In late September in northern Colorado, where the Rocky Mountains meet the plains in the traditional and ancestral lands of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Ute Nations and peoples, the waist-high grasses turn golden and dry into muted shades of red, copper, violet, and blue. The wind comes more often from the north as each day holds more darkness. And as the wheel of the year turns, so do the grasses’ voices in the breeze: the soft pffhhh of June shifting to the louder shhhh of August, shifting now toward the dry ckkkk of October.

It’s been over three years since I have strayed more than 15 miles from my home here in Larimer County. What began out of the government-enforced and temporary order to suspend travel due to the COVID-19 global health emergency has since emerged as a self-directed and lasting ethical imperative that’s altered my vision. Once I used to think I needed to see the land—bright fall leaves, winter snow—to know when I was in time. Now, I understand that relying only on my sight leaves me balancing on one foot. Now, I say, Blindfold me and let me listen.

I know that we have passed the Winter Solstice because the kestrels appear at the base of the foothills. They greet me each morning on a particular stretch of telephone line above an open field with their klee-klee-klee, swiveling their white, black, and rust-colored heads. I know we are deep in January because all along the creek, the red-winged blackbirds are calling, conk-la-ree, conk-la-ree, a welcome racket after their months of silence. A few weeks later, the northern flickers begin. Their wik-wik-wik-wik sweeps over the blackbirds, a duet that builds around the Spring Equinox, when the flickers pair their wik-wik with drumming on the cottonwood trees, whose buds shine with moisture that can brim into a drop in the cool morning air.

Later, running on crisp April days along the western edge of town, along the seam of foothills meeting the plains, I skid to a stop. I cannot stop smiling because swee-swee-swee-swee-dil-ooo—the western meadowlarks have returned. Each male flashes their bright yellow front, with their black “V” bib on the breast, as they bob on fenceposts and sing, revealing white tail feathers when they turn and fly nestward among the shrubs. Last year, a beloved trail took me near a meadowlark nest, built on the ground. The eggs finally opened, the parents swooped, the fledglings began to fly, and the nest yellowed in the summer sun and scattered in the fall winds. And the wheel of the year goes around again.

I’ve also learned to know when I am through scent. These last three years have opened me from just noticing the brightest flowers to the particular scents of each stage of the turn of the seasons.

Come summer, I cannot move along certain trails higher in the foothills without near-constant goosebumps from the rich, heady scent of the ponderosa pines in full release. When my partner and I first moved here eight years ago, we called them the vanilla trees, but now I think of them more as vanilla and patchouli, or butterscotch and sandalwood, mixed with apricot and coffee. Sometimes, when I return from these runs, my partner knows I was mingling with the pines from the scent of my clothes. A scent somewhere between clarinet and bassoon.

I have loved traveling. Some of my most beloved memories are from my few trips overseas—the cold waves on the shore of northern Denmark, the rose light of summer evenings in the Netherlands. I might cross the oceans again, but I know our world is on fire because of choices like that. Three summers ago, the evacuation line for the record-setting Cameron Peak Fire came less than ten miles from our front door. Ash fell from the sky, and lunchtime was as dark as midnight. How can I get on a plane and burn more carbon in one day than I would otherwise in months? How can I justify using our gas-powered car for more than essential shopping?

Besides, each season in this small circle of space that I have not left for 40 months now is its own kind of traveling. I remind myself that, after all, generations of my ancestors lived and died within Appalachian spaces smaller than this Colorado county. Each week, I walk a two-mile loop around a nearby lake. Before 2020, visiting perhaps once a month, I noticed only the largest changes: new leaves on the cottonwood trees, pelicans on the water in summer, the lake freezing over. Now, each week brings a parade of differences. One week in June: the first orange flowers, the first signaling by the new prairie dog pups, the first time orioles join the dawn chorus, the first time the sun reaches the trail before 6 a.m.

Here, among these shrubs, trees, and grasses, among these birds, animals, insects, and yes, other humans, feels more home to me than, perhaps, anywhere else I have lived. Still, I wonder, sometimes, how long I can stay here, as housing prices along Colorado’s Front Range soar; as the town simultaneously grows and becomes even whiter; as it is a rare two weeks when a driver doesn’t shout, race their engine, or more, as I run these county roads. Each year, multiple friends leave for other states.

Nothing lasts—and everything lasts, just in different bodies. The prickly pear cactus flowers bloom in early summer, a lemon-lime that deepens to buttery gold as the season progresses. After three years of waiting for them, of kneeling beside them and marveling, this is the first year I have witnessed rose-colored blooms alongside the yellow. I still have so much to learn.

Summer now, again, begins to tilt toward fall, with a cool morning, a day of northwest wind, the sky a deep sapphire blue, and the thistles crisping from raspberry pompoms into golden-brown discs falling across the trail, into my hands, into our classroom: a scarecrow’s corsage, a student once said. A faerie’s pillow, another student marveled. Settling deeper into place is an invitation to listen, come closer, be with. So, yes. Let’s begin another turn around the wheel of the year here, marvelous here, again.

The post Where I (Don’t) Go<span class="colon">:</span> Three Years in Northern Colorado appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When the pandemic hit, my life was rocked like everyone else’s. But while the changes were swift and thorough, they were not unlike anything I had experienced before.

In the 1970s, I was born into a small cult whose members considered themselves agents of change who were going to save humanity from itself. Our Santa Barbara group was the last remaining remote cell outside of Pennsylvania, and as a girl, I imagined myself to be some kind of secret agent of God, a black-ops nun hiding in plain sight.

It has been decades since I participated in the group. I do not believe their tenets. My life’s work has been to untangle the effect those teachings had on me. But ironically, it was my time in this religious cult that prepared me to dutifully obey science when the epidemic hit.

To me, the isolation of lockdown made sense. Like back in the day, all I had to do was follow the rules to save humanity—only this time, I knew I was following good science to aid the survival of my immune-compromised mom and me.

Rule-following was considered the closest thing to holiness in the cult, and one of the easiest ways to prove your holiness was clothing. Virtue-signaling, we call it today. When I was 12, I wore a forbidden sweatshirt emblazoned with a Mickey Mouse across the front. As punishment I was not allowed to participate in any services and my family was told not to talk to me until I was approved to return after two weeks. That’s how I became habituated to rule-following.

Now, decades later, Dr. Fauci was saying we needed to follow the rules to save humanity. So he made recommendations, and I followed them. With my mom’s immune system wrecked, the idea of even being a little relaxed with social distancing or being outdoors other than for anything truly “essential” was not an option. I stayed indoors and away from people. I even sacrificed walks in the open air. To me, the lockdown was like a kind of solitary monk-like cell confinement, and I was proud of my discipline.

I slipped right back into my old default judgment of rule-breakers, too, condemning the unmasked, the improperly masked, and the toilet paper hoarders with ice-cold glares.

I felt my paranoia of “infection” also returning. In the cult, “beware of the infected” meant always being on the lookout for the morally impure. During those years, I recall thinking that “The Others” were waiting whenever we ventured into public, like Lampwick from Pinocchio. Around every corner they were ready to pounce with temptations like decadent food, drugs, rock & roll, fashion, or the lie of freedom—all distractions from my divine purpose.

