That I could come to Romania 3½ years ago – a country I’d never set foot in before – and create a totally new life for myself was wonderfully mad, and only possible thanks to long-haul travel and supranational organisations. A month ago it was still possible, just. Now you can hardly go out your front door. The speed at which everything has shut down still feels extraordinary.
This morning I had a chat with my brother. They don’t want him anywhere near his workplace, and fair enough. Close contact with other people is just about unavoidable in his job. We talked about Brits who struggling to cope because they can no longer buy unnecessary crap.
Nothing to report, except to say that news coming out of the hospital in Suceava, which has now closed, is horrendous. Twenty-two people died there. Romania’s death total has soared to 65. I now have plotted the deaths on a separate chart from the confirmed cases, which are now close to 2000. (The real number of cases is surely several times that.) The chart of recoveries will be coming tomorrow, I hope.
I got out briefly this afternoon, just after I’d been up and down the stairs five times, and walked down the Bega a short distance. It was sunny and springlike and blissfully calm, with the willows lining the river and hardly a soul around. Then I had to come back. Any amount of “outside” has a certain level of guilt attached.
When I wrote last night’s post it was getting late, and I didn’t talk much about the conversations I’d had with my cousins. My cousin in Wellington put things in perspective – after bemoaning my inability to see my parents who live on the other side of the world, she said she couldn’t see her parents either, and they live in Timaru. She and her husband were impressed with the government’s handling of the crisis, although they wished they could have closed the borders a week or two earlier. I only saw the youngest of her three boys; he was wearing a onesie and seemed to be quite enjoying the lockdown.
My US-based cousin was about to play golf with his mates. Umm, should you be doing that? The golf course is even open? He talked about distancing and not touching the flag, but to me, golf just about epitomises “non-essential”. He talked about Trump using his daily media briefings to campaign for the election, while hundreds of Americans are dying from the virus every day.
Mum and Dad are pretty lucky. They can lock themselves down without really being locked down. They have a huge house (by my standards) and two acres to play with. They have money. In theory, these crises – earthquakes, floods, epidemics – are a leveller. Viruses don’t discriminate, you sometimes hear. Except they do. India, for instance, is now completely locked down. One point three billion people. But how do you lock down India? Where a huge proportion of the population lives practically on top of dozens of other people? Where if you don’t earn anything on a particular day, you don’t eat? The lockdown is admirable, but the reality is that untold numbers of very poor Indians will die as a result of the virus in the coming months, either directly or indirectly. Obviously this is an extreme example, but there are stark differences even within a country like New Zealand.
Every day you see or hear something that was perfectly normal until recently, but is now absurd. The buses and trams are still running here, and on the side of a tram this morning I saw a banner advertising “dream holidays” and “cruises like you see in films”.
Today I produced a coronavirus glossary for my students: about 75 terms from airborne to zoonotic, via hunker down and ramp up, complete with definitions and explanations. I hope they find it useful.
In Romania, I still can’t predict where this is going. The health minister resigned soon after making his crazy pronouncement that all two million inhabitants of Bucharest would be tested. The hospital in Suceava has been a disaster zone: nearly 100 doctors and nurses there have contracted the virus. There is a shortage of doctors, or should I say a shortage of good doctors, after so many of them have left the country. At times like these, a brain drain can be deadly. The good news is that if I must be in Romania, Timișoara is probably the best place in Romania to be.
The death toll in Romania is starting to mount. We are now at 43. More than 300 more people tested positive in the 24 hours before the latest figures were released, meaning we are very likely to break 2000 tomorrow. That number supposedly triggers a heightened alert level. In tomorrow’s update I will post two new charts, with figures for deaths (sadly) and recoveries.
It’s quarter to eleven on a Saturday night, slap-bang in the middle of Romania’s third-biggest city. As I write this, I can hear an owl. Every now and then I can also hear a freight train rattling and whistling by on the other side of the park. I’ve never heard the trains before. The cathedral chime for “quarter to” seemed especially loud. Our clocks go forward tonight, in fact, but this year it’s a pointless exercise. Tomorrow it will get dark at close to 8pm, but somehow it’s as if the clock has struck thirteen.
