Corona Diaries

Marcus

“In the seeming inevitability I do become stricken, I don’t expect to end up in the ICU.”

Background Information

Marcus uses his diary entry to describe his time as a US tourist attempting to visit Europe, beginning in the UK just before the UK went into country-wide lockdown caused by Covid-19.

A brief account of March and May 2020 March 10, 2020 — 37000 ft Somewhere over the Rockies.... Travel in a different age. My cat, Venus, was crying at 4am. I was sleeping overnight in the place where she’d be staying for the duration of my trip and being a solitary kitty, she was uneasy with the other cats in the apartment. When I awoke, I noticed a stream of panicked messages from the friend I am traveling to visit in Bristol. Am I still really coming? The shutdown of the UK is imminent and just days away. All of Italy is on lockdown!! Everyone is cancelling in all the venues her company manages. She’s being asked to work from home for the foreseeable future. I had evaluated my risk a few days before. Flights were empty, international travellers were cancelling left and right. I wasn’t planning a trip to Italy, and all of the countries I am planning to visit have as many or fewer cases as we do in the US. With socialized medicine, I even thought they might be a better place to be than in the US when the breakouts really start to hit. I’m in my mid-40’s, am in good health with medications for low-grade diabetes and high blood pressure. I don’t drink, don’t smoke, exercise regularly. In the seeming inevitability I do become stricken, I don’t expect to end up in the ICU. But it hadn’t occurred to me that the friends I was taking the trip to visit might be afraid to interact with me. Operating on so little sleep and getting that slough of messages devastated me. I wondered at that point of trying to go. Was my previous assessment off? Was I walking into certain quarantine and lock down? Was I about to get stranded, not even get to visit my friends, and sick besides? Should I cut my losses at the $2700 in non-refundable airline tickets, pre-paid rooms, and event tickets? Should I just admit defeat, retreat with my cat back home, and give up on the first international trip I’ve managed to arrange in 11 years? I had about 9 hours to decide... It took a long time for me to calm down. I don’t do well without sleep under the best conditions and adding such an explosive emotional event into the mix magnified what I was thinking and feeling. Getting swept up in the fear of the crowd isn’t common for me, but I was surfing quite a big wave. So, I took a nap. I talked to a couple of my other friends I am planning to visit. I read up on the UK’s “Delay” plan and saw that it wasn’t likely to be implemented before the end of March. They even went out of the

way to caution that anyone experiencing cold or flu like symptoms was very likely just suffering from ordinary illness as COVID-19 had yet to begin to spread amongst the general public. I spent my money, I weighed my risk, I armed myself with information — and I decided to follow through. Oddly, I felt no urge to share my decision on Facebook. There are plenty of friends in my feed who are bracing for the apocalypse and keep sharing all the most dire warning and the ugliest graphs. I didn’t want the judgement. I didn’t need their fear to become my fear. I needed to own my decision. And here I am, 90 minutes into my flight to London with no idea what things are going to be like at any of my destinations, what might change tomorrow as the globe deals with it’s first genuine pandemic threat since growing up in the age of HIV. My predictions? Other people’s fears will be my greatest shield on this journey. That they will not travel, not congregate, and obsess about the cleanliness of their hands will benefit everyone in their countries including me. No doubt we will learn six months from now that people’s individual contributions to panic slowed the spread of the disease immensely and helped manage the hospital capacity appropriately. But my eyes are open. I know I’m making a voyage that could be fraught with complication, and that the world is potentially a more dangerous place to be than it has been in a long time. Let’s see, shall we? _____________ 12 March 2020 19:00 GMT Garden Court Hotel Kensington Garden Square. Day two and it has already felt like a week. Overnight Trump announced travel restrictions on all incoming flights from Europe except the UK. I had already been watching the news and researched in advance a ticket that would take me home early. I was mostly worried because my friend in Spain was self- quarantining in anticipation of my arrival. As it was her measure, and one others were taking, I was and am expecting Spain to be the next Italy. So, at 1AM GMT I started getting all these texts and messages from my friends, and as my body still thought it was 6PM, I woke up. With all travel from Europe to cease by Friday at midnight, I quickly pulled up the ticket I was looking at and purchased it for next Thursday, hoping that I’d still get some kind of vacation. I was now nearing my vacation spending limit because I spent $600 on a ticket home, essentially discarding the three flight remainder of my already purchased ticket. I don’t expect to see that money again, and I refuse to spend 25 angry hours on the phone trying desperately to get it back. This is the shutdown. We must pick our battles. In the morning I woke up and checked out of my hotel in time to catch my train to Bristol. As I mainly took this trip to see my three best friends in Europe and catch up after years, and I had decided overnight to trim the week in Switzerland and Spain I had planned for so long, seeing one of them was at least achieving a third of my goal. As I got out of the Tube at Waterloo station, I got a message from her. She was having a panic attack at the thought of interacting with a traveller. I knew it wasn’t personal. She has severe asthma and cares for her

