Shockingly normal ⁠— what’s going on in the UK?

Nearly 900 deaths were added to the UK figures today, just like yesterday and the day before. Nine hundred. Nine Hillsborough disasters. A dozen Grenfell Towers. Every day. Granted, some of the deaths, perhaps 100 a day, are people who die with Covid-19 rather than from it, but there are also vast numbers dying in care homes who aren’t being counted. The daily tally of people dying from Covid-19 is surely well over 1000.

Those numbers are terrifyingly high. But what really shocks me is how normal this seems to have become over there. What has happened to the country I was born and bred in? How has life in the UK become so cheap, all of a sudden? How has being unable to breathe and drowning in your fluids, while your family can’t even say goodbye to you, become so acceptable so quickly?

Here in Romania we’ll be in lockdown, with armed police, until mid-May at the earliest. I’m glad of that. I agree with whoever said that lifting the lockdown now would be like flushing half your antibiotics down the loo because you’re feeling a bit better, and anyway we’re yet to even properly reach the “feeling better” stage. A huge hole was blown in my teaching hours in mid-March, but my volume is starting to pick up. Yesterday I had that lesson with Cosmin’s friend – it was probably as good for my Romanian as it was for her English. Now she wants a lesson every day including weekends (after all, what is a weekend now?). She should improve quickly.

It’s my 40th birthday on Monday. Yikes! All this social distancing means I won’t be having the massive rip-roaring party I would have had otherwise.

Timișoara really is beautiful in spring, and here are some more photos of the bits of Timișoara that I’m still allowed to set foot in.

Stop watching the news. You’ll feel better

After only sleeping four hours last night and then falling foul of supermarket regulations, it hasn’t been a bad day at all. I was in the aisle with the canned and jarred fruit, when a security guard introduced himself formally with his surname first, and told me I was breaking the rules by having a backpack over my shoulders. That’s after the security woman last week explicitly told me it was OK. This man (55-ish, short and stocky) seemed new there, and I think he just wanted something to do. Everything was fine in the end, but after that incident I really just wanted to leave, and of course I couldn’t – I had to stock up for the week. I only just had enough cash to pay for my groceries. I’ve got so used to having bundles of the stuff that I didn’t even think. Good job I’ve managed to put a bit away in my Romanian account for a rainy day, because this is a deluge.

Lack of sleep seems to be a problem for a lot of people right now. One of my students called me to postpone our lesson scheduled for this evening because he said he’d hardly slept and felt like a zombie. I was happy to reschedule for tomorrow. So just one lesson today. That was the one on FaceTime with the ten-year-old boy, and it went great. We played Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? for the first time. That’s been a hit almost universally.

I did two hours of Serbian today and only half-followed the news.

The number of confirmed cases in Romania rose to 6633 today. That’s also the name of the ultra-marathon that Tibi Ușeriu won and wrote a book about – I got the book as a Christmas present. The number 6633 comes from the fact that the event takes place around the Arctic circle, at a latitude of 66 degrees and 33 minutes north.

Here’s the latest graph with a newly-extended x-axis. I’m just glad it wasn’t the y-axis that I had to extend first.

Spring under lockdown

I called my aunt this morning. She told me that her dog had been put down yesterday. She couldn’t even be there while it was put to sleep. All very sad. She’s been on her own since my uncle died in 2002, and her dogs have always been a lifeline.

This morning, after hearing that Anak Krakatoa had erupted, I read about the Year Without a Summer. That was 1816, the year after Tambora erupted, the most powerful volcanic eruption in human history. This year looks like being summerless for completely different reasons.

Last night my UK-based Skype student predicted increasing casualty rates in Britain and even more draconian measures, just as people might want them to be relaxed. He said too many people were ignoring the rules. For some unknown reason we ended up talking about crumpets, as in the food item. He told me he picked up a packet of these mysterious floppy cakey things after arriving in the UK, but he wasn’t a fan. Apparently he ate them untoasted, unbuttered, un-anything, so no wonder they didn’t quite do it for him. To be fair, how would you know? (It’s always amused me that spectrum has crumpets as its anagram.)

The official death toll in Romania is approaching 300. Here is the latest graph, followed by some pictures of Timișoara in spring under lockdown:

Romania coronavirus 11-4-20
A helpline for over-65s without support
The shoes have walked
The half-attached sign warns people over 65 not to leave their home
This is a lovely notice on a nearby perfume shop. “Take care of each other, stay healthy, and we’ll meet again when this craziness is over.”

A full work day at last

A proper work day today, my first for ages. That feels pretty good. I also had my best first lesson with a student for a while. Let’s hope he sticks around after that. (Sometimes I’ve had what feels like a great initial lesson with someone, then they don’t come back. Other times my first lesson has felt like a shocker, and we’re still going six months or a year later. There’s basically no correlation.) Tomorrow I can look forward to more Serbian.

After my last lesson I gave my brother a call. My sister-in-law is still doing emergency foot procedures and now finds herself in the firing line. Fortunately where they live, the rate of cases is one of the lowest in the country. In the latest UK figures, more than 900 deaths were reported in one day. We’re seeing shocking numbers there now, and the death toll could easily surpass Italy and Spain.

Here’s the latest graph:

Romania coronavirus 8-4-20

A long, hard slog

Tonight I had a quick, see-if-you-like-it session with Gabi, who surprised me by popping up on the screen as a bloke. We’d only exchanged messages, no phone call, and I totally forgot that Gabi was one of those short-version either-or names. We’ll have our first proper lesson tomorrow. Four lessons scheduled for tomorrow – yippee! Last week Dad told me about a game show that appeared on their black-and-white Grundig when he was a boy. It’s very simple – the host asks questions, and the contestant is eliminated from the game as soon as he says ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Trying this game on my younger students has been a lot of fun.