Today I caught up with family – a long chat with my cousin and her husband in Wellington to begin with, then I Skyped another cousin who lives in New York State with his Italian wife (she assured me that her parents in northern Italy are OK), then finally I FaceTimed my parents. Family now seem more important than ever.
I popped my head out of the door just to fill up two water bottles in the park, and even that required a form to be filled in. When I got back I walked briskly up and down the stairs five times (640 steps up and 640 steps down), carrying those ten litres of water on my back.
The news is endlessly frightening. Deaths are now in five figures in Italy and four figures in the UK (and because they only seem to be counting those who die in hospital, the UK figures are probably understated). In Romania, eight more deaths have been confirmed today, taking the total to 34, while the latest increase in cases was at least on the small side.
Another weird day, but all days are weird now. Three lessons, which is equivalent to about seven before coronavirus hit. I finally got some masks, so that’s good. On the way back from my mission (going outside the front door now feels like an expedition), I took this picture of a petrol station. Not long ago, some of those prices began with a six. On a sunny late afternoon, the prices having tumbled, the place was empty. That felt so strange.
In the square there were still a few people, but milling around is now against the law, and everybody seemed to be going somewhere in a hurry. There probably weren’t any more pigeons than usual, and surely nobody is feeding them, but it felt like you couldn’t move for them. I don’t think pigeons can transmit the virus, but after today, when a Belgian cat tested positive, as did nearly everybody fronting the British response to Covid-19 including Boris Johnson, almost nothing would surprise me.
In the western world, the virus continues to wreak havoc and force impossible choices. I’ve just watched John Campbell’s latest Youtube video, which includes a clip where a man from Madrid is in tears as he learns that over-65s in the city will no longer be given respirators. Parents and grandparents with maybe a quarter-century still ahead of them, sedated and left to die. What can you say? Spain saw nearly 800 deaths in 24 hours, while close to 1000 people died in Italy, their highest daily tally yet, just as it looked like they might be stemming the flow at last. Britain’s death toll jumped by nearly a third today to over 750; my Skype student in the UK told me that non-essential work, such as construction, is still going on. As for America, the situation looks very grim indeed in several cities and states. They needed a national lockdown weeks ago.
Here in Romania, confirmed cases are at almost 1300, with 26 deaths. Quite a big jump in cases today.
In my Skype lesson this evening, we went through an article which included the phrase “getting plastered around the clock”. When I told him what getting plastered meant, he imagined some kind of drinking game where participants run around a giant clock in the centre of the room. He gave me the useful advice to avoid Romanian hospitals if at all possible in the event that I get infected.
It’s getting hard to know what’s what with these restrictions. Now that we’ve hit Level 3 Lockdown or whatever they’re calling it, going anywhere requires printing off and filling in forms with CNP (national ID) numbers and whatnot. It’s hard to get sufficient exercise. My best bet is probably to walk up and down the stairs a few times.
Today I had no lessons at all. I did get to the surgery, having first filled in that form, of course. There a young receptionist took my temperature – it was fine – before she gave me my prescription. I was unable to find a mask at a non-exorbitant price, but tomorrow one of my students will give me three of them.
The rest of the day I followed the news, wished I hadn’t, and worked on the book. I’ve so far written around 3000 words, so I’ve really just scratched the surface. (It’s mostly in Romanian! It’s hard!)
On the day that confirmed cases broke half a million worldwide, Romania’s official count of cases reached four figures, while 22 people have now died here. The youngest, a 45-year-old man, died here in Timișoara. A hotspot is Suceava, in the north-east, where the virus has been spreading rapidly through the medical staff.