Now this fear of infection was coming out during trips to the grocery store—my asthma magnifying the urgency of my breathing. Putting on my shopping uniform felt like a comforting ritual: two sets of gloves, two masks, and a hat. I’d crushed my Achilles Tendon weeks before lockdown, so I was also in a boot and on a crutch. What a sight I must have been: Broken Terminator soccer mom wheezing like Darth Vader. My double-gloved hand would reach for an apple, cheese, or can, hyper-conscious that other people’s dirty mitts had smeared their infection on them.

But these flashbacks paled with those evoked by being cut off from physical affection. I’m known for both giving and receiving nurturing hugs. Cut off from my friends and loved ones, in this state of total absence of touch, a difficult memory ambushed me.

When I was a child, I’d had this repetitive vivid nightmare: President Reagan pushed the nuclear button, and warheads sailed across the sky to kill the world. Every city was burnt-out Beirut. Orphaned children filled the streets. The nightmare induced a cold, sweaty panic that sent me running to my mom’s arms. But one night, when I was 8 years old, she told me she couldn’t hug me anymore. New rules. I stared at the pattern on her sweater, hoping to fall into the knit and disappear. I knew to go against the rules was to go against God, and the God I knew was always making me do the uncomfortable thing for my spiritual growth. Recalling this moment in lockdown, I was surprised to find I was ready to miss my friends’ hugs. My mother’s retraction of affection had inoculated me for this pandemic moment.

The one good thing I can say about the cult is that it taught me that making sacrifices for the greater good is a strong moral choice. That’s why I haven’t been able to comprehend why people—especially religious people—have had such a challenging time sacrificing a little of their freedom to keep other people alive during this time.

Of course, the cult took this philosophy to the extreme. Back then, we were trained to cut ourselves off from the outside world so we could focus on our divine assignment to save humanity. That could mean breaking ties even with immediate family when necessary. A family could also be asked to move from across the country. If you did not adjust without complaint, you were vulnerable to various penalties.

My family got that call—the invitation to join the main ship in Pennsylvania—when I was 11 years old. It was like Gabriel’s horn sounding just for me, urging me to pack only what we needed and to discard all else as dead weight. We moved from a tropical California garden paradise to the leafless, slate gray Colonial East on Halloween Day. Being in divine service, I had imagined our new home to be Elysian Fields, a place of the gods. But the November sun was colder than snow.

When my family left the cult five years after we moved to Pennsylvania, the isolation—different from the isolation of being on the inside—crippled me at first, and I did not handle the transition very well. But this spring, when it was my time to get vaccinated, I only felt excited and impatient for life to begin again. Still even I couldn’t have anticipated how much being fully vaccinated has made me feel like Spider-Man: ordinary on the outside, but fortified within.

As I wrote this piece, I paced in front of my keyboard. Memories of being shunned as a child, disallowed from group activities for perceived infractions, hit me like a punch to the gut. I worried how the living cult members would judge me. But the idea that I’d have to wait for everyone to die before I could talk about my truth started to disintegrate when I realized I needed to own my voice and experience, to embrace that power within me.

Coming out of isolation, I’m ready to gobble up the world. I can accept the Shabbat dinner invitations and attend the live music concerts my friends host in Joshua Tree. And I can’t wait to once again give my famous hugs—preferably on the way to the airport to see what else is out there.

The post My Childhood in a Cult Prepared Me for COVID-19 Lockdown  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Now that 2020 is mercifully in the past, we have data (from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis) to evaluate the “grim calculus” in each state. And looking at that data—especially for large states, which have more diversified economies—the results may surprise. It’s hard to find any real trade-off between COVID lockdowns and decreased economic activity.

If anything, we find the opposite.

First, let’s step back and look at larger state data. Of those states that performed better economically than the U.S. as a whole in 2020, the state of Washington, with greater than average COVID restrictions, took first place. Then came three less COVID-stringent states—Arizona, Colorado and Georgia—followed by three more stringent states—North Carolina, Maryland, and Virginia.

Then, in eighth place, came California, one of the most stringent states. After California, only three other states outperformed the country economically—Texas, Indiana, and Florida, all less stringent. Across these 11 states it is hard to find a trade-off; states with more COVID restrictions did well economically and those with fewer restrictions also did well.

And if we look beyond those 11 states to all states, we find a striking pattern: States with more stringent interventions had on average better economic outcomes and better health outcomes.

Is this just a statistical anomaly? The answer seems to be no. One reason to be confident of the result is to look at other countries. Consider, for example, Sweden, well-known for having few stringent COVID measures. In 2020, Sweden had worse health outcomes than the similar Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway, and Finland. At the same time, its economic outcomes during the pandemic were no better than any of its healthier neighbors.

The finding also fits with history. A 2008 Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis survey of the 1918 influenza pandemic found that St. Louis, which took the flu more seriously and opened up later, had better economic and health outcomes than Philadelphia, a city that opened up sooner.

Similarly, 2020 research into the 1918 pandemic found that cities with more stringent interventions had better employment gains and better health outcomes.

What explains this seemingly strange but persistent result? The power of government signaling.

When a state indicates through policy and pronouncements that it takes the pandemic seriously enough to impose measures (sometimes extreme) to control the spread of the disease and protect public health, it is sending a message to its citizens. Part of that message is about businesses. The state is saying that there are protocols in place to make open businesses as safe as possible, and were that not possible, the businesses would be closed.

But when a state indicates through policy, as Sweden did, that individuals should make a choice as to what they do during a pandemic and that the government will not choose for them, it sends a different signal. It is saying, “Citizens, you are on your own, choose wisely.” So, while an open business will be busier than a closed one, the open businesses are likely to do better in a place with more stringent restrictions.

Does this show up in data? Yes, in some ways. Using OpenTable’s data for the pandemic, a decline in the number of diners was more dramatic for restaurants and bars in California than Texas. However, for those individual businesses were open, hours worked by employees fell by only 1.5 percent in California versus an 8.9 percent decline in Texas. But this is simply cherry picking two states. The decline in the number of diners in Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Ohio was comparable to that in Florida, Georgia, and Missouri even though the former were closer to California in restrictions and the latter closer to the Swedish approach.

The retail sector data paint a similar picture. For the same large states mentioned above, there is no significant correlation between changes in retail sales and the stringency of COVID interventions. A similar analysis of retail purchases by type of store also shows no correlation between interventions and the volume of sales. And, for the smallest 10 states, the same result holds true. People headed to online platforms to purchase goods at about the same rate regardless of the stringency of interventions.

The bottom line is that people respond to the information they have and the signals they receive from their government. Clearly, business closures increase unemployment in affected sectors. But there is no evidence to suggest that closures and other public health interventions have led to worse economic outcomes. So, the trade-off, such as it is, must be between sectors directly impacted by interventions and, in states and countries with fewer interventions, voluntary lower demand and more work absenteeism due to higher overall infection rates.

Knowing all this, you might still believe that the freedom to choose is valuable enough to pay the societal and health costs of that freedom. But empirically it is not a trade-off between health and economic outcomes. It is a trade-off between the freedom to choose and public health.

The post Why Did Tougher COVID Restrictions Help State Economies? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We’re more than a year out from #TheMoment, March 17, when the first lockdown in France began. At that crossroads where countries made different political decisions, France chose to put health first.

Now, as we settle into a third lockdown, to encounter someone without a mask in the street is startling. Every few streets or so, outside every pharmacy, there are little collapsible huts where people can get a rapid antigenic test. It’s also easy to get PCR tests, which are carried out in labs. All COVID-19 tests are free, and people are encouraged to get tested if they have the slightest doubt of infection.

