Over the time I’ve been here, New York has become the center of the pandemic and America has become more and more on lockdown. I have learned to live with the restrictions and have even drawn some lessons from it.

First, as a writer, I normally work from home. I need the isolation for concentration. I find it quite hard to write around others. But now, multitudes, including my children and many of my friends, are also working from home. It occurs to me, and to many of them, that much of what they were doing in the offices was unnecessary, that emails could have easily substituted for many of the meetings, that they could be just as productive from their couches as from any conference room.

Second, news doesn’t always need to be followed hour to hour. This may seem an odd statement coming from a newspaper person and a cable news commentator, but I have found over the last couple of weeks that a little bit less is a whole lot more. I now check the news once in the morning and once at night. And I skip Donald Trump’s horrid, propagandistic news conferences and their misinformation. I am convinced that the only people who need to watch those are the reporters who cover them and the fact checkers who correct them. Those events have become as much a threat to public health as the virus itself.

Third, it has been revelatory for me just how unprepared we were, not just in terms of emergency readiness, but also psychologically. I will fully admit that I had a hard time letting the true magnitude of this set it. For a long time, I simply couldn’t get my head around how dangerous this virus was and how completely it had changed the world as I knew it. Up until three days before I was to travel to Spain, I was still foolishly contemplating continuing with my plans.

Fourth, people around the world, and particularly here in the United States, have a rebellious spirit that is on full display during this crisis. Even if the 80 or 90 percent of people who are able to do so comply with instructions to stay home and stay safe, 10 to 20 percent won’t. Complete compliance is simply impossible. Some people just don’t want to feel controlled. They don’t want to feel afraid. They have been worn thin by disaster warnings. Yes, some, many even, are just foolish, selfish and reckless, but there is also a cowboy component.