Coronavirus: Notes from the Field It’s Sunday night and instead of doing a menu plan for the week, organizing my work purse to grab in the morning, and remembering to tally up the money I owe for the kids’ Read-a-Thon because I’m fairly sure it is overdue at school, I’m trying to decide if it’s time to start panicking. Not really, of course: panic helps no one.  But I am trying to decide how much “social isolation” to do in a country where we don’t yet have our first confirmed case of COVID-19. Botswana is a small, landlocked country with a population of 2.2 million.