18-month-old toddler and lives terrified of contracting COVID-19 and being unable to care for her son. It wasn’t personal, and I felt how torn she was. We decided that I wouldn’t make the trip. It was hard for both of us, but it was what had to be. The instincts of a mother are primal, and they must always be first. Most of London as I walk around and ride the Underground is pretty cavalier. Covid is on people’s minds and you see an occasional useless mask, but those out in the world are mostly living their life, resigned to whatever will come. True, we all seem to twitch at every sniffle and cough we hear. But we tell ourselves whatever we need to in order to get through the day. So much of the reactions I see in my Facebook feed are split between those who want to present as much factual and alarming data as possible, along with pleas for desperate measures, and those who don’t want to fight, don’t want to know, and want to make themselves feel better with comparisons to other things. To defer or ignore information is a very human instinct. People don’t want to feel fear. They don’t want to allow themselves to become overwhelmed. I see the reactions and understand better those who deny climate change. Often we will listen to whatever take on things gives us peace of mind. It gives me a new compassion for people who watch Fox News. I believe they just want to feel better about the madness of the world, and are happy to turn to whomever can give them a moment of calm. When my trip to Bristol got cancelled — I didn’t see the point in going anyway — and I rebooked the hotel I’ve been staying in, I considered immediately seeing ENDGAME at The Old Vic with Alan Cumming and Daniel Radcliffe. I had wanted to see it months ago, but it didn’t fit into my schedule. There was a matinee, and I went. It was the first time I considered putting on one of the masks I’ve been carrying with me, and I briefly did. But I felt ridiculous, uncomfortable and I knew from everything I’d read that it was pretty much a pointless exercise. Not one person in the theatre had a mask on. There we were socially congregating in a time of fear and legitimate concern. Those I talked to all had the same perspective on it: we have to live our lives until we can’t. It was a good crowd for the plays — I think we all enjoyed ourselves more because we all made a conscious decision to be there that wouldn’t normally be necessary. It was an act of defiance. As I walked to and from Queensway station, I saw so many stores, bakeries, tourist shops. Everything was impeccably clean and inviting. But there was no one there. I stopped in to pick up a bottle of water at a candy store and chatted with the guy behind the counter. We spent most of our chat shrugging and smiling. Disasters and big, scary events make people more social, more affable, and oddly cheerful in the face of whatever is in the process of overtaking the community. Normally I would go out this evening and find somewhere to be social, maybe even have a beer. I’m always happy to make friends with whomever I find. But instead here I am in my room, typing away, worried about too much interaction with other people. I always say that other people are really the only thing that matter in the world. We are all so interdependent. We need each other more than most of us ever realize. It saddens me that right now other people are what we have to hide from. ————————— Day 3 13 March 2020

