covid times

I’m posting below an extract from the very first diary entries I wrote as the early days of the pandemic unfolded in 2020. I knew I wanted to start a blog, but hadn’t set it up yet.

Almost one year ago…..

March 2020

When you sit down to read this diary in 2120, you’ll consider the global Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 with detachment.   As we do now of the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic.  Despite a staggering total of some 20 millions deaths, those lives are basically statistics one century later.  They no longer have life, a personal story.  It’s easier for humans to refer to them as a collective, a data set, an aberration that took two years to subside.  Until very, very recently, most of us didn’t care.  Or didn’t even know about the Spanish ‘flu.

We’ve got a new perspective now, as the world is tumbled about in a giant vortex.  That pandemic was real. Those 20 million were not just stats, they were people. And we understand that now because every single day thousands of people are dying. We are inexorably marching towards history, creating a new data set that for you will be notable.

The global pandemic will be a curiosity because of the large number of cases and the high mortality rate. That’s the perspective one hundred years down the track.  It’s not the perspective now. For us, right now, it’s grief and loss on a monumental scale where people can’t say goodbye in person and there are mass burials in our most vibrant, modern cities.

New York has been hammered.

A skating rink in Madrid has been converted to store dead bodies on ice.

Doctors and specialists in northern Italy are having to choose which patient gets a ventilator. In essence, they choose who might live and who will die.  They are completely overwhelmed with the staggering rise of corona virus cases presenting at their hospitals.

For now, Australia and New Zealand seem far removed from the medical chaos unfolding in the northern hemisphere. But behind the scenes, governments are on edge, watching closely to try to learn from them.

In Europe and New York City, silent streets are punctuated with sirens. This is what we’re hearing, reading and watching on television or on our mobile devices. Modern, international cities – those at the very centre of finance markets and fashion – have been brought to their knees by this novel corona virus.  They cannot cope with the surge of cases, especially the ones needing intensive care.  And it’s really quite terrifying, because front line workers – doctors, nurses, orderlies, paramedics – are also dying.  This is a highly contagious virus, and those images of medical staff in Hazmat suits that came out of Wuhan earlier in the year are being replicated in Europe and the USA. 

If shit was real before, now it’s a rock solid reality.

Your history books and anthropology texts might refer to the first twenty years of the 21^st century as the ‘Information Age’, but it will also be noted for the Covid-19 pandemic that changed the modern world. 

We all want to understand more about the origins of Covid-19. That’s a natural wish, considering the global havock and impact on societies across the planet. With close to 88 million cases now, almost one million per day, pinning down the very beginning of the pandemic is a priority.

To get this massive job done, The WHO wants to send a 10-person team of international experts to China. The aim is to probe the animal origin of the pandemic and exactly how the virus first crossed over to humans. Last month it was announced that the investigation would begin in January 2021.

The WHO has been negotiating with officials in Beijing to conduct this much-anticipated investigation. But two of its members have just been denied entry to China.

When they do get there, they’ll focus on Wuhan, where the virus was first detected in late 2019. An early assumption was that the virus originated in a wet market. It looked like this was where the virus made the leap from live animals to humans.

It’s an ongoing debate. And now there are very different views on the origins of the virus. Some experts now believe the market may not have been the source, but acted as an amplifier.

Some research suggests coronaviruses capable of infecting humans may have been circulating undetected in bats for decades. So near, yet so far.

The unknown variable is that we don’t know what intermediate animal host transmitted the virus between bats and humans.

It’s true I just made up that title, ‘Covid wars’, but the image above, which was taken only hours ago in Washington D.C., looks like a battleground. As the pandemic wreaks havoc across the USA, Trump continues to bluster on. There’s only 13 days left until Trump leaves office and he’s throwing metaphoric grenades left right and centre. Meanwhile, his followers riot and police throw flash bombs and tear gas grenades in real life.

All hell has broken loose outside the Capitol, as rioters storm the building. It’s almost impossible to believe what’s happening during these final days under the reality-TV president. It shouldn’t be part of the Covid-19 story, but it is. The unrest intersects with the pandemic in America and it’s creating more angst and chaos in this dark northern hemisphere winter.

