by 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.
