Tests of Time

Among the many things disrupted by the spread of the novel coronavirus and the global mobilization against it has been our sense of time. In part, this is simply the logic of exponential growth at work: it took months for rumors of a virulent new disease halfway across the world to become reports of a handful of cases in the United States; weeks for that handful to become hundreds; and days for those hundreds to become thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. Experts told us repeatedly that what we were seeing in China and Iran and Italy was…