After a very slow start, France is speeding up its vaccination campaign. Now besides vaccination centers, pharmacies and doctors can administer the Astra Zeneca jab and will soon be able to do the same with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccinations. At first, a sizeable portion of the population was resistant to being vaccinated. Then, when vaccine supplies were slow to arrive in the European Union, the joke was that the contrarian French suddenly all wanted to be vaccinated.

Political figures and personalities were vaccinated publicly in order to encourage those who were reticent. In a moment of delightful silliness, when Olivier Véran, the Minister of Solidarity and Health, was vaccinated in public with his shirt half open, Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot (who was more recently hospitalized with COVID) commented on television that she had given him the nickname “Jolitorax” referring to a character in the comic, Asterix. “Jolitorax” is translated into “Anticlimax” in English Asterix editions, but in French, the name literally means nice-looking chest.

Such moments of levity are important in a country where we haven’t been able to go to a bar or restaurant since last October, and probably won’t be able to until May.

Because France is part of the European Union, we have a tendency to compare ourselves to our neighbors (most often Germany). France’s first lockdown of nearly two months was one of Europe’s strictest, and we had a second lockdown which lasted a month and a half in the fall. We have been wearing masks any time we leave the house since July 20, and have undergone two successive curfews. One began on December 15 and included New Year’s Eve; it kept people inside from 8 p.m. until the morning. The second curfew started January 16, and it required people to stay off the streets from 6 p.m. until morning. Despite these efforts, one year later we’re approaching 95,000 deaths from COVID.

Now, France has locked down for a third time, due to the British variant which accounts for three-quarters of the new cases. As the EU and the UK spar over vaccine doses, Boris Johnson’s government is in discussions as to whether France should join their “red list” from which travel into the UK is banned—“Now that they’ve given us their variant,” sniped my neighbor. On the bright side, we did gain one hour this time around: curfew begins at 7 p.m.

Surprisingly the French—who are famous for being grumblers—have been quite reasonable on the whole, compared to some of their neighbors, from Belgium to Austria, who have staged anti-curfew riots, even though they have had fewer restrictions imposed on them. But patience is starting to wear a little thin.

Instead of rioting, Parisians have spent the past year reading. With all cultural venues and festivals closed or canceled, people turned to books, and despite France’s 3,300 independent bookshops being closed for three months during 2020, losses were only 3.3 percent compared to the previous year. Teenagers made a comeback hit of the classic Arsène Lupin series by Maurice Leblanc, set in the early 1900s about a gentleman thief, following the success of the Netflix series, Lupin, based on the books. A recent decree passed that gave bookshops the status of “essential businesses,” meaning that, along with food shops and pharmacies, they can remain open during the current lockdown. Curiously, record stores, florists, hairdressers, and chocolate shops have been allowed to stay open as well.

We’ve also been cycling. According to the organization Vélo et Territoires, the number of bicyclists in Paris has increased by 70 percent since last May. It helped that city officials transformed an additional 50 kilometers of traffic lanes used by cars into bike lanes. There are evident growing pains; as amateur or aggressive cyclists vie for space with pedestrians and scooters it’s led to encounters that can degenerate into shouting matches.

Still, the heart of Parisian daily life is its cafés, and without them, Paris doesn’t seem like itself. The most recent closure of bars and cafés was October 6, while restaurants closed for service October 30, leaving only the option of takeaway and delivery.

But eateries have not been abandoned. Restaurants and cafés can choose between government aid of up to 10,000 euros per month or compensation equal to 20 percent of their revenues from 2019 with a limit of 200,000 euros per month. Most of the larger bistros and restaurants are closed, but neighborhood bistros are often open.

The enterprising owner of our café downstairs, a Kabyle man born in Algeria, reinvented his establishment with grace and humor over the various lockdowns, first offering frankfurters and sandwiches, then adding to the takeaway menu homemade couscous and mulled wine. During the winter months, in fact, while Germans were deprived of their glühwein in Christmas markets, Parisians converted to drinking mulled wine in order to linger in front of cafés offering takeaway beverages.

Now that it’s spring, people often congregate outside the takeaway window drinking beer. This is technically illegal and defeats the purpose of the closures, but at least they’re outside, and it gives us a semblance of normalcy. This March, during a wave of spring-like weather, the police banned alcohol in certain areas of Paris, such as the Canal Saint-Martin, where large groups had begun to gather.

Masked Parisians have been getting together legally throughout the year—to continue a tradition of demonstrating. There have been protests against police brutality, sexual harassment, poverty, nuclear weapons, and working conditions, and demonstrations in support of medical staff or teachers, climate change policy, and of political prisoners in Turkey, Algeria, or Saudi Arabia. A motley crew of conspiracy theorists, and groups against restrictions and mask-wearing, pop up in various cities to have their say as well.

Paris real estate remains expensive, and unless you’re very wealthy, apartments are small. The chic neighborhoods, for the most part on the city’s Left Bank, have emptied, their inhabitants having decamped temporarily to second homes in Brittany, Normandy, or the south of France. The first lockdown led to a rush of families deciding to leave the city permanently, often for the northern suburbs, expediting a trend that began with the extension of metro lines going just outside the city’s perimeter.

But most Parisians are still stuck at home in confined spaces. In my north-eastern neighborhood of Belleville, however, which is rapidly gentrifying but remains ethnically and socially mixed, the streets are packed with people going about their daily business or enjoying one of the largest parks in Paris, the 19th-century Buttes-Chaumont. Small children, all masked, skip along joyfully holding hands as their teachers take them for a walk.

Childhood is one area where France stands out: following the first lockdown, the government made it a priority to keep schools open to avoid disrupting education. According to statistics gathered by UNESCO, France’s schools were among the European schools least likely to close over the past year. Children ages 6 and up are required to wear masks, and classes are held in person as usual (except for high schools where classes can be also be attended via Zoom). This has been a godsend for most parents, especially those who can’t work remotely. A recent poll showed that 73 percent of parents and 89 percent of children considered their experience together during the pandemic a positive one for their family.

University courses, however, have all been online, which has been particularly difficult on foreign students who are new to France and are stuck in front of their computers in tiny rooms. And many French students have lost part-time jobs with parents unable to help out. A group of restaurants that had served meals to hospital staff a year ago is now offering meals to students in need. In January, President Macron announced that students could have two meals a day at the price of 1 euro.

Despite being provided with as much uninterrupted schooling as possible, the French are currently experiencing what is called a “baby crash.” This is also surprising. France has Europe’s highest fertility rate, and at the beginning of the first lockdown some specialists predicted a baby boom. But statistics show that nine months after the first lockdown, birthrates were 7 percent lower than in 2019.

Last but certainly not least, culture, an essential component of city life, is still on hold. Lucas Destrem, who specializes in urbanism and political and cultural geography, recently re-designed the iconic Paris metro map in support of cultural venues waiting to open. His approach was to replace the metro stops with names of museums, art centers, cinemas, theatres, libraries, or music conservatories. The map won media coverage and wide praise in the cultural milieu.

In the meantime, some Parisians are soothing themselves in an unusual way: by behaving like the tourists who typically crowd our streets. It’s become more common for Parisians to treat themselves to a weekend in a hotel, and hotels, in turn, are turning to locals for business, such as the new Hotel Paradiso. Operated by the production company and movie theatre chain MK2, the hotel offers giant screens in each room, and an open-air cinema on the roof, with popcorn, snacks, and a restaurant that delivers meals to rooms. For Parisians who are already avid movie-goers and have 200 euros to spare for a rare treat, this could provide a way to fill this unusual, and temporary, cultural void while we wait for what will happen next.

