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"\n\n[#iframe: http://audm.herokuapp.com/player-embed?pub=newyorker&articleID=5e8522f8328c5600084cf7f7](100%x90)\n\n+++dropcap\n\nOn January 31st, my mother texted the group. My uncle replied, and then my aunt, my cousin, my mother again, my uncle, my aunt. My aunt is a nurse. She types very fast and sometimes I wake up to twenty, thirty text boxes from her. I did not reply immediately because I was still reading the cycle of chats from earlier. My father did not reply because typing Chinese tires him out. My grandmother finally replied to say that panicking was useless—Delta had cancelled her flight from Detroit to Shanghai, so we would just have to rebook. China Eastern was still flying out and we got her on the next available flight, on March 30th, a month later than planned. My parents live in Detroit and my grandmother was visiting them. She lives in Nanjing. My uncle and aunt live in Nanjing. My cousin lives in Shanghai. I live in New York.\n\n+++\n\nThe new flight was to leave from J.F.K. and my grandmother is eighty-seven. She is alert, funny and sardonic, a retired city architect and a longtime professor in the field. But her head can tilt while she talks. She is hard of hearing and unsteady on stairs. She has hypertension, arthritis, insomnia. My parents planned to drive her from Detroit to New York, where we would see her off. Privately, my mother asked me to find my grandmother a face mask.\n\nI asked my closest college friend, a doctor. She had been packing all month to move into a condo that she and her husband bought. He broke his leg on a ski trip and couldn’t help. The week of their move, because of firmer social-distancing measures, the condo board asked them to wait. Unfortunately, they could not—new tenants were about to move into their rental. At a large hospital in New York, my friend was preparing three floors for *COVID*{: .small}\\-19, eight I.C.U.s in total, where she predicts that supplies will become scarce. She put the face mask for my grandmother in a floral gift bag and left it with her doorman. In the bag was also a tin of hot-chocolate mix.\n\nWho would believe this? I ask my fiction class, now online, to consider the credibility of events and what a reader will accept.\n\nNot so long ago, I studied epidemiology. For my doctorate, I had been trained in chronic-disease epidemiology, but infectious-disease data are not unfamiliar. I.D. epidemiology starts with models, moving people from bins of susceptible (S) to infected (I) to recovered (R) and, potentially, back to bin S. The true flow rates between these bins are still unknown—and probably vary by country, by health system, and by speed of preventive response—which explains why current predictions have such a huge range for the coronavirus. Under the subject line “crazy times,” my doctoral adviser and I have been e-mailing. He has two teen-age kids, both now home from school. He believes that a concept should never be so complex that he cannot explain it to them. To simplify details, the key word is “exponential.” Exponential growth and impact.\n\nIn January and February, my uncle sent us a daily ticker count of the number of cases in China and the number of deaths. The count window had a calming blue border and a white typeface. In March, he began sending a ticker count for Europe and the U.S. By the numbers, China is now safer than most of the world. But the country is trying to fend off a second wave, and this comes at a cost for its citizens abroad.\n\nIt took my entire family several days to figure out “the procedure.” After landing in Shanghai, my grandmother would wait in a multi-hour screening line to receive a green, red, or yellow card. Coming from New York, she would almost certainly receive a yellow one. I think of soccer, which my grandmother likes to watch. She sits formally and with her arms crossed. When the ball is passed well, she lifts her arms up an inch and says “good ball, good ball.” From Shanghai, she would board a bus to Kunshan, where Jiangsu authorities will screen her again. Then another bus to Nanjing, where she will be quarantined at home for two weeks. On the first and the last days, a health worker will come to check her temperature. My uncle will be allowed to deliver food, but only to the doorstep. The door cannot be opened.\n\nOn March 25th, the flight was cancelled, as were most April flights to China, and my grandmother is still waiting to be rebooked. Once her visa expires, she will have trouble reapplying for another, which will make it hard for her to visit us again in the future, so most likely she won’t. I am looking into what we can do about her pills. Her doctors are in China. Will she be able to see one here?\n\nEpidemiologists follow populations. We study how large groups funnel from unexposed to exposed, from control to case. The larger the sample, the higher the case number. The higher the case number, the more precise the results. We do not think in terms of anecdotes or individuals. At the individual level, statistics break down. But my grandmother is part of a statistic. She is one of many people in the large bin of S, and if she moves into I she becomes an anecdote.&nbsp;♦\n\n***\n## More from This Collection\n- Karen Russell on [the language of the pandemic](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/a-temporary-moment-in-time?itm_content=footer-recirc).\n- Gary Shteyngart on [adjusting to life under quarantine](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/the-prophylactic-life?itm_content=footer-recirc).\n- Maggie Nelson on [finding moments of calm](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/the-new-calm?itm_content=footer-recirc).\n- Lorrie Moore on [pandemic as a kind of zombie apocalypse](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/the-nurses-office?itm_content=footer-recirc).\n- Rick Moody on [the challenges of remote learning](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/humanism-vs-zoom?itm_content=footer-recirc).\n- Edwidge Danticat on [how the coronavirus will affect immigrant communities](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/ripple-effects?itm_content=footer-recirc).\n- Vinson Cunningham on [mental exercises to ward off horror](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/the-geometry-of-walking?itm_content=footer-recirc).\n- Ben Lerner on [what really matters to Trump](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/trumps-numbers?itm_content=footer-recirc).\n- Rebecca Mead on [how London looks during the pandemic](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/londons-avenue-of-superfluities?itm_content=footer-recirc).\n- Bryan Washington on [the grocers on the front lines in Houston](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/the-grocers-on-houstons-front-lines?itm_content=footer-recirc).\n- Donald Antrim on [how music can bring relief](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/music-will-be-important?itm_content=footer-recirc).\n\n"
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/flight-home>