Jennifer Senior: The one kind of distancing we cannot afford

Last week, within the space of just 24 hours, two friends of mine — one an ICU nurse, the other an ER doctor — told me that they’d each watched a 50-year-old woman die of COVID-19.I, too, am a 50-year-old woman. As I listened to their stories, I had to stifle the same unlovely impulse. “But did your patients have a preexisting condition?” I wanted to ask. “Were they fighting cancer, were they smokers, were they already floridly unwell?”Which is ridiculou