by As case numbers have flattened, and perhaps started to trend downwards, I’ve been thinking back to March and how scary things were back then. During the second week of March, when both the Cheltenham Festival and Champions League football were allowed to take place in front of packed crowds, it was like watching a tsunami. By this stage it was already total mayhem in northern Italy, with hundreds dying every day. That weekend I went away to the mountains and I felt sheer panic, which was made worse by everybody around me carrying on regardless. As we drove there you could see queues forming outside supermarkets. Would there be food on the shelves when we got back? It was beautiful there but I could never relax. I disconnected from the news, but one of the others got a message that a state of emergency had been declared. What does that mean? On the way back I read about Italians singing traditional songs from balconies as a way of boosting morale amid the carnage, and I thought, in two weeks, or maybe three, that will be us. It was one heck of a relief to get back. Then the next morning I just about camped outside the supermarket before it opened.
We never reached anything like the level of transmission seen in northern Italy or New York. Our lockdown, which came in the nick of time, probably saved many thousands of lives. And luckily we don’t have the density of population or amount of travel that parts of the US or western Europe have. Things aren’t exactly great in Romania now, with more than 1000 new cases a day, and because we weren’t hit very hard initially, there isn’t much immunity in the population. About 98% are still susceptible. But at least we know much more now about how the virus spreads. In my last post I neglected to mention that a reason for Africa’s lower rate of severe Covid disease must be people’s exposure to other bugs and viruses.
I didn’t have a great start to yesterday. I had a no-show from my Skype student, who (in his messages) didn’t get that a no-show might be a slight problem for me. It’s clear that he thinks I’m a tap that he can turn on and off when he feels like it. I sent him a couple of what you might call passive-aggressive texts in reply, immediately regretting that, and wondering if I’d lose him completely, but he now says he wants to meet today, so that’s a relief. In a similar vein, I never saw the woman with whom I had the car-crash lesson last Boxing Day. Until last week, when she dropped by to pick up a book. She told me she’d changed her job, moving to a competitor coffee-machine-making company after being in the same place for 17 years.
I might buy a new bike later today, and I’ll post some pictures if I do. But until then, here are some pictures of Timișoara (where else, right now?):
