What if a Wall Street veteran has a way to track how fast the virus is spreading before lab tests can ramp up?
A series of dispatches from America in the age of Covid-19.
My father now knows nine people who have been killed by the coronavirus. He’s 83 and entirely sound of mind and body. He rides his bike many miles every morning around Audubon Park in New Orleans and is as fun to talk to as he was when he was 40. His only response to the news that he and my mother would be confined to the house I grew up in was to call the liquor store and order seven cases of wine.
But now he finds himself watching the annihilation of what is left of his generation. Many of his old high school classmates and business associates and tennis partners live in the Lambeth House, the retirement community of choice for the New Orleans gentry. It’s a peculiar group, with its own customs and language, maybe the only American subculture to use “cocktail” as a verb.
Up until a month ago, the few hundred New Orleanians living at Lambeth House cocktailed together nightly, without any idea of the risks they were running. On March 10, the first resident tested positive for Covid-19. At least 52 others now have it, and 13 have died, nine of whom my father knew…
To read the entire article from Bloomberg, click https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-01/tracking-coronavirus-by-smell-test-is-risk-manager-s-project-now
