Language teaching

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.

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.

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.