The Skype lessons have been a success, it’s fair to say. I just wish I had more of them. The twelve-year-old boy today was clearly having fun with all the emojis that are now at his fingertips. I asked him if he’ll even want to go back to face-to-face meetings.
My brother told me that he and his friends aren’t exactly trying to become infected with coronavirus, but would prefer to “get it out of the way”. It makes sense in a way: he’s under 40 and fitter than most men of his age, as his friends surely are too, and once you’ve got it, you immune for a long time if not for life. But I dunno, maybe I have an old-fashioned attitude to pandemics, but I prefer the “not getting it at all” option. I do know about lung problems, having been through pneumonia when I was six. And I recently read this online comment about pulmonary edema that didn’t exactly fill me with joy: When you catch Covid-19, you can quite literally drown in your own fluid deposited in your own lungs. It’s a particularly nasty death unless you are doped to the eyeballs so you are unaware of the rising sense of panic as you gradually become unable to breathe as too little lung capacity is available to oxygenate the blood or expel carbon dioxide from your system.
I take antidepressants. I see my doctor for a prescription once a month. But how can I do that safely in the corona age? My stocks were running low and I started to panic a little. Today it was a relief to get through to my doctor on the phone. He said he’ll give my prescription to reception tomorrow afternoon and I can pick it up there without having to spend an hour in a room full of sick people. He also told me to wear a mask, which I currently don’t have, so that will be my first mission tomorrow. I congratulated him on correctly predicting the spread of the outbreak, and was very happy to hear that he hasn’t been compromised himself. He said that if this thing spreads through Romania like it has in Italy, we will be utterly screwed.
Between 6 and 7 every weeknight, there’s a music programme on Radio Timișoara. It’s brilliant, and as my steady flow of work has sadly slowed to a trickle, I get to listen to it more often. I’m now introduced to weird and wonderful artists and bands from Romania and all over the world. Last night they played music by Manu Dibango, a jazz singer-songwriter from Cameroon. He had died of coronavirus (in Paris, at the age of 86) the night before. Today I also heard that the British deputy ambassador to Hungary, who had become fluent in Hungarian in only a year (mind-bogglingly impressive if you ask me), had died of the disease at the age of only 37.
When I spoke to Mum last night, she’d just been for a last-minute pre-lockdown trip to the supermarket. From where I sit, New Zealand’s response has been exemplary and a million miles from the chaotic messages being tossed around in Australia. Closer to home, they’ve just announced that everybody in Bucharest (two million people) will be tested. How? Over what timeframe? Where will these testing kids magically appear from? Will they extend this to other major cities? Update: Yes, they do plan to roll this out to other cities.
One of the problems with tracking numbers of cases in Romania is that updates aren’t always regular. I always take the last update of the day, which sometimes means there’s a 24-hour interval between daily figures, but it can often be more or less than that, and the graph bounces around a bit as a result. We’ve so far had around 900 cases, and 14 people have so far passed away. The numbers on the graph are likely to skyrocket when they ramp up testing.
I’ve got the mountain man look pretty much down now, and best of all, I’ve got an excuse not to change it. No haircuts for the foreseeable future.
Jacinda Ardern and the New Zealand government didn’t mess about. NZ’s confirmed cases tipped over into three figures – a big rise on the previous day – and bam! They’ll be under lockdown in less than 36 hours. This decision will probably save thousands of lives. Just hours before the announcement I’d spoken to my parents about their planned trip to Moeraki.
This evening my student remarked with some amusement that I repeatedly used “we” to talk about Romania and Romanians. You’re becoming one of us! I suppose I am. This is my life now.
The latest update of “our” confirmed cases was ugly reading. They were up by a third in 24 hours to nearly 600. This is bending the curve all right, but in the wrong direction. One in nine of the previous day’s tests had a positive outcome. We’ve also now had seven deaths. My student was, however, very complimentary of Raed Arafat, a doctor of Palestinian origin, who is masterminding the coronavirus crisis in Romania.
