Virginia Postrel, Columnist

The World Is a Giant Cruise Ship Called the Covid-19

Fear of disease can change everyday habits. Sometimes that’s a good thing.

March 3, 2020 at 2:00 PM UTC

Virginia Postrel is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a visiting fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University and author, most recently, of “The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World.”

Everyone’s a passenger.
Photographer: Philip Fong/AFP/Getty Images

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I extended my hand to the woman with whom I’d been chatting for the past few minutes. “I’m Virginia,” I said.

To my surprise, she responded not with a handshake but with a closed fist. A white woman of a certain age, she was incongruously going for a fist bump. Her husband recommended it, she explained, to avoid spreading germs. We were, after all, on a cruise ship.