Life :)

It was blissful outside today. The river, the trees, the birds and not much else. I’ve been getting used to the quiet⁠—it’s easier for me than for most people⁠—and weekends are when the difference is most stark, but we now only have two weekends until the lockdown begins to ease. On a day when Romania has recorded 34 deaths, the highest daily figure so far, there are articles (advertorials?) giving advice on where to fly for 100 euros, after flight bans are lifted next Saturday. Ugh.

Yesterday morning I woke up, felt cold, then immediately hot and clammy. My forehead was sweaty. Oh no. This can’t be, can it? I don’t have a thermometer at home. Luckily it was time to get another batch of antidepressants, so I rang my doctor and soon I was able to pick up a repeat prescription from the clinic and get my temperature checked at reception. It was fine. Everything slightly out of the ordinary is magnified right now. (I pretty much always have a productive cough, so that doesn’t count.)

Today is Anzac Day and my sister-in-law’s birthday. I spoke to my brother this morning—he still thinks the British government is doing a decent job. I disagree. I think they messed this up right from the start. They were nowhere near proactive enough. The lockdown was too soft and came two weeks too late. And it still isn’t much better now. Testing is a joke. Fifteen thousand people are still flying into the UK every day, and nobody bats an eyelid when they arrive. I’ve watched a couple of the press briefings—what a waste of time. No real information, no real questions. At least nobody has advocated injecting Dettol yet. My brother reckons everyone needs to be supportive of the government and blindly optimistic no matter what, but then again he said the same about Brexit. All those years of immature chaotic faff surrounding Brexit are partly to blame here—Britain’s resources for an emergency on this scale have been shot to pieces. He also said that New Zealand is being unduly smug over their low casualty rate. Yes, time and space have been on NZ’s side, but that’s only part of the story. They’ve been dealt a good hand but they’ve played it jolly well.

Update: Just had a good chat to my sister-in-law on her 35th birthday.

Boris Johnson is out of hospital, and I’ve just watched his video address where you could see he’d been through the mill. He especially thanked one of his nurses who was from New Zealand. Invercargill, in fact. It’s great that he made it, but I’ve seen all sorts of crap in the British press like “The health of Boris Johnson is the health of Britain itself.” Nauseating stuff. In fact the British press as a whole during this pandemic, with the exception perhaps of Channel 4 News, has been bizarre.

John Campbell’s Youtube videos have been a mine of information for me. It helps that Mr Campbell is clearly a good egg. I’ve learnt all about the benefits of vitamin D to the immune system, and hence why black people might come off worse from the virus because the extra melanin in their skin reduces their production of vitamin D from sunlight (as well as significant socioeconomic factors and increased comorbidities, of course). Although I’m white, I am now taking vitamin D tablets every morning. He’s also adamant about what we should be taking whenever we get a fever. Nothing. Anything such as paracetamol or ibuprofen will certainly reduce the fever and make us feel better, but the fever is our body’s natural response and helps us fight the virus. Cold-blooded creatures like lizards, when they contract a virus, will move to the sunlight if they can, to raise their body temperature. The other negative knock-on effect of medicating to lower a fever, is that because we artificially feel better, we do more, expending vital energy.

I had a surprise text today from Cosmin, an ex-student of mine I last saw in 2017. He wished me a happy Easter. I think he was a bit surprised to learn I was still in Romania. He had plans to move to Australia – I wonder what happened.

The wonderful weather continues. Here’s the chart and my latest picture of the cathedral. I must have posted so many on here.

This morning I read an article about Doc Martens on the 60th anniversary of their launch. I own two pairs, both of them bog-standard boots with eight pairs of eyelets. My cherry-red pair from the nineties made it to Timișoara, and in winter they go pretty much everywhere I do. My navy pair, which I bought in 2002 just before they shifted production from England to Asia (booo!), are sadly still in New Zealand. I’d never dream of buying a made-in-China pair. I really can’t stand brands, but for some reason DMs are an exception. They’ve always just been happiness to me. And they last. Best of all were women who wore DMs. They were that little bit (or sometimes a lot) out there. Now they’re probably all depressingly normal – I really have no idea.

