Read: Dear Therapist’s guide to staying sane during a pandemic

The total force of the coronavirus pandemic is still to come, but millions of American households have already set up their own crisis-response centers on the fly, trying to plan for a future more uncertain than it has been in living memory. For many, all that’s left to do is to sit at home and brace for an unimaginable impact.

Single days are now so jam-packed with news—often bad, sometimes just profoundly weird—that they feel like weeks. In only 48 hours, so much changed: Local governments ordered 6 million people in the San Francisco Bay Area to shelter in place, closing all nonessential businesses. New York City shut down the country’s largest school system, which had until then been kept open for students who rely on it for food. New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut closed thousands of restaurants, bars, theaters, and gyms in tandem. Similar measures were implemented in Washington, Indiana, Florida, North Carolina, and beyond. The virus darkened lights on the Las Vegas Strip and ended the party on Bourbon Street. Much of America became housebound in the span of two days, many people without pay.

The coping mechanisms people are employing to deal with the sudden onslaught of acute, apparently interminable stress are often just as extreme. Panicked shoppers have swept supermarket shelves clean, and the young and old alike have reacted in defiance, flooding Florida beaches for spring break and refusing to cancel their cruises. The Nintendo Switch gaming console has sold out at many retailers as people look for in-home diversions. My father, a generally reasonable 73-year-old who would be at serious risk of COVID-19’s worst complications, has been so difficult to keep in the house that my mother has half—and only half—jokingly threatened to report his car as stolen if he goes anywhere but the grocery store.

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I sit on my couch for hours, looking for more news or epidemiological research, constantly aware of my quickened, anxious heartbeat. Sometimes I stop to consider whether my lymph nodes feel swollen or my forehead feels warm. Is my throat scratchy, or am I just thirsty? Did I already take my allergy pill today? Is this what my allergies usually feel like? Am I flushed because I’m panicking? The virus can look like anything from a spring cold to a virulent stomach bug, which makes every tiny bodily change all the more alarming when you can’t do much but wait for something to go wrong. I call my mom and text my friends to make sure everyone is staying inside when they can; they are, mostly. We speculate about how safe it is to go for walks outside. I wonder whether the store my asthmatic little brother works in will close before he catches the coronavirus, and then I wonder how likely my elderly parents, with whom he lives, would be to get it too. From my living room window in Brooklyn, I can see a man in an orange sweatshirt who has been running in circles around the rooftop of a building a couple of blocks away for the last half an hour, like a sad polar bear at the zoo.