Trump politicised masks – creating a divide between Republicans and Democrats, a visible voter difference on the streets. So even though this crisis at the Capitol is more about Trump not wanting to accept defeat and not wanting to leave office, it’s in the context of Covid. His ramblings are increasingly desperate and his tenuous hold on power is slipping.

This upheaval is woven into the same fabric of disruption in these covid times. Claims of ‘stolen’ elections and a pandemic hoax. Of all the terrible things happening as the world races towards one million new cases per day, this is the headline-grabbing moment.

American democracy in crisis.

It’s getting difficult to choose a topic for my posts. So much is happening across the world, at such a fast pace, that it’s hard to keep up. The pandemic is going gangbusters and there are big news stories everywhere.

Announced just this morning in real time, is the second national UK lockdown. It’s being called lockdown 2.0. Boris Johnson put on a rare sombre face to address the nation on the evening of 4 January (GMT), but he still didn’t bother to comb his hair. That’s baffling for a prime minister – he might forever be remembered as the scruffy pm.

The national lockdown comes after weeks of growing case numbers and a highly contagious new variant. On Monday, 58,784 cases set a new and devastating daily record. Tuesday was worse, with over 60,000 cases reported.

This lockdown looks like a long one, the UK government is talking mid-February at this stage. It’s not going to be ‘lockdown lite’. ELLE magazine UK offers some very *helpful* tips on how to survive;

• stockpiling – champagne, toilet paper, basic food stuffs
• socialising – not going there. After giving it good go first time round, Zoom is now banished
• Netflix – binge away, baby and stay sane
• online shopping – keep on buying like there’s no tomorrow. Because that will really help.
• expectations – it’s all about managing expectations this time round. Aim for a very low base, maybe you won’t be disappointed

2019 feels like ancient history and life as we knew it seems grainy, like footage captured on an old Super 8 camera. New Year’s Eve 2020 was a non-starter across the world due to the potential of it being a ‘super spreader’ (yet another new phrase for 2020); Christmas was all but cancelled across the UK and in other countries.

Many of these changes will be here to stay, and it’s widely accepted now that the way we live, work, shop, travel, socialise, eat and drink, will change for long term. It’s happening already, with the global surge in online shopping – excuse me while I answer the door and receive yet another parcel – closures of hospitality venues and stores and so many of the cafes and restaurants that have survived offering takeaway only.

Social or physical-distancing policies mean we’ve got to get used to plastic screens, spaced-out tables, long queues, stickers on floors and seats guiding our every step, as well as masks and other interventions that will come and go.

It seems more like Life 2.0 than lockdown 2.0.

*disclaimer. I am probably the only person in Australia who doesn’t shop online. So that comment re delivery was made in jest..

How can I define you, 2020? You were so much more than we asked for. The disruption, the havoc, the fear and the grief. The urgency, the isolation. We knew you intimately because you demanded so much of us. You cast a long shadow over humanity for the duration. But we can’t deny your significance, you were important to world history. You were a game changer.

Your legacy is that we start this new year today with 82 million cases and a changed world.

And now we’ve attached so much hope to 2021 that we need to first reconcile how we felt about you, how you stretched us to capacity and took so many people from us.  That you forced people to die alone. That you left our oldest citizens without visitors or comfort.  That our children took the brunt of your presence by being forced out of school and into online classrooms. And as if that blow was not enough, where a yawning divide quickly became apparent; those with and without the capability or access to tools to learn effectively.

One thing is for sure, no one is ambivalent toward you; we feel all the feels. You left your mark on countless grieving hearts and created mass dislocation. You are a paradox, Twenty-twenty. Never before has a year been so full of promise yet abysmally underwhelming and overwhelming all at once.

You failed to deliver the aspirations and dreams we were chasing.  We pared back our expectations, we braced for change, we worked together to conquer you. Yet you have us in a strong hold that makes us determined to defy you. It means we head into this new year with a redoubled optimism and resolve.

