It might have been helpful for my literary activities to live through two global pandemics - one before, and one after, 'getting religion'.
To wish for such a thing would of course be morally monstrous; but there would be some empirical satisfaction in the exercise. Isn't that what religion is for - to provide a hiding place from the hideous reality of an indifferent universe? (Those who make it to a cinema in these times might find themselves in front of The Colour Out Of Space, a HP Lovecraft adaptation with Nicolas Cage, which seems somehow appropriate.) Or perhaps it girds our loins for hardship with the promise of a happier world 'on the other side', as it were.
In the Christian tradition, there is certainly 'consolation' of that sort available. The Salve Regina, which devoted Catholics motor through at the end of their rosary, has this character: "To thee [Mary] do we cry, poor banished children of Eve"; "after this our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb". It certainly seems that material life in this realm is a sort of inconvenience, an 'exile' from our true home. I think this can be interpreted correctly, for a definition of correctness that implies adequacy to the gospel as a whole; but that is not the only, or perhaps not even the most obvious interpretation.
Well, so far as I can tell, religion is not helpful to me in this situation - not in that way, anyway. For all the rebirth rhetoric that attends to conversion experiences, you are reborn as ... yourself, basically. We were promised a resurrection body with the holes where we expected to find them, after all. So I'm still a highly neurotic, slightly hypochondriac grouch, who felt threatened by crowds anyway. And now all this ... Several aspects of the COVID-19 outbreak feel to me like good candidates for the category of 'cruel cosmic joke'; how else to explain a bout of diarrhoea in the midst of a bizarre run on toilet paper - as if, taken thrice a day, it breaks down the protein sheaths of RNA viruses?
Like you, no doubt, I have had to wade through a lot of marketing material from various companies whose business is affected by the pandemic - which is pretty much all of them, of course. They assure us that their employees - or 'contractors', in the case of the gig-economic complex - are subject to the most comprehensive hygiene standards so you should not rule out a Deliveroo. Likewise, for evangelists of the great world faiths, a crisis is an opportunity. I cannot be bothered to fish around for scandalously stupid diagnoses of the gay-marriage-caused-the-floods variety, but surely these must exist. The Westboro nutters will no doubt thank God for coronavirus. There is the liberal-vicar alternative, which enjoins us to remember what is 'really important' at a time like this, and to work in prudent solidarity with each other.
The bigot version of this may be dismissed as trivially as it is advanced - if the will of God were so straightforward, so monomaniacally obsessive and so transparent in its results, we would probably have worked it all out by now, but of course it isn't, and we haven't, and can't on our own. The liberal-vicar version is commendable in a limited sense, but still misses the full horror; after all, part of what is required as an act of 'solidarity' in this situation looks very much like the opposite. We are supposed to hide ourselves away, rather than being physically present to each other. Our grandparents are scared that this might be the end for them; we cannot offer a reassuring hug, because that might kill them. Unfortunately, we poke our heads out the other side of liberal cliché. We test our humanity at its limits - not at the limits experienced by those most treacherously betrayed by history, in Nazi labour camps and suchlike, but at the limits of the 'normality' we are used to, the limits of the common-sense forms of kindness we offer people when we are being kind.
What religion offers in this situation is not the presence, but the absence of God. Our absence to each other becomes a sacrament of divine silence. This is not, on the face of it, very reassuring; but then it means we are no longer alone in our loneliness. We are part of a historic human drama that stretches back through every unanswered prayer to the dawn of the species. (For Christians, of course, this sorrowful sequence includes a prayer of God himself.) The cruelty of capitalist society is that it demands we suffer alone; the promise of it is that people refuse to do so to some extent, and band together against the invisible and inhuman hand. Religion offers no concrete way beyond capitalism - in fact, it tends to be corrupted, much like everything else. It does offer us a solidarity beyond our concrete biological individuality, and indeed between the living and the dead; and that, I think, is the true sense in which we poor banished children of Eve appeal to Mary.