Coronovirus Lockdown - Week #1

Thanks to the Coronavirus, the lockdown has been enforced in Bangalore. So one has to work from home. Those with working spouses suddenly discover that the Wi-Fi bandwidth isn’t enough for two people working from home. Then there’s the issue of sharing bandwidth with the on-vacation kid(s) who want to watch Netflix and YouTube. The EU’s answer to this problem? Since you can’t control the kids + retired, you cut off the source instead:

“The EU has called on streaming services such as Netflix and YouTube to limit their services in order to prevent the continent’s broadband networks from crashing as tens of millions of people start working from home.”

Thank God the Indian government hasn’t take such crazy measures.

Non-working spouses resent the work-from-home spouse who takes over a room and insists on pin drop silence (“Hey, I’m working”) and demands endless cups of tea, snacks and meals…. to be served in “his” room.

In our apartment complex, we have slinging matches thanks to the ability to react instantly on WhatsApp and Adda. Everyone should keep their kids at home. Why? Kids don’t even get infected. And they’d drive you nuts if they stayed indoors for a day, let alone 2 weeks. Why stop with the kids? We shouldn’t allow delivery boys to enter. Are you crazy? How would we get anything then? Go out to the shops? Wouldn’t that violate the lockdown? Ok, let them come to the gate, but no farther. Residents should go pick their deliveries at the gate. An unhappy compromise had been struck, with resentful residents lugging groceries from the gate. But if you’re stopping the delivery boys, why allow the maids? When it comes to maids, even the staunchest proponents of self-quarantine swallow hard… and back down. So if you’re allowing the maids, and they move across houses, then why stop the delivery boys? Round and round it goes…

One lady suggested the lifts be swiped clean regularly. She offered to do it first, but wanted others to volunteer as well. She was able to coax and shame a few others in her building to follow suit… Another lady mentioned that her hubby was returning from Colombia. She got hit with a hailstorm of comments that demanded that her entire family self-quarantine for 2 weeks upon his return. No wonder she was very bitter: I volunteered some info, and you people burn us at the stake for it. It also set off a follow-up question: shouldn’t self-quarantines be imposed even on domestic travelers too…

A bunch of folks turned vigilantes who yelled murder, took pics and threatened to report to the cops on any gatherings downstairs. So out went the yoga and aerobics classes in the clubhouse. Senior citizens were bullied from coming down altogether, even for walks or just catching up. But kids couldn’t be prevented from playing downstairs. Unless their parents feared the infection threat enough to not want their kids to go down. But those were a small minority. For most parents, themselves stuck at home, sending the kids out was absolutely necessary for everyone’s sanity and maintaining peace in the house.

All this reminds me of a couple of points from this interview with Larry Brilliant, the epidemiologist who helped eradicate small pox. First:

“Everybody needs to remember: This is not a zombie apocalypse. It's not a mass extinction event.”

Second, all this talk of the virus being “novel” is unfortunately leading to the misconeption that, unlike other infections and diseases, you don’t develop immunity after getting it once, that it can hit the same person again. Brilliant says “novel” in this context always meant “new”, not “different altogether”:

“I don't see anything in this virus, even though it's novel, [that contradicts immunity once you had it]. There are cases where people think that they've gotten it again, [but] that's more likely to be a test failure than it is an actual reinfection.”

And third, we don’t know the spread of the virus truly:

“We figure out whether the distribution of this virus looks like an iceberg, which is one-seventh above the water, or a pyramid, where we see everything.”

On that count, everyone’s just guessing, and going with their leanings.

And last, people don’t let go off their politics even at such times. Many in the US have already decided that the US response will be woefully inadequate because, hey, there’s Trump. Those who disapprove of the UK approach attribute the policy of let-it-play-out as a reflection of Boris Johnson and the right’s mistrust of vaccines in general. And many in India believe the official response in India will be along the lines of the nonsense of cow urine, cow dung and sunlight that is spewed by RSS crazies. If you ask such people, the US, UK and India are doomed. And yet it seems to be continental Europe that is gasping so far… perhaps it’s time to take a deep look at ourselves, the facts, and identify where we’re reacting based on emotion alone.