sweat. Please, God, don’t let that be me, he thought.
He held up his cellphone, shaking a little — from fever, from shock — and took a photo of the image of the tweet on the television news. He was sure that the governor was talking about him, and yet he was praying that he wasn’t. Soon after that, an emergency-room doctor came in and told him what he’d already known in the deep part of his psyche that always prepared for the worst: Cai was in fact the first patient in New Jersey to test positive for Covid-19.
Cai worked about six days a week for a medical practice that had four offices around the metropolitan area, most of them in heavily Chinese and Chinese-American neighborhoods like Flushing and Chinatown. Many of his closest colleagues and friends were immigrants and medical professionals like him. As soon as he saw the television news, Cai had texted the photo he’d taken to one of them, his close friend Yili Huang, a cardiologist in private practice and affiliated with Mount Sinai. “It can’t be,” his friend wrote back. Now Cai let him know that it was true: The test was positive. Earlier, Balani, trying to reassure him, said that even if he had it, he was most likely past the worst phase of a coronavirus infection: the first two days. “She didn’t lie to me, right?” he asked his friend. Huang tried to be comforting, “Of course not,” he wrote. But now that Huang knew that his friend really had tested positive, it dawned on him that Cai was alone in a room facing what could be a life-threatening virus, in a hospital where no one had ever encountered it.
Cai and Huang met five years earilier
at a professional dinner. Each came to the United States when he was young, Cai at 14, Huang at 11. They instantly bonded over their love of the Shanghai waterfront and their similar accent (“a charming accent, very smooth,” is how Huang describes it). Huang had, among many of his friends, a reputation as a big-brother type — someone who followed up to see how your mother was feeling if she had been ill; who always finessed picking up the check; who lent money to his friends if he thought he could help them with a good investment. Cai called Huang his brother and considered him part of his extended family.
Just a few weeks earlier, Huang and Cai were catching up on the phone when the subject of the coronavirus came up. Huang, an optimist, reassured Cai that he didn’t think Covid-19 would ever be a crisis in this country, an opinion many of their colleagues shared. SARS, Ebola, MERS — none of them ever posed a public-health threat here. And soon it would be warm, when many viruses seemed to disappear. Cai was relieved to hear Huang’s assessment, but at the urging of his wife, he prepared for the possibility that the pandemic would reach the East Coast and do real harm. As early as late February — when people in New York were still flying around the globe, clutching poles on the subway, hugging friends hello — Cai made two trips to Costco in Brooklyn to buy provisions: frozen vegetables. Frozen fruit. Twenty pounds of rice. Protein shakes, just in case. Huang might have been sanguine, but his former supervisor at Mount Sinai, Paul Lee, a cardiologist, had posted warnings about what was to come. Many
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