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Three years later, at the May 2023 concert, the members of the Skagit Valley Chorale were once again releasing fine droplets from their airways. The audience, listening silently, exhaled them as well. It is an inevitable part of breathing. Some of the tiny droplets drifting through the hall carried living things. Some carried harmless bacteria that feast on the traces of meals left in people's mouths long after they leave the dinner table. Some droplets carried viruses that infect bacteria that dwell in our lungs. A few harbored fungal spores.

My wife, Grace, and I sat a few rows from the stage. We hoped that no one around us was emitting a pathogen that we might inhale. While the Covid-19 emergency had just ended, the coronavirus that caused it had become a part of our lives. "This virus is here to stay," Tedros had warned the world at his press conference the day before. "It is still killing, and it's still changing. The risk remains of new variants emerging that cause new surges in cases and deaths."

If the air did indeed harbor Covid-19, we could hope that the concert hall's ventilation system would protect us. It flushed out some of the indoor air—along with the droplets and the carbon dioxide—and replaced it with fresh air from outside. I could not see this invisible traffic, but I could track it. From my coat pocket, I discreetly slipped out a white plastic box the size of a pack of cards. It displayed a number: 527.

In other words, the concentration of carbon dioxide in McIntyre Hall was 527 parts per million. Outside, the level was hovering a little lower, around 420. A puff of exhaled air coming out of a mouth has a concentration of 40,000 parts per million. Puff after puff, the choir and the audience steadily added carbon dioxide into the auditorium. If anyone was exhaling SARSCoV-2, the viruses would accumulate around us as well. As the songs progressed—from "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" to a poem by Theodore Roethke—I checked the monitor. It rose to 662, then 800. If it got much higher, I thought to myself, I would put on my mask.

° ° ° °

I did not own a carbon dioxide monitor before the Covid-19 pandemic. I did not think much about the atmosphere that we share in concert halls and kitchens and subway cars. Few people did. In the first weeks of 2020, Ruth Backlund certainly gave it no thought. Each Tuesday, she and her husband, Mark, a retired psychiatrist, rehearsed with the Skagit Valley Chorale. They would drive east from their home on Fidalgo Island onto the mainland. They would pass flat fields of tulips, daffodils, and potatoes until they reached Mount Vernon, a city of thirty-five thousand on the banks of the Skagit River. To the east, the Cascade Mountains loomed. The Backlunds made their way to the Presbyterian church on the edge of town, a building shaped like a wedge of cake turned on its side. They got out of their car and walked into Fellowship Hall, a low-slung room extending off one side of the church.

The Backlunds always looked forward to working with Burdick, who drove up from Seattle for the rehearsals. She held the singers to high standards, but she never became a dour disciplinarian. "If people are uncomfortable or unhappy, they can't sing very well," Burdick told me. "I have a tendency to be the Pied Piper. We all go off to Music Land."

When Burdick first heard about Covid-19, it seemed like a faraway disease. It certainly didn't make her rethink meeting with the choir each Tuesday. In February, when reports surfaced that Covid-19 was striking a nursing home sixty miles south of Mount Vernon, it sounded like a variation on influenza. The flu came every winter, and no one made a major change to their life when it did. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told the public that they could avoid getting influenza by keeping six feet away from people displaying symptoms. The droplets released in coughs and sneezes were heavy enough that they would quickly fall to the floor. If those droplets got onto a doorknob or a turnstile or some other surface, the viruses might survive long enough to be picked up by someone else. But they could be readily stopped simply by cleaning the surfaces people frequently touched.

When Covid-19 first emerged in Washington, Governor Jay Inslee applied the same public health measures to it that he might have applied to influenza. He cut down on visits that outsiders could make to nursing homes, so that they wouldn't spread SARS-CoV-2 to the residents. The rest of Washington went on with a normal winter.

Nevertheless, some members of the Skagit Valley Chorale grew uneasy. They asked about wearing masks at rehearsals, since no vaccines yet existed for Covid-19. If the singers got infected, they would have no immune response ready to fight it off. Other members of the choir recoiled at the idea of covering their mouths with masks as they sang. Hazy fears ought not rob the choir of an experience they all cherished. The choir compromised with an agreement to be prudent. "We just followed what the CDC was saying," Ruth Backlund told me.