Lockdown Dairy
Nightfall in T&T feels like perpetual dawn. There is no sound but the flutter of a hawk cutting through the air and yes, the sweetest birdsong.
When the birds quieten, you sit with the silence. You hear something else. A distant roar, something you experience rather than listen. Like the blood rushing in your brain echoing the terror of the pandemic raging through the earth, with over three million known infections 210,000 deaths affecting over 195 million jobs.
The images of lives across the globe have come at each of us.
In Ecuador, the dead piling up in bathrooms of hospitals. Refrigerated vans carrying away corpses to mass graves in the US. The Pope delivering his Easter Sunday mass behind closed doors in the Basilica of St Peter in the Vatican. Newborn babies wearing protective face shields in Bangkok. Indian police whipping people not maintaining social distancing. Mobile morgues in Brooklyn where people said they could smell death.
Coffins arriving from Bergamo to Cinisello Balsamo near Milan laid out like a geometric flower. A policeman pointing his pump rifle to disperse a crowd of shoppers in South Africa. Then the ubiquitous images, the ones we see everywhere.
The health workers in hazmat suits in labs and PPE wear in ICU with eyes hollowed out of tears, like a futuristic horror film. Social distancing funerals where families could not embrace one another to mourn their beloved dead. People clapping for front line health workers from London to New Delhi. The deaths of doctors from the virus and the tragic suicides of health workers. It’s affected bodies and minds.
Returning to the roar. It was the roar of tigers from the Emperor Valley Zoo. Like the virus, it was there, but caged. This virus is the most dangerous of enemies–it moves with stealth (asymptomatic) an assailant with a range of unknown arsenal. Scientists think they understand it–announce it goes for the elderly and those with underlying chronic conditions. Then we hear it’s the healthy, the young. It causes strokes, hits at the heart, lungs, kidneys. It can affect children severely. Every day we learn something new about the virus, mostly something calamitous.
In T&T as I write, the April 29 numbers are 1,683 tests, 116 positive cases, 72 discharged, and only eight deaths. A day after we heard we are second in the world in containing COVID-19 (an Oxford University study) the T&T Health Minister announced that that cases #115 and #116 are from local spread.
That must put us in the red zone, raise a cacophony of alarm bells.
With just .1 per cent of the population being tested, we remain in the danger zone, unaware of clusters of asymptomatic COVID-19 carriers. Without testing, isolating or tracing, you don’t know who has it. It’s as infectious as measles and moves with greater stealth.
You can catch it if you breathe in droplets from an infected person who coughs or exhales droplets. You can catch it on surfaces. You can catch it from an asymptomatic person who is speaking. The jury is out on how long droplets linger in the air.
We are suddenly acutely susceptible to super-spreaders. Most of us have heard of patient #31 from South Korea who single-handedly and almost overnight spread the infection to thousands of people.
She didn’t obey the instruction to stay home, wasn’t tested despite having a fever, attended two church services and a buffet lunch, and that was it. The country identified more than 2,900 new cases just in the next 12 days.
This is what testing and isolating can prevent. We know this can’t go on forever.
People are suffering. Daily there is are stories of destitute families. Lines at charities which give out food are getting longer. But as one doctor said, it’s either this or watch our people drop dead on the streets as they did in Ecuador. We may not be able to cope. Everyone must help our vulnerable. Government and civic society, COVID-19 has brought even wealthy countries with robust health systems to its knees.
The virus has stripped us all down to essential needs, forced us to see what our parents always told us. That the most essential thing in life is to have a sense of civic duty towards family and community; that acts of humility, serving others selflessly brings joy like nothing else; that we are fragile, and pride is laughable. Death is always closer to us than we think. That the one sure thing that will yield treasure is patience–as we wait for the vaccine. Till then, we must brave this new world, with masks, keep our distance from one another while being one another’s keeper.