Interesting Reading- Pandemic Journal
New York Review of Books are running an interesting daily series — Pandemic Journal from across the World — a small collection below;
I hear about truckers being hailed as heroes for continuing to work in the face of adversity, but there is little mention of the men and women who are flying airplanes in an effort to keep this critical infrastructure in place: flight crews, especially at the major airlines, are carrying passengers and freight that includes vital medical supplies and essential health-care personnel around the country. I’m not disparaging truck-drivers; they’re essential front-line workers, too, but truckers, for the most part, sit alone, self-isolated in their cabs. There’s no social-distancing in a cockpit. Pilots sit right next to each other, inches apart in a confined space. And so it goes: face time with my co-pilot; FaceTime with my kids.
Social distancing is a bit of an illusion in a country where there is no sense of personal space. There are exceptions. In a line outside a pharmacy on M.A. Jinnah Road, people are made to maintain a distance of three feet between each other. Others, however, huddle together. A veiled woman, begging for money, leans against the lowered window of my car.
In a supermarket in Clifton, an affluent neighborhood, people jostle each other. The cashier’s latex gloves are yellow at the tips. In an aisle, a salesperson without a mask brushes against me while walking past. Parking lots shared by supermarkets and banks are half-full. Bank employees in my neighborhood take a break outside, none of them wearing masks. In the quiet residential lanes, people emerge from gated compounds and go for walks — something they would never do under normal circumstances.
The domestic staff who work in some of the apartments in my building are on leave. But not everyone can afford to self-isolate. For some, starvation is a more immediate concern than the virus. The young man who sweeps the driveway of my apartment block comes every other day. With buses no longer operational, he commutes on a bike from his nearby home in the Postal and Telegraph Colony, one of the many slums located within the well-heeled neighborhoods.
At ten in the evening, I hear prayers being recited in the mosque and seminary behind my apartment block. The children living in the seminary chant after the prayer leader. Mosques across the country have, of late, initiated special prayers at night for protection against the present pandemic..
In February, before the arrival of the virus, a poisonous gas leak at the port killed fourteen people and led to the hospitalization of many more. The government agencies investigating the incident were unable to provide any explanation, and over time the entire episode faded from public discussion. In the minds of many, Covid-19 is just another life-threatening hazard in a city that stumbles from one crisis to another.
I was in New Zealand to work on a book about whistleblowing in medical research. National Women’s Hospital in Auckland was the site of a cervical cancer study that New Zealanders call — with characteristic understatement — “the unfortunate experiment.” Women with a precursor of cervical cancer were left untreated for years. One of the whistleblowers at National Women’s, the cytologist Michael Churchouse, is now eighty-seven. Shortly after we arrived, on March 18, a friend and I had tea with him at his farm south of Auckland. At the age of sixty, Churchouse and his wife sailed around the world for nearly seven years in a thirty-foot wooden boat, escaping pirates in Asia and gunfire off the coast of Yemen. “It’s no wonder New Zealanders were the first to climb Everest,” my friend said. “They’re a bit of a mad lot.” Neither seemed nearly as worried about Covid-19 as I was.
But that conversation came before the epidemic began to escalate. When it did, the New Zealand government acted quickly. Recently arrived travelers were ordered into self-isolation. Airlines canceled flights. Restaurants were shuttered. A looming sense of menace hung in the air, as if anxiety had been aerosolized and sprayed into the pohutukawa trees. One day, my wife and I took a long hike out to Narrow Neck Beach and back to Tauranga/Mount Victoria. In a vine-covered cemetery, we found a gravestone that said, “Annie Turner Webb, who was called by her saviour to join his ransomed throng.” It sounded like Jesus was taking hostages.
The hidden threat of plagues is the way they turn your fellow human beings into objects of mutual fear. Every person becomes a potential vector of disease. Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand prime minister, seemed to understand this instinctively. “What we need from you, is support one another. Go home tonight and check in on your neighbors,” she said in her address to the nation. “We will get through this together, but only if we stick together. Be strong and be kind.”
New Zealand is a small country that feels like a large village. It was the first place my wife and I lived after we married nearly thirty years ago, when I took up a postdoctoral fellowship in bioethics at the University of Otago, in Dunedin. When friends ask me why I keep returning to New Zealand, my response is always: “New Zealanders.” Kiwis are modest, outward-looking people who value tolerance, good humor and common sense. Their default self-presentation is one of cheerful unflappability. “She’ll be right,” they say. No worries. It will all work out.
