Corona Diary: Day 1

I have been working at home now for two weeks. I remember, only a couple of months ago, flying into Seattle for work and getting a strange notification: anyone travelling to the US, be aware that the first corona virus case in the US has just been diagnosed… in Seattle. At the time, it didn’t seem like a big deal. A minor blip in an otherwise unnoteworthy trip. I obviously started looking up corona virus: it was a bit like SARs, it was fairly prevalent in China, some people were worried. I remember SARs. It involved people panicking about wearing facemasks, but not anything that affected me personally. In total, 774 people died.

I know a lot more about corona virus now. Everyone does. It’s killed a lot more than 774 people. Even Donald Trump thinks its a bad virus, and when Donald Trump says something is bad it usually means that it’s incredibly good at its job and Donald Trump is scared of it.

So what is life like now, in the post corona world? How do we carry on when everything has changed?

I’ve found a lot of little things have been helping. I’m actually contacting my friends more, on skype and WhatsApp and by text. They are, clearly, shocked by this, as previously you’d have been lucky to get a conversation out of me even if I’m in the same room. Like most writers, I find social interaction draining. I can’t get dialogue right until at least the second draft. And even then, only if I can edit the response.

Still, when you’re confined to the house, not because you’re self isolating but because there’s nowhere left open to go to, I’ve found seeing a friendly face is actually quite cheering. In the last week, I’ve done video chat based drinking sessions, I have friends who stayed up until 1 in the morning playing an online group game called quiptastic, I even spent twenty minutes watching a friend put a chair together while I worked on my laptop and made helpful comments over the VC.

Exercise helps too. Or at least, that’s what my wife keeps telling me, and has done for several years now. It turns out you go out for a run without endangering yourself or other people, just by shouting ‘I’m socially distant, run away, run away,’ whenever anyone gets too close. This is also something I’ve been doing for several years.

Things are going to continue to change. The word unprecedented gets overused. This is unprecedented. The closest thing to this that’s ever happened was sometime in the middle ages. Thing is, we’re good with unprecedented things. We adapt, we change, we carry on.

Hopefully, over the next few months, things will become clearer. If the predictions are correct, things are going to get a lot worse. We can help by staying home, avoiding unnecessary contact, and not panicking. There is plenty of food, the majority of people who get sick have only mild symptoms, and the logarithmic growth rate of infection in countries like China and Italy is already showing signs of slowdown. Of the 81,008 cases in China, 71,740 have recovered, and a further 4086 are showing only mild symptoms and are likely to recover. Quarantine and lockdown, it seems, are effective.

As others have said, our great grandparents were asked to die for their country. You’re being asked to stay home and watch Netflix. And there’s some really awesome box sets. For instance, I still haven’t seen beyond the first episode of The Walking Dead.

I wonder how it ends.