Tonight I’ll post two charts. First there’s a zoomed-in graph of the current situation, and then there’s a zoomed-out “what if” chart with two possibilities for what might happen in two weeks’ time. If we set off on that horrendous trajectory that I’ve marked “?!?!”, we’ll have 50,000 cases by then and a likely death toll in the high four figures, just like Italy have currently. Under the more optimistic option, we’ll have a tenth as many cases and fatalities.
The clock has just struck 10pm, and I’ve just heard a tannoy announcement in the street telling people they need to return home. We’re under curfew. It’s currently sleeting.
Boris Johnson will be addressing the UK shortly. I expect him to finally mandate measures to slow the spread of the virus, instead of just advising them. Update: That’s just what he’s done. I just wish he’d done it at least two weeks ago.
Yesterday we reached a balmy 20 degrees; today we topped out at 8 and the sun hardly poked through the cloud all day. Perfect coronavirus weather, in other words. I popped out to fill up my water bottles from the well, but was rarely in danger of being within fifty metres of another soul, let alone two. High winds and even blizzards are forecast for large swathes of Romania in the next two days. Bring it on.
Romania has now seen its first two fatalities from coronavirus, both of whom already had very serious medical conditions, including a man with terminal cancer. Today’s percentage increase in cases was very similar to yesterday’s, although they did test significantly more people just prior to today’s update. (The 66 new cases is identical to New Zealand’s total number.)
Some good news: Timișoara is rapidly becoming the Romanian epicentre for people getting rid of coronavirus. Of the 64 patients cured of the virus so far, two-thirds have been treated in Timișoara. Nobody is quite sure why. (My guess is just that a lot of the early cases came from this part of the country.)
The Italian death toll rose by another 650 in the most recent daily update. That’s a horrific number, but maybe, just maybe, the lockdown is beginning to have an impact. Spain saw almost 400 additional deaths, a truly awful number.
I’ve been watching Youtube videos from John Campbell, a British doctor. They are extremely informative. He gives daily updates on the global situation, as well as practical advice on how to properly wash your hands, whether to take medicine to reduce a fever, the benefits of vitamin D, why this virus spreads more readily than the SARS virus we saw in 2003, what R0 factors mean and why they’re important, and much, much more. It’s a veritable trove of information.
I didn’t get through to my brother last night. When he rang me back this morning, I asked if he was down the pub. We wondered when (and where) we might see our parents again.
I’ve been working on the first part of my book. I’ve been trying to make it a bit light-hearted to attract the reader’s attention, but as I’ve been writing in Romanian I’m not sure if my humour has worked. I need to arrange a meeting with my Romanian teacher.
I can’t complain. My hours have dropped off a cliff in the last ten days, and that’s certainly a bugger, but psychologically this new way of living, this new normal, isn’t all that different from the old normal. The things we’re all told to avoid – interacting with large groups of people, mostly – are precisely what I like to avoid anyway. Self-isolation is practically my default option!
For some people it’s clearly been harder. I’m talking here about the (mostly young) people crowding on beaches, or even worse, in pubs. You are killing people by your actions. Have killed people. It’s that simple. You might not get the virus yourself, and will in all likelihood survive it even if you do, but you have unnecessarily caused the virus to spread further and faster. This will cause extra strain on the health system, and in two or three weeks some doctor might be forced to decide who lives and who dies. All because you wanted a few pints with your mates.
I can hardly imagine what doctors and nurses in Italy are going through at the moment. They are forced to do the impossible – decide who lives and who dies – every day, and are putting themselves in grave danger in the process. It is heartbreaking. Today – on one day – Italy recorded almost 800 deaths. Those are wartime numbers.
The question I keep asking myself is whether the UK is going the same way as Italy. All things being equal, it shouldn’t be. The proportion of very elderly people isn’t as high (Brits don’t live as long as Italians on average), three-generation households are far less common, and Italy had the huge disadvantage of being Europe’s guinea pigs. But the UK death toll is rising fast, and they lost at least two weeks of precious time in late February and early March when the control panel was flashing red but they peered out of the window instead and everything still looked rosy.
