News of an unfamiliar respiratory illness reached rural northern Haiti first through relatives abroad, then spread across radio broadcasts, messaging apps, and talk in markets and neighborhoods. Bulamah notes that when advice about keeping apart arrived, few doubted it would work; what they doubted was that any of this was new. He sets COVID-19 against a longer local record of epidemics, asking how that experience shaped what people expected.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and on conversations with Haitian friends during the outbreak, the article treats the stillness the pandemic imposed as a sharpening of something already there, a blocked political and existential condition named lòk. Against that stagnation, Bulamah traces a popular epidemiology built around the lakou, the household, through which people made sense of the virus and lived with it.

The closing move is conceptual. Movement itself, he suggests, works as a form of vitality, generating and ordering life even under conditions of severe uncertainty.