The post A Letter From Paris, Where the New Normal Is Less Grouchy Than You’d Expect appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

COVID-19 hit our side of the world relatively late. That meant that Mexico City, where I live, had one month’s notice to prepare after seeing what was happening in Asia and Europe. Unfortunately, we did not use that advance warning well, and now we are still paying for it. Almost a year after COVID-19 hit us, we have reached approximately 600,000 confirmed cases and 30,000 deaths.

As the city continues to suffer under the pandemic—even as other parts of the world have COVID-19 under control, or are well on their way to getting vaccinated—I find myself thinking back to that time last February and early March when life went on as usual in Mexico. It seems strange in the memory: Why did we think we could be spared?

It took until March 23, 2020, for Mexican authorities to officially urge people to stay home. Still, they noted the low number of reported cases and said there was nothing to be afraid of; we would be out of confinement by April 19. Then that date was pushed back to June. After that, the government stopped estimating when lockdown would be over.

It’s still not over. We residents of Mexico City have been officially on lockdown for nearly a year, since March 23. Or to be more accurate, we are supposed to be on lockdown.

At first, people stayed home and followed the protocols. So, at least for the first two or three months, we experienced unprecedented silence in our urbanity. The city was eerily quiet, especially at night. The number of cars (both parked and moving) in the streets was reduced dramatically, which gave some streets a post-apocalypse aura.

I had never experienced such a feeling of solitude in Mexico City before. One night in last year’s spring—I can’t remember exactly when, since keeping track of time’s passage has been challenging—I was walking home at around 9 p.m., and it felt like the world had suddenly stopped. I was the only person walking in the street and the only noises were my footsteps. I remember thinking how unaccustomed we are, in a city of 20 million people, to being utterly alone. It gave me the creeps and I hurried my steps back home.

While the usual city sounds were muted, confinement wasn’t entirely quiet—it brought the audible singing of birds. A family of butterflies surprised me by making a home among the leaves of the plants in my balcony. I’m not sure if the butterflies or the birds are new; it was having silence and the time to actually notice both of them that made them remarkable.

But the peace and quiet did not last.

Early on, a traffic light system was employed by authorities to tell us what’s what. Red light meant a total lockdown. Green meant a total lift of lockdown measures—or at least that’s what we’ve been told, because we have yet to experience green. The pandemic traffic light has since gone from red to all different shades of orange to red again… and then once more into “orange with caution.”

As time passed, and the traffic light stayed at red or orange, many grew tired of staying home and gave themselves the unofficial green light. There wasn’t much the authorities could do to stop them. With every increasing day since last spring, I’ve seen more people on the streets—day and night—from my window. One day last the summer, the street vendors came back and never went back home again—not even during the deadliest weeks of the pandemic at the very end of last year.

The parties started last summer too. You could hear loud music and singing from more than one rooftop on any given night. Traffic on the streets also came back around that time, though it would not be until December that it returned to pre-pandemic levels.

December and January would prove to be the worst of the pandemic, and not just because of the spikes in cases and deaths. In those months, people lost all sensitivity and returned to their lives. It is still hard for me to believe what I witnessed, but the juxtaposition was real. Hospitals—private and public—became so full that people were being treated on the waiting area benches, and sometimes even on the streets. People were queueing for five or six hours every day in order to get oxygen tanks filled up for sick relatives, and social media channels were full of ads featuring oxygen providers and resellers. Everyone had a sick friend or relative.

And yet parties and gatherings did not stop. They accelerated in number and grew in size. Some private companies even held year-end parties—maskless, massive indoor parties. This was the case of TV Azteca and several other enterprises owned by Ricardo Salinas Pliego, one of the most influential businessmen in Mexico. Salinas did not care about the backlash he and his employees received through social media, claiming they were just living without fear and were ready to face the risks of contracting COVID-19.

This was not shocking or surprising. Ours is a country where the president has openly refused to wear a mask or take any measure to enforce lockdowns since the beginning of the pandemic. In his own words: “Everything here is optional. Nothing is mandatory.” It was not a surprise either when he contracted COVID-19 at the end of January. Being sick didn’t even convince him to mask up; while infectious, he had a TV crew come to his house so he could record a message to the nation about his health condition.

Some ten days after his contagion, the president returned to his daily routine, without adjustments. At that time, which was just over a month ago, the COVID-19 traffic light in Mexico City was still red. But you would never know that by walking the bustling early February streets. All formal businesses remained closed, but many business owners resorted to selling their wares on the sidewalks just outside their formal establishments. Who could blame them? Given the lack of government support for businesses, this fend-for-yourself mood permeated throughout the city. Life was not the same as before the pandemic, but this was as close as it could get.

February was a very strange month. We had been on red light since mid-December when hospitals were completely full. Even private hospitals used by the rich were denying new admissions. There were many reports of oxygen canisters being stolen (at gunpoint) from the delivery services. But cases started declining slowly, and restaurants and shops were pushing for reopening. The government announced that the first vaccine doses for elderly people would soon be administered. Most of us spent all day on February 1 trying to get our elders registered at the vaccination website. Most of us failed and had to wait until some days later, when the site started working properly.

By the month’s end, vaccination of the elderly had started in earnest, with a bit less than a million vaccines applied in a week or so. Many elders had to stand in line for more than five hours to get their shots. Despite the obvious need for a better vaccination strategy, it was a great relief to watch people finally get immunized.

Restaurants with outdoors seating space have now been allowed to reopen. So have stores, with capacities limited. Public transportation is as crowded as ever (and no social distancing is possible inside a metro wagon or urban bus at rush hours). I am glad to report that most people on the streets are wearing masks (and around 70 percent actually wear it over the nose and mouth). More bicyclists are using the roads than ever before.

Not everything has opened up yet. Schools and non-essential workplaces are still shut down, though recently the public has been pushing for school reopening. It doesn’t appear people will tolerate home schooling and virtual classes much longer.

Mexico City may be treating the pandemic like it’s over, but the traffic light system remains at “orange with caution.” The road ahead of us remains a long one. Vaccination efforts are falling way short of their goals, and herd immunity won’t be reached anytime soon. But citizens want to resume their normal lives, even if it means risking new outbreaks.

I have been watching this year-long unraveling from my window, for I am privileged to have a job and family life that allow me to stay confined. I am not sure what to think about the future. Perhaps we have learned new ways of resilience that will be important to dealing with other emergencies when the pandemic recedes. But the government also has demonstrated a failure to lead, communicate clearly, and enforce its own rules in a crisis. And too many people here have shown too much indifference and stubbornness.

When this is over, I hope that we will be more sensitive to suffering and more willing to compromise, and to support each other.

The post A Letter From Mexico City, Where We’re Still Supposed to Be on Lockdown appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As I take a slight turn to the right, a woman and her German Shepherd appear, walking towards us from the opposite direction. She hesitates. The path is narrow, and for both of us to keep the required distance, someone will have to leave it. We both step aside, drifting apart from each other, but the dogs have a different plan. Skeletor wags his tail; the other dog does, too. They come close and sniffle, happy to see each other. The woman peers at me over her mask. How does she feel meeting another person? Is she even slightly glad to see me? Am I?

This situation has repeated itself a lot in the past few weeks. The dogs are always eager and approach without fear, and I start to feel as if Skeletor is walking me instead of the other way around.