Yesterday my aunt called me from the UK to wish me a happy birthday. My birthday is the 20th of next month, not this month, but that didn’t bother me. She said that Boris is doing a good job. I remain unconvinced, but I watched his chancellor Rishi Sunak (22 days younger than me) at yesterday’s press conference and he was very impressive indeed, and the sort of compassionate conservative Britain used to have.
Romania has yet to record its first death within the country, although some patients are in critical condition. Cases today rose from 308 to 367, a rate of increase that is very close to the fourth root of two. In other words, if cases continue to increase at the same percentage rate as they did today, they will double every four days. Although it could be worse – Turkey’s official case figures are doubling almost daily – that isn’t good, and alarmingly, nearly a tenth of those tested in the last 24 hours were positive. That suggests that the real figures are much higher.
Here is my manual logarithmic chart of Romanian coronavirus cases, starting from 10th March, when the numbers first exceeded 25. It is some comfort that, after going like a steam train at the beginning (from 59 to 95 in one day – ouch), the curve has flattened somewhat.
I just got the highest level of alert on my phone – it made me jump out of my skin – telling me that groups larger than three will be banned outside the home, and that everybody must stay inside between 10pm and 6am. So far we’ve taken more draconian measures than the UK every step of the way, and I’m all for that.
I haven’t seen the elderly couple who live on the sixth floor for a while. They’re probably hunkering down in their apartment. (Why can’t you hunker up? Or just plain hunker? As an English teacher I have these thoughts all the time.) I wrote them a message to wedge in their doorway, but I’m not sure which apartment is theirs. I then put my note in their letterbox. I wonder if they’ll go downstairs to collect it.
Tomorrow I will try advertising for Skype lessons. Are you bored? Why not learn English? Some of my students have been happy to migrate to Skype classes, others not, and my hours have been cut in half. I might set my location to Bucharest because my location is all of a sudden irrelevant.
And a funny (I guess) story from one of my students yesterday. Unlike in Australia and the UK, people in Romania haven’t been hoarding bog roll. Here it’s flour, which makes a great deal more sense. My student told me that she’d put the last three remaining bags of flour in her trolley, but when she’d got to the checkout they’d magically disappeared.
Today I’ve had a bit of a runny nose and a cough. It can’t be, surely. Millions of people must be Googling symptoms, wondering if this sneeze or that sniffle might be it.
We’ve had yet another sunny day. After my two lessons (which is a good day all of a sudden) I read my book in the park. It didn’t feel like Timișoara, but more like an expanded version of Temuka. Tomorrow I’ll make some progress on the book I’m writing, as long as I haven’t developed a raging fever in the meantime.
I’ve been plotting Romania’s coronavirus cases on a logarithmic chart I manually created. The numbers now come out twice a day, and I was relieved to see the 6pm figure of “only” 260, instead of something closer to 300. It’s too early to say where we’ll end up, especially as I don’t know how much testing is getting done.
Elsewhere in Europe, it isn’t too early. The situation is very ugly now. The latest figures in Italy show 475 deaths (19% of the previous total of 2503) in 24 hours. The death toll in France in the last 24 hours was 89 (51% of the previous total), while in the UK it was 32 (44% of the previous total). It’s those percentages that are so shocking. Emmanuel Macron made an impassioned speech on Monday night, and hopefully the French will get the message and those percentages might start to fall. In the UK I’m not so sure. They wasted valuable time on their herd immunity “strategy”, and as far as I know, many Brits are still going to pubs and malls like it’s a divine right. My prediction for the UK is that it will end up in a very bad place indeed.
On a much more positive note, here are some pictures from my trip to the mountains. I hope you agree that it was a beautiful place to spend a “last chance” weekend. The picture with the logs and dogs was from the place where I was served palincă.
by 
