Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You

As of last weekend, SoulCycle and Flywheel were packed, as were bars, restaurants, clothing stores and coffee shops. As of Monday, “there was a line out the door at [East Hampton restaurant] Mary’s and Starbucks,” says the Springs resident. “If you’re going to make such a hoopla over leaving the city and hoarding your food, why not stay in your million-dollar mansion on the waterfront? Don’t go to Starbucks! I’m sure you have a coffeemaker.”

Last weekend, Albronda says, “there were a couple of restaurants so overcrowded that the police had to come and thin them out. No one’s taking this as seriously as they should be. They’re just being selfish. If this disease spreads out here, that will be why.”

And a fair amount of these panic-fleers don’t own homes out here. “We started early,” says East Hampton realtor Dawn Neway, who works with her sister Diana. “We have a lot of high-end clients, and we noticed when the private schools were closing, before the panic, they weren’t going to travel. They were canceling trips to Aspen for spring break. We had one client call, budget range from $400,000 to $1 million, year-round, starting now. I’ve never seen anything like this.”…

Southampton Hospital, which serves East Hampton, Bridgehampton, Sag Harbor, Noyack, Amagansett, Hampton Bays, Montauk, and of course Southampton, has 125 beds. Only eight are ICU. While a spokeswoman told The Post the hospital is preparing for more, locals here aren’t encouraged.

“How many [ventilators] do you think they have in there?” asks Katsipis. “Ten? Twenty? The city has a lot more hospitals and, not for nothing, better care. Southampton is just not equipped for a pandemic.”

“That hospital is extremely small,” says the Springs resident, who was treated there extensively last year and says there are only four quarantine rooms. “You already get treated in the ER hallway in the summer. We don’t have any medical resources here.”

Compounding the problem is the lack of ambulances. Each firehouse has only two or three, and firefighters and paramedics are not on site — when a call comes in, they’re alerted at home, and they must make the drive to the firehouse and then to the emergency. And all East End firefighters are volunteers.

“It’s a state of emergency now,” says a spokeswoman for an East End fire department.

As a born-and-bred city dweller, I’d much rather be close to a hospital than far from ‘the other’. I understand people, like the Blogmaster, who’d just as lief be entirely self-sufficient… but I have a small house, my dearest friend, our cats & dogs, a tiny yard for isolating-in-place, while also being within easy reach of some of the best hospitals in the world. That’s my happy place! (And, yes, I do realize exactly how privileged this makes me.)

While we’re talking clueless rich people… anyone else remember the Mad-Man-era ‘Aryan from Darien’ jokes that followed guys like ‘Poppy’ Bush around?

When rich people wonder why they're being vilified—and then do this. #COVID19 https://t.co/vjGm7UfTMz

— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) March 20, 2020

The median household income in Darien is like $208,000. (I wrote about it once!)

— Amanda Fortini (@amandafortini) March 20, 2020

Chloë Sevigny is from there and also calls it Aryan Darien. Also, in the 1958 movie Auntie Mame, the titular character laments that she doesn't want her nephew to move there and become "an Aryan from Darien." So, they've had a bad rep for a long time.

— Levi Wilson (@leviisevil) March 20, 2020

Lots of angry Darien residents in my DMs because I tweeted a story from their local paper!

Also, update from that same paper: there will be a new test site opening at the high school on Mondayhttps://t.co/Ed7D5YAHWg

— Anne Helen Petersen (@annehelen) March 20, 2020

Lying awake that night two weeks ago, Brueck remembered hearing about the first confirmed case of coronavirus disease in his state — a man who’d traveled to Italy and then returned to Colorado, where he went skiing at nearby Keystone Resort and Vail Mountain.

The Friday before feeling symptoms, Brueck had worked his restaurant job in the same area…

Normally around this time of year, the prime ski spots within Eagle County’s borders — Vail, Beaver Creek and Avon among them — would be flush with tourists from all over the world enjoying the Rocky Mountains and the sprawling hospitality-based economy that’s sprung up around them over the years.

Now, the slopes are closed. The Eagle County Regional Airport’s arrivals board is a red wall of cancellations. The area has emptied of international tourists and seasonal workers, whom resorts kicked out by the hundreds earlier this week.

Unlike many large, urban COVID-19 hotspots, the outbreak in Eagle County is affecting small towns, some of which are home to service workers who, Avon said, sometimes don’t have internet access. On Friday, the mayor was preparing to distribute print-outs of Cook’s op-ed around a mobile home park in town. Other towns facing a surge in cases ought to get creative when it comes to informing residents, Smith Hymes said.

“Somehow, at the earliest possible opportunity, even if you have to use alarmist language, they have to get the message out any way they can about how serious the situation is,” she said…

Which worries Ed Kilgore, at NYMag:

… Now that Trump has gotten the memo, and is at least rhetorically echoing expert assessments of the threat posed by COVID-19 and what Americans must do to stem its spread, there’s still a big gap in perceptions. As Ron Brownstein observes, it involves geographical differences that reinforce partisan differences:

If the virus never becomes pervasive beyond big cities, that could reinforce the sense among many Republican voters and office-holders that the threat has been overstated. It could also fuel the kind of xenophobia that Trump and other GOP leaders, such as Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, have encouraged by labeling the disease the “Chinese virus” or the “Wuhan virus.”…

But even if (or, more likely, when) the virus spreads beyond the big metropolitan areas, there’s a chance it will simply reinforce small-town and rural hostility to the culturally alien influence of big-city folk aligned with foreigners, given the more cosmopolitan (demographically and economically as well) nature of Urban America…

Indeed, there was an urban-rural split in perceptions of the threat posed by the last great pandemic just over a century ago:

Eva Kassens-Noor, a professor in the global-urban-studies program at Michigan State University, studied urban/rural patterns in the 1918 flu pandemic in India. Her research found that mortality was much greater in urban places above a certain density level than in rural places below it. She believes that U.S. communities will experience the coronavirus in contrasting, but complex, ways: While the disease will probably spread more rapidly in urban areas, she says, more of the population there is young and healthy. And while outbreaks may not be as pervasive in rural America, they could still prove very damaging because the population is older and has less access to quality health care.

In other words, we could see higher mortality from COVID-19 in nonmetro areas, even if the number of cases (and the perceived need for strong mitigation measures) is lower.

So how will that play out psychologically and politically? It’s possible confidence in Trump and his administration will flag in Red America as the pandemic ceases to be mostly a blue-state, big-city phenomenon. But it’s also possible heartland insularity will feed on itself and embitter endangered people even more toward the godless, elitist mongrels of the East and West Coasts and the pathogens they breed.