Last week, much of San Francisco was in a state of denial. Many of the tech shuttles had halted service, and a slate of local conferences had been cancelled. Still, I received e-mails from a neighborhood yoga studio, a local dispensary, and several hair salons assuring customers that they were open for business. “Let’s be healthy and well,” an e-mail from a bath house in Japantown read. “Let’s lift the vibration globally to allow this to be a time of healing.” An upscale New American restaurant in the Mission, known for its wine list and seasonal fare, wrote to say that it was temporarily switching to a soup-only menu: asparagus vichyssoise with Dungeness crab; carrot-ginger with Greek yogurt; Tuscan minestrone with pancetta and wild peas. “This is a brilliant food-safety strategy,” I said to my boyfriend studiously. I also was having trouble reading between the lines.

On Thursday evening, I walked from my apartment to a theatre near City Hall, where I was scheduled to do an event—a conversation with another writer. The coffee shops and stores were quieter than usual, but the parklets were full. It felt a little like Burning Man week, the city’s annual exhalation, when thousands drain out to the playa. The clocks had changed, and it was still sunny and warm, a slow slide into summer. I felt gaslit by the weather. I paused to check my phone outside a bakery, where two men wearing sunglasses relaxed at a sidewalk table, eating pastries. Maybe it’s all right, I thought, scrolling through headlines that told me otherwise. One of the men coughed, and I turned my back to him.

The theatre, a beautiful nineteen-twenties auditorium, had the still, cool air of a tomb. The event organizers had decided to live-stream the event rather than cancel it outright, and a cleaning crew of two moved silently through tight rows of crimson seats, sanitizing. A few minutes before the event was slated to begin, we took our seats onstage, in two armchairs positioned beneath warm photographer’s lights, as if posing for a furniture catalogue. I felt a steady, gnawing panic. I could not hold an idea. I wanted to cry, but I was in my thirties, and on a live stream.

“I have heard people suggest that folks in Silicon Valley were perhaps a little ahead of the curve, because they have really good intuitions for exponential processes,” the other writer said. “Do you think that a founder of a social network actually does get something about a pandemic that, say, a politician would not?” I felt caught between my long-standing opinions and recent developments. For weeks, venture capitalists and founders had been tweeting about their own prescience, attributing their cautionary measures to familiarity with the sort of exponential growth curves exhibited by successful startups. I didn’t mind the warning, which was fundamentally useful; I minded the smugness, the implication of superiority or exceptionalism. At the same time, in the absence of trustworthy government authorities, tech companies had been ahead of the curve: closing offices, halting shuttles, cancelling conferences, suspending travel, taking it seriously. I gave a terrible, unsatisfying answer. Embarrassed, I laughed nervously at all my own jokes. (On a live stream, every joke bombs.)

That night, I went to dinner with a group of people I didn’t know well. On the way there, I passed a night club with open doors. Inside, a band was playing to a good-sized crowd; on the street, a man with a mask hanging around his neck smoked a cigarette. The restaurant was half full of people eating from shared plates; the panicky feeling intensified. As we sat down, someone asked if I was a mom. I was not a mom, I said, feeling oddly guilty about it. “You need to get on the mom threads,” she told me helpfully. She recounted a piece of information that had recently been shared in one of her group chats: drinking water every fifteen minutes, she said, would flush the virus down the digestive tract, and then stomach acid would kill it. This did not sound quite right, I said, picking up a glass of water and draining it. I excused myself quickly, worried I would have a panic attack. When I got home, I took a shower and looked up the mom-thread advice. Google returned several articles warning against it as a hoax. The next morning, I woke up to an e-mail from a relative containing the exact same misinformation. Right, I thought. It went viral.

I stayed home. I stayed home. I stayed home. On Friday night, we needed things. Outside, everything was still there: incredible, a miracle. The sun was setting. I walked to a nearby market for groceries, passing a group of six or seven people who were standing outside an apartment building, chattering happily. “Wait,” one said. “Is he hot?” I passed a couple my age, arms locked and heads bent together, singing quietly and dancing a slow, theatrical shuffle down the block. By the market, a newly opened restaurant was well lit and bustling. At one table, a dozen people, maybe an intergenerational family, were celebrating.

The market was well stocked and not busy. The abundance was startling. There were baskets of citrus, shelves of cereal, tubs of onions and sprouting garlic. I circumvented the produce, as if it were poisonous. After each customer had paid and left, the cashier pulled a fresh disinfectant wipe from a nearby tube and rubbed everything down: the register, the counter, the credit-card reader. Even with this measure, the mundane point-of-sale ritual––handing over my card, signing the receipt, nestling everything into an ill-sized tote bag––felt reassuring. On the walk back, I passed a jogger in a reflective vest. A delivery-app courier exited a white minivan, walked up the steps of a crisply painted Victorian, and deposited a bag of food on the porch.

I wanted to know what our neighbors were doing. Amazon, via a module advertising “trending items” near me, offered a strange and slanted perspective: disinfectant wipes, cough-and-cold medication, barbecue-flavored seed mix. A friend in Los Angeles e-mailed to say that he was cancelling his wedding. A friend in New Orleans, a public defender, posted an Instagram story soliciting donations to help his incarcerated clients post bail and buy commissary soap. Friends in New York announced the temporary closures of their restaurants; friends in Point Reyes announced the temporary closure of their bookstore. Brushing my teeth, I watched a trio of ants making their way across the edge of the shower. Don’t they know? I thought, deranged.

On the Internet, every open tab was a porthole to some new horror: ventilator shortages, death-toll projections, layoffs, Disneyland, spring break. Still, social media was proving itself helpful in a crisis. Funding drives for laid-off workers were launched. Spreadsheets and Google Docs outlining strategies for mutual-aid responses were circulated. An Instagram account run by volunteer couriers sprang up, offering services to the ill or high-risk. “I’m off the whole week so my availability knows no limits,” a woman in San Francisco posted. Volunteers in Vancouver, Bozeman, Dallas, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Portland said that they could provide free dog walking, grocery shopping, babysitting, and transportation; one offered emotional support, tarot readings, poem readings, meal prep, specialized playlists. A venture capitalist put out a call for virus-related startups and projects to fund. “The Jelly Cam is here for you,” the Monterey Bay Aquarium tweeted, with a link to its live-streamed exhibits. The city’s museums joined a social-media campaign, #MuseumFromHome, linking to art work and objects in digital collections, including a leather jacket owned by Albert Einstein. “Take a break from the mainstream media chaos, turn off your TV, and get lost in music,” an e-mail from the San Francisco Disco Preservation Society, a nonprofit audio archive, suggested.