We’re in complete lockdown, quarantine, enhanced quarantine, double secret quarantine – whatever the hell you want to call it. A lot of weird and crazy behaviour going on – plenty of it from me.
Yet in a strange way there’s a sense that normalcy is returning. Why do I say that? Because on the social media fear is being replaced – with finger pointing. Seriously, in a warped way it’s a good thing. Governments are being blamed, officials should have known, health organisations are responsible for our plight. And then there are the Chinese; OK in this case they are to blame. Come on guys – I can’t make every analogy work.
But Janet and I have a particular reason to remember the timeline for the beginnings of all this. We had booked a trip to Vietnam, flying out of Manila January 20th and returning the 28th.
It seems a lifetime ago, not 2 1/2 months. Were we worried about a Chinese virus on January 20th? Nope. There had been some rumours but nothing big. But we were worried about our trip. Why? Because Mt. Taal had erupted a week or so before our flight, NAIA had actually closed for a day or so. Janet and I were worried that it would impact out flight and I checked the airport status daily. We were also aware that it might impact our return flight on the 28th. But a virus – no way.
We arrived the evening of the 20th. By the 21st there were lots of masks being worn in Ho Chi Minh City and people were clearly buying masks in stores. Other than that normal life seemed to be going on. Yet as the days went by the topic became more and more important to the Vietnamese people and Janet became more concerned, finally buying a pack of masks.
The 23rd was the first time I really paid any attention. It was the day after my birthday and we’d booked massages in a very high end spa. When we arrived we were required to fill out a form saying that we had not been in the Wuhan area of China over the past 14 days. ‘Well, they’re getting serious about this thing,’ I thought. Probably paranoid, but a little paranoia might not be so bad.
It was the week of Chinese New Year, which is also celebrated in Vietnam. There were the normal celebrations, but I couldn’t help but notice something was wrong. Maybe it was the fact that by then nearly everyone was talking through a mask.
By the time we returned on the 28th, a week later, the world had changed and nearly everyone on the flight was wearing masks. OK, I wasn’t but all the sane people were. We got off the plane and they checked everyone’s temperature, which I thought was really strange, though I was impressed that the Philippines seemed on top of it.
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Three days later a certain politician closed off travel from China and everyone called him a nut.
I have no grand conclusions here, except who the hell could have really known. For those who say they did know or everyone should have known, I have a great memory of the week that began to change the world and I sure as hell didn’t know.
A couple days ago I played the movie Cloverfield, a clever horror movie. For those not familiar, it starts out as a story of some 20-something friends at a party celebrating one friend moving to Tokyo for work. We get to see these young people get drunk, hit on each other, and do silly things we all did at that age. A half hour into the movie there’s a huge crash, a building comes down and we find out in real time that a Godzilla-like monster is destroying the city. It’s a clever take on a routine monster story.
I think I played it for myself and Janet because it reflects our current life. We go along enjoying life, in my case a retired life. We go on a vacation and have fun. We return home our vacation a success. And then suddenly a monster begins to destroy the world.
There’s no time to figure out where the monster came from or who should have known or whether we should have been better prepared for an alien attack. We just have to run like hell, or in our current situation, sit like hell.
Come to think about it the Cloverfield analogy is a crappy one. At the end of the story, the military, nearly defeated, drops a nuke on it killing our young heroes. So as I say the analogy doesn’t quite work; or maybe it does. In our case the nuke is to stay home, stay safe and take care of each other.
