At least it is until we go around for “check-in.” One of our friends lets us know her son is quarantined in his room. The boy has tested positive.

•

On Tuesday, the 24th, I find the world changed by an overnight snowfall. There’s a good six inches surrounding us, and the world is mysterious and still. Later, I take a walk alone through my neighborhood. I hear the sound of water rushing over rocks beneath the snow. It is a clear, hopeful sound.

That day, there are 42,164 confirmed cases in the United States; 471 Americans have died.

The president says it’s almost time to phase out the period of isolation. “I give it two weeks,” he says. By Easter, he says, “we will be just raring to go.”

If we do this, one scientist says, “Covid would spread widely, rapidly, terribly, and could kill potentially millions in the year ahead.” So there’s that.

•

That evening, my daughter shaves the sides of her head. An “undercut,” she calls it. She doesn’t ask me what I think about this, which is just as well. I remember how much my own mother hated my hair, which is fairly long. “It makes you look like Ann Coulter,” she told me, knowing how this would get under my skin. “Are you happy with it?” I ask my daughter. She says she is.

Several days later, she dyes the rest of it pink. She does not look like Ann Coulter.

•

I wake in the middle of the night, worried and neurotic. I have asthma, which gets triggered by stress. Now, lying there in the dark, I convince myself I am symptomatic and reach for my inhaler, gasping for breath. The puffer makes a soft hiss in the black room.

I do not have the coronavirus. But worrying about it is making me crazy.

In “Little Dorrit,” Mr. Meagles laments: “I am like a sane man shut up in a mad house. I can’t stand the suspicion of the thing. I came here as well as ever I was in my life; but to suspect me of the plague is to give me the plague. And I have had it—and I have got it.”