Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

CORONAVIRUS – A BRICOLAGE

I write and post these "Something Thoughtful" articles about three weeks before you read them. But sometimes events move so quickly that my more topical comments become dated. So I am now sitting here, one day before this posting goes live on Monday 13 April, 2020, writing a preface to what is now a dated comment.

I wanted to give an impressionistic account of how "Covid19" could affect us New Zealanders, but I wrote speculatively and before the lock-down came into force.

At time of writing this introductory note, we have now been in lock-down for 2-and-a-half weeks. Schools, theatres, cinemas, restaurants, cafes and all businesses deemed non-essential are closed.  Only supermarkets and petrol stations are open to customers, and for all of them, customers have to line up, distancing themselves from others, before they are are allowed in. Queueing of this sort has not been seen in New Zealand since the Second World War. Only essential services (hospitals and the medical profession; ambulance; police; the fire service etc.) are operating as normal. We are being warned not to take inessential journeys and to stay at home. Roads and highways are now patrolled by police to turn back home people who are simply joy-riding or attempting to go to a holday home (or bach, as we call them here). Rushing off to a holiday home has been the norm in New Zealand for the Easter season, but not this Easter. There is an eerie silence in suburban streets.

Everybody can now tells tales of what it is like to be confined to home. Few now would dispute the government's wisdom in adopting this strategy, no matter how inconveniencing it is. But there is this very odd sense of constraint. Outside, here in Auckland, the sun has been shining most days, the birds and daytime crickets are singing (the noisier cicadas have now gone, given that summer is over) and everything looks normal - but it isn't. For exercise, people are allowed to take walks or runs around their immediate neighbourhood, and in these circumstances it is interesting to see how courteous everybody seems to have become. To keep our social distance, we step aside if we meet somebody else on the pavement and usually wave or give a greeting of a sort we would never have given to strangers in more normal times.

And yet, of course, some people are going through hell.

What follows is what I wrote three weeks ago. Events have overtaken what I then said; but in the main it is an accurate forecast of what has happened. One thing I did not foresee was that the German Bauer company would take the opportunity given by the pandemic to pull the plug on all the New Zealand magazines it owned, and hence to wipe out a sizeable part of New Zealand's print media.

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            THE SITUATION

When we’re all locked down, and assuming schools are all closed, how will working parents cope with children? Will this mean that one part of a working couple will have to stay at home doing the minding? And you know and I know that this, nine times out of ten, will mean the mother. And even if there are older offspring – teenagers old enough to be left unsupervised – what problems will arise from unsupervised adolescents suddenly with lots of time on their hands?

Grandparents who often act as child-minders will not be available as they, too, will be locked down, because they are aged, and therefore more likely to suffer severely from infection. Perhaps suffer mortally.

            And what about working parents in essential services that have to keep running? Doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, fire and police departments and border security. Indeed, what about anybody working in such essential services? As they are on the “front line”, they will be the ones more vulnerable to infection, working face-to-face with “cases”. In Italy, at the time I am writing this, a record number of doctors and nurses are coming down with the virus they are trying to control.

            Of course many people have been told that they can work from home. For many businesspeople and for many professionals, this is a clear possibility. But there are many people in service industries and in factories – where physical things are physically made – who cannot work from home, and who will either lose income or lose their jobs as things are downsized. Obviously, even in the early stages of the virus here, tourism and what is called “the hospitality industry”, are crawling to a halt. The virus is clearly going to have severe effects on the economy of this and every other affected country.

            In New Zealand, at the time I am writing this, and three weeks before you will read it, we are up to only Level 2 of what the prime minister and other authorities have defined as the four possible stages of the pandemic. Perhaps we will be up to Level 3 by the time you read this. The advice to self-isolate if you have been exposed to possible infection is good advice. So, for those who have not been exposed to possible infection, is the order for gatherings of no more than 100 people to be held. Of course this is rough on many people – especially those in sport and in the performing arts, and the audiences who want to see them. But it is a necessary meaure. We are reasonably being told to keep calm but not to carry on as usual.

            We can say that New Zealand’s isolation, the way our borders are now closed, and the scarcity of confirmed cases [at time of writing] all mean that we are fairly safe. But we cannot be complacent.

            THE UP-SIDE

I asked for thoughts on the Coronavirus from somebody quite a few decades younger than me. She was surprisingly upbeat.

It’s a good time in history to have such a virus, she said, because technology is now in such a state that, even if we are in (self-) isolation, we can instantly communicate with others via Skype, cell-phone messaging, twitter and even good ol’ e-mail and the ‘phone. As much as is technologically possible, we don’t have to be alone. Technology means we can still keep in touch instantly and speak to people.

She also averred that the crisis will have the effect of mass-teaching children hygiene, with all the warnings about washing hands and keeping your distance.

Yet she cautioned that, human nature being what it is and inevitable contacts being what they are, some will die. She wasn’t totally optimistic.

THE OFF-THE-WALL BITS

Yes, there is a loony side to every crisis, and rumours and conspiracy theories will circulate. Did you hear this one? “The Chinese deliberately created this virus to eliminate non-working old people”. Complete nonsense, of course, but then there really are some people who seem to desire such an outcome. A national magazine quotes a columnist from the (British) Telegraph newspaper saying the virus might be good for the economy “in the long term, by disproprtionately culling elderly dependants.” I hope you do not agree with this bland suggestion.

Then there is the much-condemned habit of President Trump’s referring to the virus as “the Chinese virus”. Though the virus did first appear in China, and though its huge toll in Italy is demonstrably connected with a large cohort of workers who commute between China and Northern Italy, Trump’s words are seen as racist. And maybe they are. But I reflect that, racist though it may be, using this term is more accurate than the term “Spanish ‘flu” that was regularly used for the pandemic of 1918. As all historians are aware, the so-called “Spanish” influenza originated in other parts of Europe, but was not at first noticed there in the midst of the death and destruction that was then going on in the First World War. Spain was neutral in that war,  so Spain was the first country to publicly notice and aknowledge the virus. Hence the misnomer.

There is, unfortunately, another matter related to China. China is a one-party authoritarian state. Party dogma says the government is always right and, of course, news services and reporting are strictly controlled. I sincerely hope that their recent claim (at time of writing this) to have got the pandemic under control, and to be experiencing fewer fatalities, is correct. But unfortunately reports from official sources in authoritarian states always have to be greeted with at least some scepticism. A surgeon recently said to me “The Chinese lied over SARS and they could be lying over this.” I hope he is wrong, but I will maintain my scepticism until the pandemic is over.