I’m back to learning Serbian, now that I have a good book to study from. Every time I pick it up again, I’ve (at best) half-forgotten everything I’ve done previously. I’m getting more comfortable with the lower-frequency letters of the Cyrillic alphabet, and today I started on hand-written Cyrillic, in which some letters look very different from their printed counterparts.

I’m lucky to live in a city centre and still have so much green space – and a river – around me. We’ve had glorious weather these last few days, and at least I can get out for a quick walk or a bike ride in the sunshine without bumping into people.

Every Sunday and Monday, we see less awful figures from the US, UK and elsewhere, and suddenly everyone says we’re peaking or plateauing (that’s such an awkward word), we’ve turned the corner, we’re flattening the curve. And then Tuesday happens. It’s clear that the numbers from Sunday and Monday reflect cases and deaths reported at weekends, and this reporting is an admin task that sometimes only gets done on weekdays. Still, there is evidence that parts of the US, especially New York, might be nearing their peak.

Wisconsin is holding an in-person election today. That’s so fucked up it beggars belief. I mean, just how? They have far fewer polling stations than usual, so people will have to queue for even longer than they would normally. From the president down, the US is full of very powerful people who are happy for citizens to die as long as they get what they want. It makes me extremely angry.

Romania has sadly just recorded its first death among medical personnel, an ambulance driver from the disaster zone that is Suceava. To give you some idea how awful the situation in Suceava is, I’ve posted the latest chart of Romanian cases by county. The figure of 191 in the west is Timiș, where I am. The 697 is Bucharest – it’s hardly surprising that the capital would have a large number of cases. But the 1322 in the north-east is Suceava, where the main population centre has barely 100,000 people.

As for Romania as a whole, two weeks ago I sketched optimistic and pessimistic scenarios for where we might be today. We’ve followed the optimistic path almost exactly, so let’s celebrate! Umm, no. First, around 200 Romanians have died so far, probably more if people who die at home are n’t being counted. That is already tragic, and the numbers will only go up. Second, testing isn’t keeping up with the spread of the virus, so the number of cases is greatly underestimated, probably by a larger multiple than a fortnight ago. Third, my pessimistic scenario was almost apocalyptically awful. And finally, life isn’t snapping back to normal any time soon. This will be a long, hard slog.

Here is the latest graph:

Romania coronavirus 7-4-20

In like a lamb, out like a lion

March. What a month. Waaay back on the 4th (it feels a lifetime ago now) I had a lesson with those two teenage boys. When I asked them what they felt about the virus, the older one said that everyone will have forgotten about it in about the time it takes to say “coronavirus”. A week later their mum was clearly scared shitless by the whole virus thing, judging by the texts she sent me, and lessons were off until further notice. On the 6th, I had a lesson with two younger boys. Their mum was in the background, and when we’d finished she told me that the virus was being massively hyped up by the media. I said that the media were in fact understating the risks posed by the virus. The following week she told me to stay away.

Two lessons today, one of them with a ten-year-old boy on FaceTime instead of the usual Skype. That was a really awkward lesson. On a small phone screen and with no way of sharing documents or text, it was like teaching with both arms tied behind my back. At one point I introduced a simple word game, a bit like Countdown on British TV, but with seven letters. This kid knows his alphabet in English (most don’t) so I thought this would work. R for rabbit, E for elephant, G for gold, another E for elephant, and so on. After two minutes I asked him what words he’d made from the letters. “Rabbit,” he told me.

People are dying of this virus in shocking numbers. Nearly 400 additional deaths were reported in the UK today. In Romania we’re still at the point where age, sex, location and any comorbidities are given every time a death is reported. I’m just reading that the 81st recorded death in Romania (out of 82 so far) was a 70-year-old man. Her wife had died of the virus only yesterday. Three weeks ago they travelled to Turkey to get some medical procedure done. For now, the Romanian victims are still people rather than cold statistics, but for how long? There is clearly a desperate lack of testing here, because so many of those dying from the virus are being diagnosed on the day of death or in the post-mortem. I’d dread to think what the genuine case figures are. By the way, the whole city of Suceava, where the virus ripped through that hospital, killing at least 28 people, has been quarantined along with surrounding towns.

I’ve just received half a dozen books that Mum ordered for me online. The delivery man was alarmingly unprotected. She got me all three of the remaining books in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, Complete Serbian and Border – A Journey to the Edge of Europe. That lot will keep me going for ages, even under our reading-friendly lockdown.

It’s also a good opportunity to listen to music. A couple of great coronavirus tunes I didn’t know about until today: John Lennon’s Isolation and Fleetwood Mac’s Behind the Mask.

Some Brits just don’t get it. Not only are they buying more stuff every time they visit the supermarket (which makes sense), they’re also making more trips, which is bloody stupid. Everybody needs to be making fewer trips. As well as the increased risk in packed supermarkets, there’s also a greater chance of food being wasted, which we can ill afford.

Three charts now: cases, deaths and recoveries. Sometimes new figures are reported after I post them on this blog, but before midnight, in which case I have to apply some Tipp-ex.

Coronavirus cases in Romania 31-3-20

Some are more equal than others

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.

Romania coronavirus cases 29-3-20

Weirdness is becoming normal

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.

Empty petrol station

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.

Piața Victoriei

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.

Romania coronavirus cases 27-3-20

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.

You really don’t want to get it

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.

Coronavirus in Romania 25-3-20

Where we might end up

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.

Coronavirus cases in Romania - 23-3-20
Romania Covid cases projection - 23-3-20

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.