23:33 GMT Kensington Garden Square I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that each day so far has ended up being stranger than the last. I awoke a little later today — I tried to give myself a chance for some extra sleep because I knew it would help me adjust and keep my immune system up. I planned my trip to the National Gallery today but found when I got there I didn’t stay long. I started having psychosomatic reactions like I thought I was getting ill, with a tightness in my chest. I kept thinking, “oh god, this is it.” What surprised me most in Trafalgar Square was how peopled it was. So many people were throwing their arms around clowns and people in costumes for pictures. No one seemed the slightest bit concerned except perhaps the woman renting audio tours in the gallery, sterilizing each headset within an inch of its life. And after what was probably one of the best concerts I’ve ever attended in an amazing place with so few others, I was frankly shocked to see how much of London was out for Friday night, business as usual, snagging and cramming together in pubs and going to the theatre. Admittedly, I’ve had a bit of a cavalier attitude, but compared to these people I’ve been pretty cautious. Last night the friend I am visiting for the weekend suggested we go to the birthday party for an art collective Sunday night and originally I said yes — but after mulling it over I had to say no. I simply had quite a bad feeling about a party with 150 people in a small space. Then on the way home I received all sorts of emails from the master tenant at our house, telling me she was worried about me coming back home and could I self quarantine elsewhere, etc. That sparked an unpleasant conversation about my rights as a tenant. She pretended to have gotten a lawyer that said she was allowed to keep me out of the house, and I let her pretend. I didn’t want to fight with her, and I can always call the cops as soon as I get home to be let back in. But it has made me think about coming back even earlier than next Thursday. Who knows what the world will be like in a week. Already Spain is shutting down on Saturday, even though a couple days ago it was being so casual. Clearly the UK will be next. It’s all so scary — particularly because I have to move as soon as I get home. I’ve already lost so much money, but how much will I still feel like I’m on vacation in a day or two? 10th May 2020

“I don’t need your COVID catechism. Everyone is preaching like a crazy man on the corner who only knows

one sermon but has absolute conviction they are saving your soul.

More than the repetition being maddening — admittedly repetition grates on my nerves — is the smug certainty of the newly saved. The unwavering belief that Truth is theirs alone, and their path is The Only Path. I don’t want your phone calls with grandstanding outrage that you saw people at the store speaking freely with Satan, nor your emails tattling on the people you saw in the street. No one made you Hall Monitor, and I’m not interested in the misbehaviour of people I’ll never meet. People are irritated — and a lot of that is people being subjected to the judgment of the evangelical tent revival that suddenly sprung up around them. Bullying rarely wins converts — just ask those who were recently shot for dictating to other people. Personally, I’m far more worried about the big picture than this disease. But when people only see the economy as “money for rich people” instead of the survival mechanism it actually is, I can understand why they generalize. Maybe I’m a cold-hearted prick — or maybe history has taught me what few people in the developed world have learned first hand: bad things happen sometimes. I suspect that the bad things that happen as a result of our desperate attempts to mitigate something we can’t control are going to be far worse in the long run than this disease has been or will be. That’s just my opinion — but it’s every bit as valid as anyone else’s opinion, and that’s simply where we’re at. We’ve no idea what’s really going on, what the best path is, nor what’s going to happen next. So, naturally people who believe so strongly they have answers they can’t possibly have are necessarily annoying. Just relax. Control what you can. I recommend not seeking to control or nag others. You’re not mad at them — you’re mad at the state of our culture and our education system and our media and our leaders that allows for the people that don’t behave how you want. Don’t go around pretending you’re Dr. Fauci and lecturing people. Everyone knows you just learned what he told you and you don’t speak with his authority. Most of us have too little to do. We feel very powerless in the face of everything happening around us. But we have to stop taking that out of each other. The sad reality is that the US is doing the best it can. It’s shocking for us to see that this indeed is the state of our country — but there it is. We can’t change the conditions that were in place when this crisis descended on us. The very best we can hope for is to be better prepared for the next crisis. Truly, that is the best we can hope for. People usually only learn from the painful lessons.”