What a muppet I was to present Romania’s coronavirus figures on three separate graphs. A real silly billy. So now I’ve got cases, recoveries and deaths, all on one graph. On the separate chart I had a deaths starting at 10, but at such low levels there is considerable volatility, so I’m OK with including deaths only from 25, as with cases and recoveries.

A few words about the chart. It’s a log (logarithmic) chart, which means numbers on the y-axis (vertical axis) don’t go up at equal intervals (100, 200, 300, and so on); they go up exponentially instead. You can see that the distance between 100 and 200 is identical to the distance between 500 and 1000, because you’re doubling in both cases. On a linear (normal) chart, exponential growth is harder to determine, because you bump along the bottom for a while before you quickly skyrocket, giving a J-shaped curve. On this chart, exponential growth would instead be represented by a straight line. If you start to see the line bend downwards, that’s good news because growth is then less than exponential, indicating that all the social distancing and hand washing is starting to make a difference.

A massive problem here is the accuracy of all the figures. If you aren’t testing, you’re massively underestimating the number of cases. What counts as a recovery isn’t obvious, and probably varies from one country or region to another. You’d think deaths from coronavirus would be fairly clear cut, but in Romania dozens of people have (incredibly) been undiagnosed at the time of death. In other countries, some people who have died with the virus have been counted as pneumonia deaths (say) instead of COVID-19 deaths, to keep the numbers down.

The latest report from the UK showed 563 additional deaths in 24 hours. It’s tragic. No other word. The latest one-day tally from the US saw around 900 deaths, and soon they could be facing a 9/11 every day.

I followed Wimbledon quite intensely last year. Today they announced that it wouldn’t be happening at all in 2020, and that hardly even felt like news.

I’m talking to my parents every day or two now. This morning Dad said he hoped I’d have a better time up the mountain than last time. I said that actually last time wasn’t bad, and then he reminded me of my hellish sinus pain, or migraine, whatever it was. It’s amazing how easily one can forget horrible experiences. I only have to read back over old blog entries.

So we’ll be setting off at seven tomorrow morning. If we don’t go this weekend, we probably won’t get another chance for a while. Part of me wishes I wasn’t going at all, but up a mountain honestly isn’t the worst place to be right now. And it will give me a break from the wall-to-wall grimness of news channels and websites.

In the last 60-odd hours, things have ramped up to the next level. Eerie is the best word I can use to describe the scenes here. All the trains and trams are still running to schedule, but the usual crowd at the nearby bus stop has depleted by about 80%. As for me, I have avoided public transport for the last three weeks. There are always old men playing games in Parcul Dacia. Always, whatever the weather. But there weren’t today. And neither were there in Central Park. And over large swathes of the world, life is gradually shutting down. This will be no ordinary spring and summer. If we’re lucky, only two grand slam tennis tournaments will bite the dust.

My lessons have taken a battering this week, but I managed four today: the brother and sister who live near Parcul Dacia (they were not enjoying their enforced break from school), then the lady who came here and immediately wiped down my desk, then the guy in the UK on Skype. As a listening exercise with the lady, I went through a 15-minute monologue that my dad had listened to on Radio New Zealand about a Romanian child who moved to NZ in around 2003 at the age of eleven. He talked poetically about the differences between NZ and his homeland, and quite movingly about his phone conversations with his very elderly grandmothers. Listening to that was the highlight of my day, and really an escape from everything else.

When I get back on Sunday afternoon or evening, we’ll have moved a further notch or two up the eeriness scale. My work is likely to be sparse. (I’m encouraging people to have Skype lessons if possible.) There are currently 86 confirmed cases in Romania (make that 88) of what most people seem to be calling simply “the virus”. I expect that figure to double in the next 48 hours. Meanwhile Italy has recorded 250 deaths in the last 24 hours alone. The projections I’ve seen for Romania – cases doubling every second day or so, with a 2% mortality rate – are sobering indeed.