Living and working with COVID-19

Year of Plagues: A Memoir of 2020, by poet, novelist, and playwright Fred D’Agular, is his first nonfiction work. In it, he describes his personal diagnosis with Stage 4 cancer during a year marked by a new public health crisis and public reckoning with ages-old racial injustice.

Plague Journals and the Need to Capture Time by Alissa Wilkinson considers ‘Why do we preserve the scary, endless pandemic days?’ and in its closing paragraphs discusses several of the efforts writers and artists have made to record this pandemic time, March 11, 2021

‘Right Now Feels So Long and Without Any End in Sight’/Dear Diary: This Pandemic Has Been a Bear, by Benedict Carey reporting on (and providing excerpts from) The Pandemic Journaling Project, on February 15, 2021

Student Voice: 100 Argument Essays by Teens on Issues That Matter, an anthology from The New York Times Learning Network of essays written by 13-to-18-year-olds includes essays on COVID-19, edited by Katherine Schulten, 2020

How Did I Catch the Coronavirus? by Carolyn Kormann recounts her experience having COVID-19 and constitutes a “parable revealing the limits of both contact tracing and preventive measures to avoid this “atmospheric threat.”

‘I Wish I Could Do Something for You,’ My Doctor Said—The day before this 33 year old woman became ill, she ran 3 miles, walked 10, and ran up 5 flights of stairs; a month later with lingering pneumonia, she still sleeps on her stomach and comments in this May 14, 2020 commentary that “many of my neighbors didn’t make it.”

A woman living alone: Seven stories of solitude during the coronavirus, from ages 24 to 86 by Caroline Kitchener with illustrations by Olivia Waller

How New Jersey’s First Coronavirus Patient Survived by Susan Dominus—the story of the first person in New Jersey to test positive for COVID-19

My Whole Household Has COVID-19—Deborah Copakan in The Atlantic, March 27, 2020—Also, as a “public service announcement,” Copakan recorded her cough that might be said to speak for itself.

St. Mary’s College Student Came Home from Spain with COVID-19, NPR, March 30, 2020

A pictorial narrative, 14 Days of Enforced Home Quarantine by artist Gareth Fuller

Wuhan Diaries

Swabs, STAT! Inside Puritan Medical Products Co., a narrative of the company producing the swabs the diagnostic testing requires, Bloomberg, March 25, 2020

Reflecting on COVID-19—from the computer, from the head of the Center for Bioethics & Health Law, from the heart, March 24 – April 3, 2020