I’ve never been good at keeping track of days. But since March 22, when the lockdown began in Athens, I am counting as if never before. Date and time have taken on a new urgency, as I try to calculate the right moments to leave the house.

For each outing, we are required to fill out a form or send a text message to the government. We must specify which of four activities we will engage in: an emergency visit to the doctor, grocery shopping, exercise, or walking a dog. The penalty for being a pedestrian outdoors without one of these reasons is a fine of €150. I’m choosing to fill out the form for now, but rumor has it that the government will require text messages from everyone soon.

So these days it takes me much longer than usual to prepare for a walk with Skeletor, because I’m fretting over what time to write on my piece of paper. How much time is enough to walk a dog in the morning? My usual morning walks would take an hour, and Skeletor needs them to let off some steam—but now an hour seems too much, a luxury. I try to bargain—maybe half an hour is good enough if I climb up the most remote part of the hill and make sure nobody is around. If I am late because I took too long to get ready, will I be lying to the police?

Skeletor appreciating the view from his walk. Courtesy of Eugenia Triantafyllou

Every few days, Greek social media and TV bulletins tell us there will be an extension of the lockdown. A few days ago we were doing well, but now the same measures are not enough anymore. We need to stay inside for longer. To be more specific about how much time we spend outside of the house, more frugal with our outings. “The next couple of weeks are critical,” the leading epidemiologist says.

But they said the same thing the week before, and the one before that.

People are confused. And worried.

My worries are not only about the authorities. In the mornings I wait until I hear my neighbor, an elderly woman with severely compromised health, go outside to feed the stray cats who depend upon her. I gave her some latex gloves a few days ago. Living in an apartment building makes it difficult to avoid bumping into each other in the entrance. So I listen for her usual sounds, imagining the scenario of not hearing her one day at all, and what I would do then. When I am sure she has finished her morning ritual and I hear the lobby door close, that is my signal to leave the house.

A few days ago, I read about an old woman in another city. She was seen walking her sheep downtown. Not a dog or even a cat. A sheep. A photograph showed her next to a building complex, the sheep grazing on some grass that grew on the lot right next to it. Her face was pixelated by the news media for privacy.

Had she always done this, before the quarantine? Perhaps. Nobody noticed then, or if they did it might have registered as something rural people did, something bucolic and colorful. Now, it is scandalous enough to make the news, one of many suddenly suspicious characters.

Another article describes a woman who was caught hiding one of her small children in the trunk of the car to escape being fined because only two people are allowed to ride together in a car. A man filled out a permit for personal exercise but was discovered by the police many kilometers away. A woman swimmer was forced to come out of the sea to be fined. The violations, according to social media, have reached 40,000, amounting to a total of €6,000,000 in fines, another number to count.

There are even priests who break the quarantine, insisting that the gathering of the congregation for the Divine Liturgy, including the Holy Communion itself, cannot possibly be a source of contagion.

Still, most Greeks are following the rules as best they can.

Greeks on Facebook protest that the government focuses too much on serving fines and policing instead of healthcare. One day the medical personnel were hailed as heroes; the next, police tried to break up their peaceful World Health Day protests. Gatherings of more than ten people are forbidden after the lockdown. Doctors and nurses gathered in the forecourt of Evangelismos, one of Athens’s big hospitals, protesting the shortages both in personnel and equipment that has been happening even before the coronavirus crisis. The government promises radical restructuring of healthcare in the next couple of months. There are plans for 500 mobile medical units that will test people for the virus at home.

As Orthodox Easter approached, the government also promised to enforce the lockdown with drones and raise the fine to €300 to deter people from leaving the cities. So people celebrated Easter on balconies and rooftops, where the traditional roasting of the lamb took place in pairs or alone.

On social media, we Greeks argue over every single piece of news. That’s nothing new. But somehow it feels more important, more pressing, to be right, to maintain a sense of control now in this chaos of information. Many call the opposite side “sheep,” an old expression for gullibility that feels as common nowadays as it is to roast one for Easter, if not to take one for a walk.

Contrary to how it might seem, we Greeks are not obsessing over sheep. But the irony of the imagery is not lost on me. People are afraid of being lambs, of being herded mindlessly and corralled inside their homes, an uncertain future ahead of them. But more than that, they are afraid of dying.

In our apartment, we don’t have a working stove yet—one of the perks of moving in just a couple of weeks before the coronavirus crisis reached Greece. We try to manage with cold food: sandwiches, fruit, some snacks from the grocery store. As Skeletor and I returned from our walk, we stopped by the small pizza place on the square. Exarchia—the neighborhood I was raised in and the only place I have lived in Greece—has a long history of anarchism and clashing with police forces. Here the lockdown, though necessary for public health, sometimes ends up scratching wounds that never healed. The virus has achieved what decades of police intervention haven’t: The square is empty except for a small squad of policemen, standing next to their motorcycles at the south side as a warning to unnecessary wanderers. They have not stopped me yet, although I carry my ID and papers with me at all times.

It’s almost eleven. I greet the woman behind the plexiglass and place my order. She offers hand sanitizer and tells me I am her first customer since she opened at 7 a.m. “It’s only pocket money now.” She shrugs.

There is talk on the news about a coronavirus subsidy for the private sector. I hope it reaches all the people who need it so they can endure for now. It’s important for everyone to endure as long as needed, to stay healthy and alive until it is okay for us to return to the world and take a look at it anew. Perhaps we’ll appreciate things we took for granted—a home cooked meal, brushing against strangers on the streets, having a cup of coffee in the sunlight, a long walk with a dog. It will be strange at first, resuming life after such a long pause. Maybe we’ll start the count anew: Which things remain lovingly, reassuringly, the same. Which ones broke during the pandemic and will need to be fixed. And which ones have always been broken but we refused to see it.

And I do hope in this restored world, the sheep will keep taking walks.

Editor’s Note, May 1, 2020: Since this piece was filed, Greece’s low death rate during the lockdown has prompted prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to announce a time frame for easing the restrictive measures imposed last month.

The post A Letter From Greece, Where Quarantined Sheep Go for Walks appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Located on a remote island in the North Atlantic, the village of just 100 people had closed its schools the week before; restaurants and hotels never reopened after the new year holiday season. And now my last glimmer of hope for a hot coffee this morning—the “Bakeriet på Å”—had closed.

As the Northern European Correspondent for the Swiss Broadcasting Company, I must rove around a reporting area that extends from the far north of Greenland to the very south of Lithuania. Å, which is as tiny as its name, sits close to the geographic center of my beat. This is a friendly and open part of the world, where you cross borders without thinking about them. People here in the Arctic Circle exhibit unusually closeness and cohesion, and ever since my visit to the far north as a teenager in the 1980s, my trips to the lands and seas near the North Pole have always felt like homecomings.

But this time, I reach Å on the same morning that the central government announces an immediate lockdown of Norway to prevent the spread of COVID-19. It is a startling announcement that sends me scrambling to come to terms with what it means for an open region to shut down—and to find a way home before it’s too late.

In Å, the snow is falling heavily, and I don’t catch a glimpse of anyone stirring through the contracted curtains that cover the windows of Å’s picturesque and colorful houses. My requests to interview some local fishermen go unanswered. I can’t blame them. Overnight the government in the capital Oslo—more than 1300 kilometers southward—has declared all foreign visitors to be undesirable persons. I am officially a threat to public health.

