“Do we want to be those people?” my daughter, Yolka, asked. She meant, Do we want to be the rich white people who leave the besieged city because they can?

“Yes,” I said. I explained that we wanted to be those people who break the chain of contagion in our apartment building, where, every time we went outside, we touched at least three doorknobs and two elevator buttons. And, if we got very ill, we wanted to be those people who were not stressing this already overtaxed city, taking up hospital beds that were needed by people who didn’t have the option of leaving.

We rented a car. We rented a house. We drove, stopping only once—to refuel, using disinfected gloves. On Monday, March 16th, we arrived in Falmouth, Massachusetts, a town on Cape Cod where my seventy-five-year-old father lives. The town has a hospital with more than a hundred beds, for a year-round population of just over thirty thousand, and it’s only about an hour’s drive from the Boston Medical Area, a cluster of hospitals unlike any other in the country. My twenty-one-year-old son flew in from college the following day, we conducted one giant shopping trip, and we commenced our quarantine. My father is also under quarantine, because of possible exposure in Boston, where he works; we haven’t seen him or anyone else.

A couple of days after we arrived in Falmouth, a narrative had started to take hold across the Northeast. “Coronavirus leads to class warfare in the Hamptons,” a headline in the New York Post announced. The Times reported that tensions were mounting in the Catskills. The spectre haunting these stories was that of a wealthy Manhattanite who knows or suspects that she is infected with the coronavirus and wants to get treatment at the small, underequipped local hospital. The Post story had two of these anecdotes, one in Southampton and the other in East Hampton, but neither account was firsthand. The journalist Caroline Kitchener, writing about Nantucket, tweeted that “someone drove to the hospital as soon as they arrived,” though her story for The Lily omitted this anecdote. Word on Martha’s Vineyard—a short ferry ride from Falmouth—is that the first person to test positive there was a New York real-estate agent who came into town for a closing. Chris Priore, who owns a construction business on the island, told me about it, citing a story in the Martha’s Vineyard Times as his source. In fact, the story identified the first Martha’s Vineyard coronavirus patient as a local resident, though it did say that the person was “previously from New York” and mentioned a real-estate closing.

But, the day after the first confirmed case on Martha’s Vineyard, the presidents of the Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket hospitals issued a joint statement asking people who were not already on the islands to stay away. Members of the state legislature who represent the islands asked the Massachusetts governor, Charlie Baker, to restrict travel to the islands and consider deploying the National Guard. (At this writing, Nantucket has eight confirmed cases of the coronavirus and has not released information on whether the patients are local residents, while Martha’s Vineyard has six confirmed cases.)

Massachusetts has closed schools, restaurants, and bars, and taken other anti-pandemic measures, but Baker has insisted that construction should be allowed to continue. (Both islands have since officially banned all construction locally.) Priore, however, told me that he has declined to do work on houses on Martha’s Vineyard with seasonal inhabitants who were considering coming to the island now—one family, for example, wanted him to open up their house and replace the water heater. He has refused to do such work, primarily to protect himself but also because, as he told me, he is ambivalent about helping any second-home owners at this time. Like most year-round residents, Priore, who is forty-one, depends on the summer crowd for much of his income, so, he said, “It’s very conflicting for me.” To explain to his regular customers why he was turning them away, he said, he showed them the hospital presidents’ statement.

Another Martha’s Vineyard resident I interviewed suggested that people coming to the island should be tested for the coronavirus before they are allowed entrance, and said that, as long as that’s not feasible, no one should be coming. Rick Hamilton, who is sixty-five, also depends on summer business: he is a boat captain who mostly ferries people to and from their own boats. He doesn’t want his customers arriving yet. “In a week or two, we are going to explode,” he told me, his voice cracking. “You can hear the stress.” It sounded more like terror.

Especially after President Trump ratcheted up mentions of New Yorkers during his coronavirus briefings—at one point even suggesting that he would place the tri-state area on lockdown—discussions on local online forums in Falmouth were becoming more heated. In a Facebook group called “Falmouth Discussion,” people were sharing pictures of New York license plates that they had spotted in town. Someone posted that she had seen a local branch of a national business chain deny entry to a customer who had driven up in a car with New York plates. I contacted one of the outspoken opponents of part-timers via Facebook Messenger, and she wrote to me, “They think because they own a property here and pay taxes that they have a right to be here. The truth of it all is that, we don’t have enough medical staff, equipment, food, etc to sustain those of us who are full time residents. . . . We are too small to deal with selfish, greedy, know it alls who come here when we can’t even take care of our own.” (She then instructed me not to use her name.)

On Thursday, Falmouth put up electronic display boards along the highway: “ATTN: COVID-19 NOTICE / METRO NY ARRIVALS REQUESTD / 14 DAY SLF QUARANTINE.” When the governor of Rhode Island, Gina Raimondo, mobilized the police and the National Guard to stop cars with New York license plates and to go house to house to look for New Yorkers, in order to enforce self-quarantine, “Falmouth Discussion” lit up with demands for Governor Baker to do the same—and, of course, to close the two bridges to Cape Cod for everything but deliveries.

On another discussion board, “Engage Falmouth,” where the politics skew more progressive, weariness mixed with sympathy. “I understand the fear pushing people to come stay,” Pamela McCarthy, one of the moderators of the group, wrote to me on Facebook Messenger. McCarthy, who is fifty, lives in Mashpee, which borders Falmouth, and commutes to work at a university in Boston. “I am not sure how much good it will do people to stay somewhere else. I don’t think you can really escape the virus. I think practicing social distance where you currently are is the best bet right now.” When I pointed out that social distancing is relatively easy in Falmouth—where most houses are single-family and many lakes, ponds, and wildlife reserves separate living communities from one another—she wrote, “People still have to get to the store and the pharmacy. And they may still get sick.”