by 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.