Oh, I could go on and on, Twenty-twenty. You have changed our planet. Yet your presence was not without an upside; you had a sense of humour, you exposed our fears that forced a run on toilet paper across the globe. Your pressure created responsive and innovative industries to support pandemic logistics and management and contact tracing. You drove scientists and science to achieve nothing less than brilliance in an effort to create a viable vaccine. There really was an Operation Warp Speed. You must find that amusing.

And perhaps most poignant of all, your intensity and wrath shone a light on our frontline medical workers – everyone in the hospital system to the pharmacists and paramedics and emergency responders who stood up to face you front on.  Because of you, we now recognise them. We honour them.  We thank them with a deep gratitude that had somehow got lost along the way.

You made us appreciate the little things and look at things differently.  We finally acknowledged that people who work at the corner store or supermarket play a vital role in society. We re-learnt how to bake and restore furniture and integrate home and work into one space around the dining room table or in the kids’ cubby house out the back. We learnt to be teachers and how to comfort our friends and family through extraordinarily tough times in lockdown. We developed a new language and created new words. We took up a new practice – social distancing.

But we really do need to say a final farewell.  Millions of people have been forced to be introspective due to stay-at-home orders and lockdown and one thing is guaranteed, you are unforgettable.

This is not til next time or à bientôt.

This is goodbye.

We will each carry a mark of the beautiful pattern of 2-0-2-0 in indelible ink on our souls.

You might have heard of a two speed economy, but Covid-19 is fast becoming a two speed pandemic. By definition, a two speed economy happens when industries within an economy experience unevenly distributed rates of growth. Any armchair pandemic commentator can see this happening now with corona virus.

While here in Australia, and New South Wales in particular, the government is announcing daily testing rates between 20,000 and 50,000, these are the actual daily case numbers for other countries. For the last few days, the UK has had record numbers – 50,023 confirmed cases on Wednesday, the second highest daily figure since the pandemic began. On Tuesday, it was 51,535 – the highest ever.

Globally, all countries were running on parallel tracks, but now continents have veered apart, recording vastly different case loads and vastly different crises. In the UK, the new variant of coronavirus is spreading more rapidly than the original version, adding extra layers of concern.

Two speed economies are recorded in history. The Industrial Revolution was one of them, with new industry in the north and traditional agriculture in the south. The contrast between the north and the south is now happening on a global scale. Covid-19 races up its own global parabolic curve in the northern hemisphere, while daily case numbers remain in single or double digits in Australia and New Zealand. This shows a clear divergence in the pathways of this pandemic.

This two speed pandemic is happening globally and also regionally, within countries. Australia was a classic example when Victoria had its second wave – for a while there, recording up to 700 cases per day while the rest of the country had just a handful. Now, down here on our isolated continent, the ‘arse end of the world’ to quote Paul Keating, we watch with dismay as the Covid-19 pandemic gathers momentum with new variants as well as surging case numbers.

There is a clear divide now, between the northern and southern hemisphere. One is belting along in top gear, the other kind of cruising. Not that anyone thinks of cruising when it comes to corona virus. But here in Australia, Covid-19 is not moving at break neck speed. I don’t want to generalise, though, because that doesn’t paint a fair picture of what’s going on. Below the equator, there are exceptions, the notable one being South Africa, which has its own new variant running amok. But that’s another blog post.

At the beginning of 2020, we were all in this together. It was a global crisis like no other, one that intersected with all of humanity at pretty much the same time. The two speed pandemic has seen the rise of nationalism, governments looking inward in order to survive, borders being “slammed shut” as the media likes to say. The virus takes off in some locations, it surges and decimates communities in its path. And then it spares others, largely due to the interventions to hold it back.

At the end of 2020, we go about our lives almost normally in Australia. People get worried about 18 cases. Many of us freak out about the inconvenience of being asked to stay at home. Meanwhile, in London, over 5,000 are in hospital as we say goodbye to 2020.

It’s like two quite separate pandemic events now. Once again, as at the beginning of the year, our televisions screens shock and this distant audience cannot fathom just how bad it really is out there, in a whole other Covid world.

This year if you’re lucky enough to be able to host Christmas, when your guests ask what to bring for lunch, maybe just suggest ‘anything but Covid’.

