KIRKLAND, Wash. _ Feeling festive, Pat McCauley looked around the crowd as she accompanied a dear friend into a Mardi Gras party at his nursing home.
A jazz band played "When the Saints Go Marching In" while a woman on staff wearing a masquerade mask strutted to the music, took photographs and handed out plates of Cajun sausage and rice.
Many residents wore jester hats that some had made the previous week.
It was Ash Wednesday, Feb. 26, and a man from a local parish had anointed some patients with ash.
McCauley was happy to see her friend and more than 30 other residents taking a break from their medical woes, although one thing struck her as odd: In the hallways, many staffers wore surgical masks.
Nobody knew it yet _ though plenty of clues existed _ but there was an uninvited guest at the party: the novel coronavirus.
It had been there at least a week, silently spreading among the 120 residents, 180 staff and multitudes of visitors.
Three days after the party, McCauley was listening to a Seattle radio station when she heard the words "Life Care Center of Kirkland."
Now the radio station was reporting that COVID-19 had reached her leafy Seattle suburb and could be rampant at the nursing home.
Two people there _ a health worker in her mid-40s and a resident in her 70s _ had been hospitalized and tested positive while more than 50 others had begun to show symptoms.
Memories of the party suddenly gave McCauley chills.
She wondered if the homemade green-foam hats, festooned with gold balls, had become vectors for disease as staff members moved from resident to resident to try them on.
And what if the man from the parish had gone on to more nursing homes and touched the foreheads of other elderly, vulnerable residents?
McCauley, 79, and her husband, 80, had been visiting their friend regularly since mid-February.
How long had the deadly virus been lurking at the nursing home? Were they also infected?
