In this audio piece, I read aloud all of the e-mails that I received regarding the coronavirus and COVID-19, from the first message on January 21st, 2019, through the end of March 11, 2020, the day the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the virus a pandemic. Each day from January 21st through March 11th is allotted 12 seconds, with one exception: January 23rd receives more time to include a bit of a message from a friend in China. The long silences near the beginning of the piece allow the listener to forget about the piece, to become distracted by something else, much in the way we would not think about the virus in the early days. As the situation intensified, so did the quantity of e-mails. The listener also gets to review the attitude we had toward the virus and how that changed over time. This piece is not only biographical of a pandemic and a nation response to it, it is autobiographical of the person whose voice is reading the e-mails. This is a set of e-mails unique to me.

Listen to Virus Propagation