I wanted to talk with fishermen because the economic backbone of the Lofoten archipelago is fishing. In spite of the islands’ position—at the same latitude as Northern Alaska—temperatures seldom go below zero Celsius (32 F). The reason for this has a name: the Gulf Stream. Early in the year, this relatively warm Atlantic current drives gigantic schools of fish into the Bay between the Lofoten chain of 80 islands and the mainland of northwestern Norway. For the fishermen of Å and dozens of other villages and towns in the archipelago, it is possible to catch enough cod and pollock in these few months to secure a full year’s income. It is why the islanders call the fishery “our treasure chest in the sea.”

Unable to talk with the fishermen, I make my way through thick snow towards a small factory, where I might find someone to interview. But all the doors I try remain closed. On the car radio, I hear the sober voice of a Norwegian radio announcer read a long list of measures decided by the national government: “By Monday morning at 8 a.m. all our national borders will be closed,” the announcer says, adding that after it will be “guarded by the military.”

Remi Solberg, the mayor of the outer Lofoten archipelago, whom I had met for an interview just a few hours before the shutdown, punctuated the national regulation with a mayoral decree: “All visitors from outside the Lofoten islands are immediately banned and must be quarantined for 14 days.”

That left me just 36 hours to escape, or face two weeks of quarantine. And escape would require reaching the mountainous border station between Norway and Sweden, my country of residence.

In normal times, it’s easy to leave the archipelago. Here is where the iconic E10—the European highway connecting the Baltic Sea in Luleå (Sweden) with the Atlantic Ocean in Norway—ends dramatically on a cliff falling into the sea. Seventy years of European peace have made borders an afterthought as we freely traveled to the most remote parts of the continent. But this time, the odds are against me.

Going through a checklist of possible transportation options, I quickly realize that I need to be both innovative and lucky. Harsh winter storms have closed the highway and many of the very narrow roads across the islands. There are no trains that will go where I need. And the few propeller plane connections onto the mainland were either grounded because of the storm, or fully booked weeks ago.

Most of the time, crowds are the concern—National Geographic has ranked the Lofoten among the world’s most beautiful islands, and since 2010, a crush of tourists has confounded residents. “Last year we got 1 million visitors, that’s too much for our pristine archipelago,” said Mayor Solberg.

Still, while overtourism is an issue for the Lofoten, the bigger threat, for decades, has involved oil. Norwegians depend on royalties they received for their country’s oil production, and there have been longstanding plans to extend oil production fields into the far north. Young ecologists and senior fishermen have fought bitterly, and sometimes together, against such a move, which could threaten both the natural beauty and the lucrative fishing business.

Not long before I arrived, the local nature lovers and fishermen had triumphed when the conservative government in Oslo agreed to table its search for oil outside Lofoten.

This decision was touted as preserving a fishing tradition that goes back at least 6,000 years. And in the era of the COVID pandemic, that experience suddenly paid dividends. A few years ago, when the virus spoken about locally was the one savaging the local salmon, the fishing industry set up a comprehensive infrastructure to test fish for viruses. Now, that infrastructure is serving local hospitals where a large number of humans are now being tested for the coronavirus.

I wanted to learn more about what the remote islands can teach us in this strange time, but I knew I needed to get home. A local Norwegian journalist generously agrees to drive me across several of the Lofoten Islands, connected by bridges and tunnels, to the small harbor city of Stamsund. There, the last ferry boat is supposed to depart for Tromsø, on the mainland, in the evening.

In Stamsund, I find myself the last man around, sitting totally alone in the cozy lobby of the Live Lofoten Hotel, which the lockdown has emptied of all visitors. And I am also the only traveler to board the MS Polarlys on its 18-hour crossing to Tromsø. It is a truly gloomy feeling to be on one of the last overnight rides. The ferry company Hurtigruten was founded in 1893, and it normally connects more than 30 Norwegian ports. Now, because of the virus, only two boats are running. And I am on the final one.

Tromsø, northern Norway’s biggest city with more than 70,000 inhabitants, is sometimes called the “Paris of the North” because of the great density of bars, restaurants, and coffee shops. But now, when I arrive there is nobody to be seen.

I make my way through empty streets to the bus station, where one of the last long-distance buses to the Norwegian town of Narvik is about to depart. The bus driver does not even bother to sell tickets—he does not want to risk interacting with passengers. I board and we leave Tromsø according to schedule for a four-hour trip, during which we see—and overtake—many military vehicles on their way to various border posts. Older residents of this part of Norway still tell stories about a time in the beginning of the Second World War when fierce battles were fought around the Lofoten island between the Nazi occupants and the British naval fleet. Now the fact that the military is out again means that the circulation of daily life is stopping.

The bus reaches Narvik, but that still does not get me to Sweden. Narvik is considered a border town, but that’s just because it’s the town closest to the border, and it has a harbor. In fact, it’s still 50 kilometers from the soon-to-be-closed Swedish border. The only way for me to get to the border now is to catch a ride up a mountain road that has been closed for days because of heavy snow.

But I am fortunate. As the bus approaches Narvik, I check the Norwegian Road Administration app, and—Eureka!—the road has just reopened, at least for now. I manage to convince the local taxi company to send me a car to pick me up and drive me across the border, where concrete elements stand ready to block the crossing just a few hours later.

While the whole of Norway is entering into COVID-19 hibernation, Sweden tries to keep up a more ordinary path, asking people to keep distance without going into full lockdown. On the way, the taxi driver, whose name is Pernille, talks of the spring that lies ahead. She will have time to enjoy it. “This is my last assignment before I am laid off tomorrow,” she tells me.

The post A Letter From the Norwegian Village of Å, Where COVID Lockdown Forces a Dramatic Escape appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My family has been navigating the shifting geography of COVID-19 for months, as the virus first emerged in China, our country of residence, and then moved onto our native home, the United States. We’re Americans with a home in Virginia, but a couple of years ago I took a job in Shanghai, and we moved there, with my husband commuting back and forth to his job in D.C. When the coronavirus began to shut down China over the Lunar New Year holidays in January, we were on vacation in Japan. Once Shanghai schools began announcing closures, we decided the girls should fly back to the U.S. unaccompanied to stay with my husband, while I returned to work in Shanghai. The subsequent Chinese lockdown would separate us for two months.

By mid-March, we had reached a pivot point. The girls had just enrolled in their old Virginia public schools when those schools announced a shutdown. Meanwhile, their Shanghai school was sending out upbeat notices about reopening in the near future. And with U.S. cases on the rise and China tightening its borders to prevent re-infection, I figured it was now or never.

I was on the ground in the U.S. for less than 36 hours, but saw enough to be alarmed. If I hadn’t volunteered quite forcefully that I had just come from living in China, I don’t think I would have gotten anyone to check me for fever before entering the U.S. Once I declared myself, I was escorted to a “CDC line” for a cursory temp check (with a large group of returned Mormon missionaries from Europe), given a CDC flier about COVID-19 symptoms, and asked to stay home and minimize my trips outside for 14 days. While on the ground, I did not leave my house except to ride with my husband to pick up some takeout; I was stunned at how full my hometown restaurants were.

The girls and I landed back in China on March 19, and our arrival there was the opposite of my entry to the U.S. Our flight from Tokyo landed at 11:45 am, but we sat on Shanghai’s Pudong International Airport tarmac for two hours before immigration officials let us disembark. During those hours we filled out health forms that asked, among other questions, whether we had sore throats, runny noses, or fevers, and whether we took any medication to reduce fevers. I debated whether to report a stuffy nose that I was sure was caused by allergies and not any other illness.