It’s been such a crazy time and recently, many countries and cities have moved into lockdown or other restrictions to minimise the spread between households. Millions of people are facing a very different festive season, and last minute disappointments. Our home is one of them, with the northern beaches cluster meaning one of my sisters and her family can’t travel to be with us up here on the mid north coast. But we’re rolling with the punches.

It’s really weird to even have to consider this angle, but we don’t want the angel falling off the top of the Christmas tree. Here’s a few tips to help keep you and your guests safe.

Hugging

We’re all in pretty desperate need of a good hug this year, especially if you’ve been separated for a long time due to travel restrictions, lockdown or a stay-at-home order. Do a quick risk assessment, keep to a minimum, short and sweet, preferably outdoors.

Singing

Carols might be part of your Christmas tradition, but in 2020 singing is off the agenda. Singing is now known to spread aerosol droplets, so humming might be better. Just nod and smile as you imagine next year when you can belt your lungs out.

Festive cheer

Sharing a fine feed is right at the heart of any Christmas celebration. If it’s managable or possible, setting up the table outdoor is a good idea. If not, try to avoid elbow to elbow seating and ensure hand washing, no sharing of glasses or utensils.

Unfortunately, Christmas celebrations present a significant risk with close physical contact, sometimes for quite a long period and often in confined spaces. It’s hard to practise social distancing during the festive season, especially when we just don’t want to feel socially distant. However, time and time again and all over the world, in 2020 we’ve seen these factors contributing to Covid-19 transmission.

Most important of all is share the love in a Covid-safe way. More than ever, we need to feel all the Christmas feels.

Whatever happens in the context of Covid-19 and a global pandemic, it’ll be unforgettable. Even if we think it’s the one to forget.

Wishing you a very twenty-twenty Christmas. May the sense of ‘we’re all in this together‘ restore some faith and hope in our world – a world that in 2020 has seen devastation of community, so much loneliness and loss, grief amplified by the sheer scale of the pandemic. Shock and awe.

A world that has had one almighty off kilter orbit.

Earlier this year, when corona virus was just starting to gather momentum and had moved outside of Wuhan and into other parts of the world, governments scrambled to respond. Asian countries, with first hand experience of SARS, were ready to respond quickly with well-oiled systems and contact tracing. Outside of Asia, however, there wasn’t much in the way of pandemic preparedness.

The first whispers of schools closing seemed outrageous. It just wasn’t in anyone’s headspace, no matter where they lived. And then it began to vary widely across the globe. Students were sent home, a new concept of remote learning was rapidly rolled out, but other governments were defiant or in denial and stated categorically that they would never close schools.

The early thinking was that there was very little chance of community transmission at schools. When my sister in Dublin told me that Irish schools were moving to home based learning for six weeks, we were both gobsmacked. We couldn’t believe what was happening. In the US, there were obvious challenges to overcome digital inequality. The Brookings Institution looked at ways communities could partner with schools to deliver online learning in a more equitable way.

Then the school that my 16 year old son attended (he was on exchange in Brazil) advised that students should stay home. Only just beginning to grasp Portuguese and make new new friends, so this was really bad timing. He never went back to school in Brazil, but that’s another story.

Covid-19 has crashed through normal, everyday lives and taken us with it on a really wild ride. Some of the unthinkable things from early in the year are less shocking now – but it depends on your location. Students in many countries spent most of the year learning remotely. Others were able to return to the classroom without too much disruption.

For senior students and Year 12 students doing their HSC or VCE or equivalent, it’s been especially bad, trying to juggle finals and remote learning in a crucial year, the culmination of 13 years at school.

They also nearly missed out on their school formals, until a backlash from parents and students forced governments to back down. A petition on change.org attracted 55,000 signatures. In line with other events, all schools had to develop a Covid-safe plan.

This week, the class of 2020 received their results. They show remarkable resilience and strength in the face of crazy study challenges. Forbes says that they are ‘graduating into a moment of unprecedented crisis and uncertainty, marked by systemic failures, human suffering and economic damage’.

Back here in Australia, one Wollongong student said, “I feel like I’ll be telling my kids I was in the class of 2020, so they can’t complain about anything.

“I had to graduate during a pandemic.”