You Already Live in Quarantine

Last Wednesday, I sat down in my office in midtown Atlanta to conduct a lunchtime writing seminar in Durham, North Carolina. I had considered flying in for the event, but my schedule was in flux, and the hassle of transit for a short meeting seemed excessive. At the suggestion of my hosts, I logged in to the videoconferencing program Zoom instead and led the event from my desk chair.

[Read: You’re likely to get the coronavirus]

I hadn’t avoided the trip out of concern about the coronavirus; my plans had been set before cases really began to crop up in the U.S. But over the next day, Zoom’s stock rose more than 10 percent, that global disruption might increase demand for remote meetings. In Italy,, tens of thousands of people immobilized at home. Zoom was a diamond in the rough; lockdowns such as Italy’s and general global tumult caused by the uncertainty of pandemic drove most stocks down precipitously as cases of the disease known as COVID-19 ticked up in the United States and proliferated internationally.