After they let us off the plane, we were put into a line that did not move for another two hours. When we finally reached the front of that line, we sat down with a man in full PPE—a white hazmat suit, face-shield, and glasses. He reviewed our health forms. I did say I had experienced the occasional stuffy nose, but insisted it was because of allergies. I held my breath. 

He paused, but decided to let us through to the next stop—a line for a Xerox machine run by police officers in hazmat suits, where we had to make two copies of our health forms. The senior official in a hazmat suit also put yellow stickers on our passports—meaning that we would be required to take the COVID-19 tests and undergo mandatory 14-day quarantine either at home or a hotel.

The next line was for passport control, and then another line for a body temperature scanner, and then another interview with another set of hazmat-suited individuals who would decide whether we were “high-risk” and needed to go to the hospital to get our COVID-19 tests or whether we could go to our home district to have the tests performed there. Luckily, we got waved into the home district channel. That meant we would be allowed to pick up our luggage and move to a line for a bus to our home district in Shanghai. 

In that line, we were required to download an app and provide our passport information. Then another hazmat-suited person asked if we wished to do our quarantine at home or at a hotel (they offered two levels of hotel, one that was about $30 per person per night and another that was $60 per person per night). We opted for the home quarantine—which would be allowed only if our neighborhood committee and building management agreed. Since we live in a building of foreigners like ourselves, we were pretty sure the building management would agree. The official asked for our passports and informed us that they would be returned to us only after our COVID tests. 

After a 45-minute wait, we were asked to form a line. Police officers stood at the front of our line and at the back. We were led to a large tour bus, and got onboard. We pulled out of the airport parking lot around 6:30 pm. We had been in Shanghai for almost seven hours at this point. The girls were amazingly patient with this process—it helped that the 13-year-old had her phone and could watch TikToks; the 10-year-old alternately read and napped on the luggage cart.

The bus arrived in front of a large gymnasium around 8 p.m. I turned on my phone mapping app to find out where we were—it was the Xuhui District Sports Middle School. After a temp check, the hazmat-suited workers took our names, assigned us ID numbers (I was I7), and led us all to a cordoned-off section of the gym. 

Our bus was dubbed “Group I,” so we were led to Section I. There was a bottle of hand sanitizer and a flat-screen TV at the front of the section, and what appeared to be a selection of videos on demand. We were each assigned a reclining lawn chair where we would wait to be called for our COVID tests. Volunteers in hazmat suits passed out new blankets, bags full of bakery breads, imported German milk, masks, and water. I was impressed by their foreigner-friendly care package—they knew their audience. Around 8:30 p.m., another hazmat-suited individual called us up and led us to an outdoor alley behind the middle school. There, seated at a table under an awning, were two nurses, who swabbed each of our nostrils and our throats as well. I double-checked the vial to make sure it had my name. Once we were done, we were escorted back to our lawn chairs to wait. 

I spent a sleepless night in my lawn chair, worried that after two months of staying virus-free in China, I might have managed to pick it up in the U.S. during my 36 hours on the ground. What if the girls were asymptomatic carriers: Would they really separate me from my children? (The answer is yes—all infected children are separated from their parents and sent to the children’s hospital.) And if I were a carrier, where would my kids go? I watched the volunteers spray down the chairs of travelers who had finished their waits and were off to their homes. Even now, I feel outrage that the U.S. still does not have enough tests for the symptomatic, while China had enough to test asymptomatic foreigners. 
 
No one ever told us we were negative. But at 2:30 a.m., we were informed that it was time to go home, and we boarded a bus. More paperwork awaited us in front of our apartment building, where the security guards for our complex and the doctor who would be supervising our case (also in full hazmat gear) met us. Finally, after we promised not to leave our apartment, our passports were returned to us, and at exactly 4:03 a.m., some 16 hours after landing, we were finally home.  
 
That morning, a young woman in a hazmat suit knocked on our door and took our temperatures at 10 a.m. She returned at 3 p.m. to take our temps again. This routine was repeated for 14 days before we’d be permitted to circulate in the general Shanghai population. We chatted occasionally with our temperature takers (they were a rotating cast of twentysomething women). Initially, a man would accompany them to film the temperature reading, but by the final few days, the women came alone.

A few days after our return, we discovered that authorities had placed a sensor on our door. And more than a week after the start of our quarantine, we received a note informing us we were not to open our door more than five times a day. Because we were trapped in the apartment, we had to have everything—groceries, toilet paper, takeout meals—delivered. There were a couple of days where we were inefficient with our ordering and had more than five deliveries—and more than five door openings. Oops.

Entering China was a long, tedious, and dystopian process, but extremely orderly and well-organized. All the foreigners waiting in the long lines with us at the airport and testing center were polite and patient as well. We understood why the Chinese were doing it. On the day we landed, five people right away were found to have the virus: a Chinese husband and wife returning from New York, a French citizen and a Chinese student traveling from France, and a Chinese student returning from Switzerland. Nine days after we returned to Shanghai, the Chinese shut down the border to all foreigners in an effort to prevent the further re-importation of COVID cases. I am so glad I made that mad dash back to pick up the kids when I did.

After 14 days of being locked away with my family, where we miraculously got along much better than expected (a combination of online school and work kept us pretty busy), we were cleared to exit quarantine. We bid goodbye to our cheerful temperature-taker lady, who informed us that this was her last day as well—and that she would be going back to her real job, at the dental clinic. The doctor on our case texted me our health freedom papers.

We can now walk the streets again, but we have been cautious about re-entering Shanghai society. Markets are bustling and the subway is nearly full; though the manicure shop, a women’s clothing boutique, the draft beer bar, a branch of a popular bubble tea chain, and the quirky hipster gift shop didn’t survive, most of the businesses in our neighborhood have re-opened. But I find the crowds a little unnerving. We’d gotten maybe a bit too used to keeping our distance and keeping to ourselves.

Still, Shanghai is almost back, and so are we. 

The post A Letter From Shanghai, Where a Powerful System of Control Prevails Over COVID-19 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Mentally, I’d roll my eyes. If someone asked me, my answers would be monosyllabic. Food wasn’t something I liked to talk about, and the everydayness of the question diminished it in my view. That is, until last week. I get it now. The superficial—What are you eating? Is that all?—masks the essential (I’m thinking of you). If friends ask me now, I answer in all earnest: Khichdi. Bread. Potatoes, yes, again.

My timeline is now full of photos of self-prepared meals and recipes. I read them, uselessly. Most ingredients are missing from our kitchen. We’ve never stocked much. There’s a grocery store right outside, a dairy across the road, and a bakery every few yards. But the lockdown was only announced at 8 p.m., when it was scheduled to start at midnight. We’d been self-isolating for a week already, and supplies were so low that, along with the rest of the city, I panicked.

My mother tried to dissuade me, but I went out anyway, promising to keep my distance. It was a mistake. I had to choose between keeping a safe distance, and getting hold of any food. A few mini-packs of soy milk, for which there are few takers in India, and some buns were my only prize, the latter thanks to a baker who recognized me. He’d pulled the grille-gate shut and turned off the lights to dissuade crowds, but when he heard my voice through the cotton mask, he gave me something.

There were funny moments too. At one shop, I asked for bleach and experienced a surge of relief when the vendor said yes, he had some. A pause, and then he said: Face bleach, yes?

