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“There is immense power when a group of people with similar interests gets together to work toward the same goals.”
― Idowu Koyenikan

Like everyone else, I have never experienced a pandemic before. For us it is unprecedented in its scope and it's hard for us to get our minds around how much danger there is as it moves ever closer to where we live. I have, however, experienced a very small, minuscule cousin to it.

When I was about eleven years old, my dad was stationed on Adak, a small island far out on Alaska's Aleutian Chain. Because it was so isolated the community was tight knit, a small town bound together by military personnel, government contractors, civilian employees, and their families.

One day my mother received a phone call from the base dispensary asking her and my dad to come down for a meeting with medical personnel. What they and the other parents were told was that a little girl in my brother's kindergarten class had contracted spinal meningitis and we were all to be checked over to make sure no one else had caught it. We, along with the other families of the kindergarten class, were then the first to be given medication, HUGE pills that I was somehow lucky enough to avoid as I was given the medicine in a liquid form, and told to go home and stay there. The rest of the island was then medicated and everyone was put under quarantine. No one was allowed to come onto or leave the island and all personnel on leave received orders to go immediately and have themselves checked to make sure they weren't infected. I am told that supplies were brought in via military cargo plane and left on the tarmac, not to be touched by anyone until the plane was actually airborne again. We were effectively cut off from the rest of the world.

I don't recall exactly how long the quarantine lasted. As a kid I thought it was going on forever. My parents wouldn't let us go outside, and even they were restricted in their activities, so we were two adults and four kids in a three bedroom duplex with very little television programming and constantly in each other's faces. Things got a bit, shall we say, tense? No one was allowed into the base commissary except in groups of ten and all personnel living in the barracks were told to sit apart from one another when in the chow hall. I don't remember whether my dad was even allowed to go into work. Things were that bad.

Everyone was told that they had to go to the dispensary with any kind of head or neck pain but in the end, if memory serves, there were only two other confirmed cases. I am convinced that it was the quick actions of the medical doctors, the command itself, and everyone's adherence to quarantine protocols that kept it from spreading. These things I've kept in the forefront of my mind as the Corona pandemic has made its way across the oceans and continents of the world. It is as if that experience so long ago was a kind of rehearsal for what was to come forty some odd years later.