embodiment of everyday American-ness, felled by the new virus. And the speaker of the House of Representatives taking this question Thursday morning: “How prepared is Congress

to work from home?”

This, in mid-March 2020, is now the very abnormal normal in the new United States of Purell — a nation that watched for weeks as the coronavirus erupted in China, South Korea, Iran and Italy before starting down the path of figuring out how to encounter this threat itself.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, something tipped. Words and phrases used intermittently in recent days began coming at Americans in a dizzying fusillade: Canceled. Postponed. Scrapped. Stay home. Don’t come in. Don’t embrace.

Don’t shake hands. Social distancing. Unprecedented.

Crisis.

“I think it’s finally sinking in how serious this is, and how incredibly unprepared we are going into this. And people are scrambling,” says Dr. Mical Raz, a medical historian and practicing physician who teaches at the University of Rochester.

Which raises the central, delicate question: Are Americans ready to meet this challenge — a challenge distinct from any other that American society has faced in the last few generations?

“You find out who you are when a crisis hits, what the culture and the character is.

It’s the wizard behind the curtain,” says Hilary Fussell Sisco, an associate professor at Quinnipiac University who studies how people communicate in troubled moments.

President Donald Trump, in his Oval Office address Wednesday night, called the unfolding coronavirus saga “just a temporary moment of time that we will overcome together as a nation and as a world.” The coach of the Denver Nuggets, Michael Malone, after learning an NBA player had been affected, had this to say: “These are things you watch in movies.”

Trouble is, though, this whole thing isn’t really either a moment or remotely movie-like — which is precisely what makes it more challenging for a country accustomed to consuming, and reacting to, “moments.”

When 9/11 happened, it came with most of the markers that a society raised on Hollywood and Madison Avenue storytelling would find familiar. It happened in a certain place, over a specific and compressed period of time. Its scope was obvious by looking at it. And there were immediate villains to rightfully blame.

TED S. WARREN, FILE - THE AP In this March 11 file photo, a worker from a Servpro disaster recovery team wearing a protective suit and respirator peers out a window as he waits to exit the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Wash., for a break from cleaning the facility.