I have a small holiday house on a creek near Sydney. It’s accessible only by boat, and my vessel was already within an inch of going under the floodwaters by the time I reached her. We bailed and bailed until I could get in and turn the key. When the outboard fired up, it felt like a miracle. Then, in conditions reminiscent of the storm in John Huston’s Key Largo, we took her the eleven miles to our house, dodging whole trees that were being carried by the flood.
Covid-19 began to stalk us. Our family had decided to retreat to the holiday house if things worsened, and we started to stock it with essential supplies. I’m glad I got onto the toilet-paper purchase early, for, in an early and strange response to the threat (though not one unique to Australians, apparently), Australians plunged into a toilet-paper buying mania that saw supermarkets stripped of this essential.
The great toilet-paper drought of 2020 was not Australia’s proudest moment: several shoppers were charged with affray after they fell to fighting over the last roll, and toilet-paper thieves have been caught red-handed by CCTV at some stores. Now there are rumors that “the good stuff” can be had, if the price is right, at certain online marketplaces.
Last week, my wife, two sons, and my elder son’s partner decided to retreat to our house on the river. Our first thought was to try to extend our food supply by fishing, but the flood had brought down so much food that the large specimens gambolling around our pontoon ignored our tastiest baits. But we needed a project to occupy us, and our minds turned to a long-deferred one: renovating an old, termite-riddled shed behind the house. With building supplies hard to come by, we decided to see what we could scrounge locally first.
An inspection of the nearby mangrove glades yielded, among other flotsam, a handsome picnic table and benches, much structural timber and planking, a sturdy staircase, a refrigerator in good condition, a tool rack, a forty-four gallon drum full of lubricating oil, and a trash can, miraculously delivered by the waters complete with lid and plastic liner. It was as if the flood had scoured a hardware store and delivered everything we needed at no cost.
As I write, all is well in our isolated retreat. The termites are banished, and we have enough building materials to recreate a habitable scale model of the Taj Mahal should we wish. We and many other Australians seem to be slipping into a new and more organic routine. I just hope that whatever the eventual outcome of the pandemic, we can all find some joy amid the constraints that Covid-19 has placed on us.
It seemed to come by stages. After a week working in Niger, I flew to Burkina Faso, a country next door, to meet a documentary filmmaker. That’s where I heard a boy announce to all present the momentous news he’d just heard, “Corona is in Ouaga” (“Ouaga” is shorthand for Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina). It was brought back by a local pastor who had been in a megachurch gathering at Mulhouse, in Alsace, one of the starting-points of the epidemic in what has turned into France’s coronavirus hot spot, the “Grand Est.” After the news broke, a physician was interviewed on television about the potential impact in Burkina. He said, with the reassuring tone of a family doctor, that Burkina lacks the resources to cope, many will die, and what could be done would be done.
Niger was then still “corona-free.” The day I returned to Niamey, Niger’s capital, there was a tense citizen demonstration against a huge war-profiteering and cover-up scandal involving the top brass of the ruling party. Three people died in the repression. The Corona Effect was immediately visible in the fact that the international media — especially Radio France Internationale, an influential outlet in French-speaking countries — barely registered the event.
When the president made a speech forbidding all gatherings of more than fifty persons, the main reaction in the public opinion was that he was battling the citizens’ anger, not a virus. And when a first case was announced, people were skeptical because someone had the idea of a viral social media prank, broadcasting on WhatsApp a message in which he claimed to be the so-called “corona-patient,” that he was healthy and that his “case” was all a government plot.
Eventually, the sense of menace sunk in, but in slow motion. Cases are coming in a trickle. No one I know has got it and I know no one who personally knows anyone who’s got it. Yet the continuous flood of startling information from abroad has persuaded general opinion that this is real, like the stench of something odious that’s on its way.
So, what to do with the mosques and markets? Many can’t see why they should not pray shoulder to shoulder in the mosque, as Islam prescribes, apart from the fact that the police may raid. For some, praying the right way has become a black-market affair. Information is whispered that in such or such place, people are still doing it, so let’s go there.
Markets are to close early everyday so that they can be washed. In a village market, not far from Niamey, some young men arrived yelling “the soldiers were coming” to shut down the place. This was much before closing time, but terrified buyers and sellers — military and police can be a brutal lot in Niger — frantically ran around to pick their stuff and leave. In the chaos, the young ruffians pilfered freely and made away with a small fortune.
The day before writing this, new measures were announced. Niamey was “closed” and subject to a night curfew. Instead of confining the people within the city, the city itself was confined. The president explained that this was because it was the only place in Niger touched by the epidemic, and that, in the seventh century, the Caliph Umar had once cancelled a trip to Syria when he heard that it was hit by the plague. I wondered how one could close a city that has no walls
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