KIRKLAND, Wash. – On Friday morning last week I went for a jog, heading down a hill near my house outside Seattle, toward Lake Washington, then banking right into a neighborhood near my two-year-old son’s favorite park. The one with the swings and the gentle slope he calls “the mountain.” Along the way, on NE 120th Street, I passed a maroon sign—a fleeting bit of scenery then; an ominous harbinger of pandemic now. In white letters it read: LIFE CARE CENTER OF KIRKLAND.
I thought nothing then of the nondescript nursing home, nestled among apartment complexes and pine trees, until later that day news broke all over the world: Patients and workers at the facility had been diagnosed with the respiratory (and super-contagious) disease known as COVID-19.