It’s hard to remember the moment when we first began to worry. My partner was recovering from surgery as the first case surfaced in Codogno, so we were in the midst of our own medical drama as Italy’s began to unfold. It wasn’t a pandemic yet, just one case. The next day, it was thirty-six. We live in Turin, in the country’s north. Lombardy, the next province over, felt far away. We still thought they would contain it. We were dutiful in our use of the hand sanitiser dispensers as we paced the ward, but she’s on immune-suppressing medication, so we’re always careful.

Is it just the year I’m having, or do crises seem to overlap with greater frequency? A few months ago I was writing about Australia’s bushfires while standing knee-deep in the floodwaters in Venice. I recently joked with ABC RN that I was becoming the Book Show’s catastrophe correspondent. Maybe the world is like this now, a series of rolling emergencies without enough time between to measure meaning. Maybe that’s just what it feels like to live through a pandemic. It reminds me what it felt like to be broke.