LIKE most institutions of higher learning in the United States, Bradley University, in Peoria, Illinois, where I was a professor of journalism until I retired in 2015, closed two weeks ago for a weeklong spring break.

Students and faculty alike look forward to the break, a respite from the daily grind of learning and teaching and research and the relentless stream of assignments and projects to be completed under deadline, to say nothing about tests scheduled and unscheduled. Without it, they would be teetering on the brink of nervous exhaustion well before the semester ends some seven weeks later.

For students especially, it is time to fan out to the warmer climes of the southern United States and the Caribbean to “make out” with friends from college, chance acquaintances or outright strangers with the minimum of inhibitions, confident that “what happens on spring break stays with spring break.”

One week later, they would go back to the usual routine. The library, the labs, term papers and all-nighters.

Many of them were probably still on the way to their spring-break destinations when the University announced in a mass mailing and on its website that they could add another week to the vacation, in view of the developing situation regarding the coronavirus outbreak.

The more perceptive would have seen this unsolicited additional timeout as ominous. Most will have welcomed it. I can tell you from personal experience that nothing gladdens a student’s heart as a break from schoolwork.

Scarcely 48 hours later, the university announced via a video posting on its website that formal instruction for the academic year was ended. Lectures would now be imparted online. Commencement – Convocation, as we call it in Nigeria – had been cancelled. Students living on campus should await instructions regarding when to return to collect their personal effects from the dormitories.

That was it.

For thousands of students here, and tens of thousands on other American campuses, Commencement, perhaps the most significant event of their education, their preparation for life and living, came to an abrupt end. They will not know the joy of marching attired in their academic costumes, of the photo-op and congratulatory handshake with the university president, the gifts from friends and relations that usually pour in on such occasions, and the pride of the parents and guardians who had supported them all along, expressed most eloquently in their collective attendance.

Perhaps most painfully in a tight job market, they will miss out on a last chance to meet recruiters looking to hire from the graduating class.

This is not how college was supposed to end.

But in the time of the coronavirus, that is the way it is ending. Nor does the disjuncture fall on graduating students only. Previously, returning students and freshmen could count on starting new academic year in August. In the time of the corona virus, that too is not guaranteed.

If the foregoing seems like sentimental mush in the grisly manifestations of these times, take the setting and stretch it across every platform of life – the office, the playground, ball park, the assembly line and shot floor, the mall, the retail shop, the theatre, the airport, the bus terminal, the train station, the home and indeed wherever two or more persons are gathered in cities across the world, and you have perfect calendar of human misery unfolding on a scale almost beyond imagining.

The grisly bulletin of deaths from the virus issuing from China, Italy, Spain, Iran, the UK and the United States, the thousands receiving treatments in hospitals where doctors are often forced to engage in the macabre calculus of rationing care between those who have a chance of surviving and those who are too far gone to deserve the attention that has become a scare resource, the exponential spread of the infection, and the tens of thousands in voluntary or forced quarantine across the world are but the horrid indications of the coming cataclysm.

A virus that has been traced to stalls selling live rodents in a market in China and dismissed blithely at its onset as a hoax by U.S. President Donald Trump who sets a greater store by blind and stubborn belief than by the scientific evidence has given a whole new meaning to globalization.

It has been said the September 11 2001 terrorist attack on the United States “changed the world forever.” The same claim can be made now with greater truth for the ongoing pestilence. Under its brutal regime, the only certainty is that nothing is guaranteed. And according to the best experts, we have not seen the worst yet.

A great many of the students whose college careers have been peremptorily foreclosed will not return to school. Many of the restaurants and bars and hotels and establishments now shuttered will not reopen. Thousands of employees now forced to work from home may never return to their previous work routine. Hundreds of athletes, performers and entertainers will not return to form. Thousands of literary, artistic and musical works in progress will not be finished.

Our social and cultural life (No Owambe!) and our culinary habits will change markedly, and so will our modes of production. For better and for worse, many a political career will founder and die, just as many will flourish. The severe downturn in the economy will bring the depredations of the corona virus up close and personal.

On the whole, according to the best sources, things will get worse before they get better.

As casualties mounted and deaths piled upon deaths and patients in varying conditions of distress spilled over from hospital wards into corridors and waiting rooms and all evidence pointed more to deterioration than respite, I sought refuge in the disorganized book cases in my study.

There, I fished fish out The Plague (La Peste in the French original) Albert Camus’s haunting and evocative 1948 novel about the bubonic plague that ravaged the city of Oran, a port on Algeria’s Mediterranean coast.

I had read the book back in 1967, and my recollection of the men and women and prevailing circumstances chronicled in it has been dimmed by the passage of time.

But not its horrors, understated though they were, nor its ironies, especially the fact, as I remember it, that the plague afflicted with devastating consequences the stronger, more virile persons in the community and generally spared those with weak constitutions. Nor the atmosphere, of which our unfolding circumstances are eerily reminiscent.

The coronavirus, on the other hand, they say, spares the young and persons of sturdier constitutions for the most part, while felling older persons and those whose immune system has been compromised by preexisting conditions.

Neither the one was to be preferred to the other, to be sure; nothing indicated that dying from the one would be less horrific that dying from the other. Still, if you belonged in my age group — I am four months shy of 76 years — you surely suffer from one preexisting condition or more unless you are a freak of nature. You are therefore bound to take note of the especial malignancy of the coronavirus toward our group, unless you are past caring.

In this viral conflagration, what are our prospects?

Nobody knows for sure. To paraphrase the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, coronavirus is in the saddle and rides humankind.

In the days ahead, I will be rereading The Plague with painstaking attention. Illinois, my state of residence, has gone into lockdown in response to the rapidly escalating menace of Covid-19, the killer disease spawned by coronavirus.

Then, like millions of other residents, I will be watching and trusting that hope will triumph over the experience of those who also waited and watched and took the right measures but are unfortunately no longer with us.

What are Nigeria’s prospects?

If through Abuja’s acts and omissions coronavirus brings avoidable suffering and death on a staggering scale, thus compounding the Nigerian condition, it may well strengthen the desire and growing resolve of some of the constituent units to take their destinies into their own hands and seek their fortunes in a different setting that could hardly be more stultifying than the present one.