Every visit to the wash basin is ironic. Soap-free cleanser. Soap-free shampoo. What use now? I had a bar of real soap tucked away, thankfully. I’d bought some off a woman I know online as the Alt Prime Minister. There was a fun campaign going at the time: An Alt Sarkaar (shadow government) was formed on Twitter, with a cabinet and ministers who would announce measures to which the actual government ought to have paid attention. Vidyut was elected Alt Prime Minister via an online poll. Aside from digital activism, she also makes soap, giving each bar an interesting name. What I have now is “Black Day,” a bar of black soap she made on December 11, 2019, the day the government passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).

The amendment offers citizenship to illegal immigrants as long as they’re Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis, Jains, or Buddhists who declare that they fled persecution in three neighboring Muslim-majority nations: Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan. Only Muslims from those countries are excluded from citizenship citing persecution. The amended law doesn’t take into account that Myanmar and China are in the neighborhood too, and Muslims have been brutally persecuted there. Or that minority sects like Ahmadis or Shia are also vulnerable even within Muslim-majority nations. It also ignores Tamils, whether Hindu or Muslim, who might face persecution in Sri Lanka. It is as if the persecution and suffering of Muslims in South Asia were irrelevant, something that can be shrugged off by India. It is also the first time that India, founded on the principles of secular democracy, has singled out Muslims for isolation by way of policy.

The act heightened fears around the “National Registry of Citizens,” a registry that had already been initiated in one state, Assam, where the government had confined thousands to detention centers for being unable to prove that their forefathers lived at a particular address and were therefore not illegal immigrants. In January and February, tens of thousands of Indians took to the streets. There were multiple sit-ins in cities across India, many led by Muslim women. For a few weeks, art bloomed. Libraries popped up.

As COVID-19 began sweeping across the world, moving from China to Europe, state elections were held in Delhi. The party that is currently in power nationally lost. Suddenly, violence was reported on the fringes of India’s capital city. Murders, mobs, arson. It was said that the violence was a backlash against the sit-ins and protests against the CAA/NRC. Police arrested a Muslim leader and social media accounts suggested that Muslims were responsible for the violence, although it was Muslims who died in larger numbers, and the majority of the businesses and homes burnt down belonged to Muslims. Muslim peace activists were arrested and their families say they’ve been tortured in custody.

A certain miasma already hung in the air. Long before the coronavirus hit, many of us were practicing social distancing of another kind. I was already staying home a lot. I was afraid of talking to many former colleagues or schoolmates. It was impossible to accept their affection for me while witnessing their hatred of Muslims; it was no longer possible to be me without also being “Muslim.” Like-minded friends were distraught. Some threw themselves into relief work. Others admitted to being depressed. We didn’t need to meet each other to know. We read the news. We saw each other’s social media posts. We slept poorly. We had nightmares.

When news of coronavirus cases in India started to come in, I wasn’t worrying about rice, noodles or sanitizer. Instead, I sent messages to people who were attending sit-ins, pleading with them to quit. Others, who understand how dangerous narratives are spun, also urged them to quit. Movements are hard to build up, though, and there was no official lockdown. Parliament, politics, pilgrimages—nothing had been halted. The protestors felt they could continue to sit-in with masks. I had to admit, it wasn’t only their health I worried about, but that they’d get painted over as obstinate and irrational. Irrational Muslims.

The protests wound up after the Prime Minister announced a “janta curfew”—a people’s curfew, a single 14-hour period of isolation—and also asked the public to clap and bang on pots and pans to show appreciation for doctors. They did so enthusiastically.

Immediately after the curfew ended, people poured out of their homes to celebrate. A nationwide lockdown was announced only two days later, on March 24.

After the initial panic, I was calm. True, we were low on groceries. True, there was no immediate clarity on how one could go out to shop for basics. There were memes: Someone on social media shared an image of a heavily padded rubber bodysuit, to wear when you go out for groceries. It suggested protection from batons aimed at your backside and thighs. One politician had reportedly asked cops to break people’s legs, or just shoot them if they violated the lockdown order.

Still, I felt calm. The lockdown felt like a physical enactment of my inner world—a sense of siege, of caution and confusion. I had the relief of a dozen unread books, waiting. Besides, it was getting warmer. It is already close to 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the evenings here. The pandemic won’t hit India as hard, I thought.

Then came the awful visuals: thousands of migrant workers trapped in cities who had been abruptly thrown out of work, and were now hungry and desperate to go home. Train and bus services had already been suspended. They would have to walk hundreds of kilometers to get home. Outraged at the treatment of the workers, some citizens began to donate rations and funds. And masks.

My eyes barely left my phone screen. It was like being in a tunnel where the roof has fallen in, our collective hands bloodied from trying to dig out despite a lack of tools. All tunnels have ends, of course. Perhaps it will be three months, not three weeks. Or three years. Everyone says to brace yourself. On the other end of the tunnel could be a mess of an economy and millions of starving people with low immunity. And who knows what the spring harvest was like? How much were farmers able to store? Was the government able to procure enough grain?

It became impossible to read or write about anything outside of this. My mind turned circles around words like decency. Dignity. Equality. It returned to warm spots of memory—places blue and burnt sienna, sprawling libraries. It also sprang towards terrifying stories of famine from the last century.

For some reason, I also kept returning to the image of a maze: the Bhoolbhulaiya in Lucknow’s Bada Imambara. It is full of sunlight glancing off honey-tinted stone walls. People must have had a taste for perplexity back in the day. Perplexity can be charming, unlike the grim certitudes of a tunnel. Not everyone makes it out though. I caught myself thinking of a chakravyuh—a military formation whereby you are encircled and trapped. With surveillance and restricted mobility becoming acceptable in the name of public health, was this the beginning of something more dangerous, more discriminatory than a virus?

Some of India’s COVID-19 deaths were traced to a large gathering of Muslim preachers, the Tableeghi Jamaat, in Delhi. That religious congregations are associated with risk of infection is not news, and the Jamaat had already congregated before the lockdown was announced. The instructions were to stay put where people were and not to travel. So, many of them stayed put. Large numbers of Hindu pilgrims had also traveled to temples like Vaishno Devi and Tirupati around the same time and had also sheltered in place. However, a bunch of television news anchors began to focus mainly on the Tableeghi gathering, accusing them of hiding or holing up, instead of simply saying that they were stranded as pilgrims of other faiths were. The phrase “Corona Jihad” was used.

When I first took a bath with my bar of black soap purchased from Vidyut’s online store, I started crying. This black, black day. These days that never stop dawning black.

The same evening, I caught sight of a new trending hashtag: #मुस्लिम_मतलब_आतंकवादी. Muslim Means Terrorist. The television focus on the Muslim preachers had already borne fruit online.

I was first alerted to the “terrorist” hashtag by a stranger, who’d apologized to me and a few other Muslims on Twitter, saying he felt ashamed by it. I felt compelled to go check it out, although friends had advised against it: Why do this to yourself? But I feel the need to bear witness. This sort of hate campaign has been mounted much before the pandemic. An earlier hashtag called for the economic boycott of Muslims in India. Again, I made myself look.

I took screenshots, reported a couple of tweets, but there were too many. For an hour, I kept scrolling. Down, down. The tears came, but I couldn’t put the phone away. That evening, I wept until my head started to hurt. I was careful to be silent though, and to wash my face well before I faced my mother. Then I made myself a cup of tea and picked up my phone again. The essential question was waiting: Have you had your tea?

The post A Letter From Mumbai, Where Everyday Questions Carry New Weight appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.