By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

COVID 19 is an epidemic tailor made for my husband, a man who has at least one pharmaceutical product for every year he has been alive. Calamine. Bendaryl. Lomitrin. Neosporin. Tums. The catalog of ailments we can treat from our master bathroom is astounding. Dry skin. Oily skin. No skin. Name a malady; we have a salve. Warning: we’re really good at buying stuff, less good at knowing what we have.

Not surprisingly, with the threat of impending quarantine, my husband decides we have to stock up on food. Stuck in, we can’t live on the food channel or Netflix alone. Making room in our freezer requires a reckoning that yields some unwelcome news. In various wedged-in spots, we have six boxes of frozen cauliflower pizza crusts, one of them expired.

I go along with my husband. But for me, getting ready for a quarantine feels like a stretch. You make fun of all the people who have four-wheel-drive because you insist it never snows, I remind Hal. Why is this any different? Apparently, it is — and that’s how I find myself with $800 worth of groceries one oddly balmy late February morning. I tell him the sodium in all the cans of Campbell’s Soup he insists on buying will kill us way before coronavirus ever does.

It doesn’t really matter that we aren’t quarantined by this stupid thing. Our conversations have been completely hijacked by it. In our umpteenth discussion about how to protect ourselves, my sister tells me the answer is elderberry. She bought it in gummy form, she says.

According to the Internet, elderberry enhances the immune system and suppresses the appetite — great to have medical sanction for a supplement that allows you to be both skinny and well. The contraindications are fairly minimal, my sister tells me. Just make sure, Medline warns, it doesn’t interfere with anything else you’re taking. Apparently the anything else is mostly birth control. Well, I wouldn’t be in the close-to-high-risk group if birth control were still an issue. Maybe elderberry is a better coping mechanism than denial.

Last night, I had my first coronavirus dream, not surprising because other than the Democratic primary and the dog, it seems it’s all we talk about over breakfast. In my dream, I’m invited to a high school party at a house that appears to be in Jersey City, which is incidentally not where I grew up. I end up spending the entirety of the party sitting with a young woman who has a fever and a cough.

This weekend, my dream comes true. Sort of. We find ourselves at a French movie festival across from Lincoln Center. And that’s when I hear it. I nudge my husband. “That woman behind us? She’s coughing nonstop,” I whisper. “Do you think she has Corona?” I’m half kidding, or at least I think I am. Hal whispers back. “That’s just a nervous cough.” And given what’s going on, is it any wonder that people are nervous?

A nervous cough…hmm. It’s an odd moment of equanimity for the doomsday tsar. But I snuggle into him as I take it.