I’m an anxious person at the best of times, and I have hoarded knowledge in lieu of toilet paper: I’ve learned about the need to avoid large gatherings in order to reduce the likelihood of so many people getting the disease at once that the healthcare system finds itself completely overwhelmed. I’ve learned about the severely limited numbers of hospital beds per capita in the United States, the even more severely limited numbers of ventilators. I’ve read about ground-glass opacities, hazy spots that appear in the lungs and are often a marker of the disease; I’ve read about how severe cases feel like drowning on dry land, gasping for breaths that won’t come. I’ve read about the number of cases in the United States—just shy of 3,000—and about how the egregious lack of reliable and widespread testing in this country means that that number is likely a fraction of the true number of cases in our states and cities. And most of all, I’ve read about how social-isolation measures, rapidly and broadly implemented, can prevent the complete breakdown of healthcare systems.

These measures could keep young and healthy people, who are also susceptible to getting seriously ill and subject to the effects of an overburdened health system, from contracting the disease and spreading it to the people in their lives who are neither young nor healthy. While many cases in ICUs around the world are people under 50, it is their parents and grandparents, as well as people with asthma, diabetes, compromised immune systems and lung or heart ailments who are far likelier to succumb. For those people, the virus will be an unbearable stress on fragile bodies, and will cause them to die.

It’s a curious time: the silence before the thunder, before the trumpets and the timpani. A brief pause while the conductor wipes his specs, before the cases climb into the tens of thousands, before ICUs and cemeteries fill and burst. The virus incubates for days before showing symptoms; in many cases those symptoms mimic those of flu, or cold, or even seasonal allergies. After all, the sun is coming out after a long winter, the pollen is falling like a yellow rain. Each day is followed by a morning, still. It feels heavy, itchy, terrible to know—and not to doubt—that we are most likely to wind up like Italy, a country on lockdown and with tens of thousands of cases and more than a thousand deaths. To know that something big and heavy is falling out of the sky, that its shadow is on our faces as it hurtles down towards us. It is hard to stomach knowing that there are those who will continue life as usual until they cannot; harder to know that they might die, or kill others, without ever having felt a severe symptom.

Those who continue to hold and to attend large social gatherings–from churches to weddings to big sweaty dance parties—are hard to fault entirely. Humans are social, restive creatures; the cruelty of isolation is largely because we are hard-wired to receive comfort from one another. Solitary confinement is torturous for a reason. For some, the most fitting response to collective fear is bravado: a “we must continue to live in the face of terror” attitude, as though coronavirus were the Germans of World War I or hijackers of 9/11, and defiance was on order, and joy noble and courageous and best performed in crowds. Or a “carpe diem” attitude –let’s live and be sexy and daring before we all die!—as if the virus were a hurricane or an inevitable flood that would swallow each of us. But it is not war or a storm: it is already here and it is in our lungs and it is growing, and its principal burden will not be borne by the young and healthy, those who want to howl at the night that they are still alive (although they too will suffer). It will be borne by those who had less breath to howl in the first place.

Those who can help us have done little, or nothing at all; those we cannot help are myriad. This is the terrible quiet before the storm breaks over us. There is only the piteous sound of a truth that so many refuse to hear, and the other truth that dawn will come and brush its fingers against our drawn blinds come morning. The crocuses are out already, opening their purple mouths to breathe in the terrible spring.

Talia Lavin is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her first book, Culture Warlords, is forthcoming in 2020 from Hachette Books.