The national papers run with a full-page photograph showing a young doctor weeping against the façade of a hospital. I find myself fascinated by it. There is an undeniable gravity to the photo. A sense of history in its making. Who is this woman, I wonder, this unattributed soul?

Her eyes are ringed and sunken, her skin puffy. She is crouched low to the ground as if she expects it to shift beneath her, but in truth I believe it already has. I imagine that she has not been home in days. That she has paged chief residents, fellows, attending physicians, department heads. That her questions remain unanswered. The nature of the illness, the things she has witnessed, have invalidated the axioms of her own understanding. The bedrock of her reality has shifted.

I know this because I have lived through a similar crisis of understanding. I stood months earlier beneath the punishing fluorescent lights of a hospital wing while a doctor explained that our son was gone. I watched as Simone shut down, failing entirely to process the news.

‘Thank you,’ she said after the doctor was finished. ‘May we please speak with him now? He must be terrified.’

Much like his birth, the reality of his death hit her in waves of pain. He was gone, and by extension so too was a piece of her. And perhaps that is why I find the photograph so captivating. There is a candour to it. It captures the immediate aftermath of loss. It is an overtly human moment.

I sit cross-legged in front of the television until late afternoon. I watch as authorities race to establish cordons in an attempt to slow the spread of the illness, as they erect tents to filter the incoming sick. Like footage of the Great Depression there are lines of people stooped and coughing. Corridors full of gurneys. Ambulances circled like wagons, their flashing lights illuminating the falling snow round them.

They play footage of loved ones being escorted to and from hospitals. Siblings and parents, grandmothers and uncles. Some weep openly, others hold handkerchiefs to their mouths, the rest walk with a grim determination. No one stops to speak with the press. When I try to discuss the case with Simone she begs me to turn it off. She can’t even bear to hear about it.

Though the media blackout is fairly effective, a local network is able to secure an interview with an off-duty nurse. She talks into the camera from a dimly lit hotel room, her features distorted, blurred in a way that makes her face look like a blank sheet of flesh. No eyes or mouth. And when she speaks I hear only a distant tinkling sound, like glass scraping glass.

‘They fall into a sort of waking sleep,’ she says. But there are moments of consciousness. Frantic whispers.

‘It took us a while to realise that they were talking about each other,’ she says.

That they were recalling memories, but not their own. Never their own.