But there was something unusual about the group: all were women.

Bogotá and other Colombian cities have long imposed a traffic policy called “Pico y Placa,” which prohibits each vehicle from using the streets every other day as a way to reduce congestion. (Your days off depend on your license plate number). In April, as the coronavirus approached, the government, after banning travel and events, imposed a variation on the Pico y Placa policy to keep more people home: Males were only allowed to leave home on odd-numbered days, and females on even-numbered ones.

Despite the draconian—and, some might say, arbitrary—gender rule, few protested (although many grumbled). The only organizations to criticize the curfew publicly were transgender rights advocates, who don’t want the police—whom they accuse of many abuses—deciding who is a man and who a woman.

Of course, in the best Colombian style, the rule was enforced with flexibility. Some businesses, such as banks and large supermarkets, conformed and allowed only a single gender each day, probably because of the police watching from the sidewalk outside. But smaller businesses, needful of pesos during harsh economic times, didn’t seem to care. I purchased bread and fruit, and made photocopies on the first women-only day. And dozens of cops who saw me riding my bike on the street just ignored me, although the fact that I was pulling a cargo trailer loaded with fruit probably helped, since messengers of all genders are permitted to work.

Even so, when I arrived in the morning at the market from which I have been doing deliveries of fruits and vegetables, a guard would not let me enter without a special permit. It was the same at Bogotá’s central wholesale market, where burly men called cargadores usually arrive at dawn to unload 100-kilogram sacks of fruit and vegetables. The first morning of Pico y Placa, guards initially kept out the cargadores, until common sense prevailed and they returned to work.

Those men are more fortunate than others who work in Colombia’s huge informal economy, and have no social insurance, poor health care and, now, no employment. With the shutdown’s start, street vendors were banned, as were bars, barbers, and bike shops. The city even blockaded off the red-light district and recommended masturbation as a contagion-free alternative. Yet, many white-collar workers, who can work from home, are still employed, and getting paid, and will likely weather the pandemic fine.

I have lived in Colombia for 15 years. The first several years, I did freelance journalism. But, as the amount of work shriveled with the troubles of the print media industry, I was able to turn my lifelong love for bicycling into a business by founding Bogotá Bike Tours. We were fortunate that Colombian tourism was then just taking off, and doing tours and renting bikes turned out to be a fun way to make a living—until the coronavirus slammed the brakes on us. With travel banned and the borders sealed, our industry evaporated.

But Maikal, one of our guides, and his girlfriend Sara, saw a new need: to feed the millions of Bogotanos confined to their homes. So, they founded a business delivering fruits and veggies from one of Bogotá’s main markets.

This was work that few would envy. You pedal across this sprawling city of 9 million people pulling a child trailer loaded with sacks of produce, in sun, rain and hail, under broiling sun, and sometimes up the hills lining Bogotá’s eastern border, and while gasping for oxygen at 2,650 meters above sea level. And all for about $2 per delivery.

But I didn’t mind the discomforts, which I saw as challenges. And pedaling all day was a great relief after years of staying up half the night preparing invoices, answering e-mails and resolving problems with bike tours. Now, all I had to do was pedal, and the complications became someone else’s headaches. Plus, with the city shut down, this was the best time ever for urban cycling: The vacant streets belonged to us, and pollution was at a record low.

When deliveries took me to cramped efficiency apartments belonging to young couples who probably signed their leases expecting to only eat and sleep there, but were now spending months shut in doors, I gave a prayer of thanks for my freedom, even with all its troubles.

We messengers didn’t worry much about getting infected, even though I’ve since seen delivery people described as “front-line heroes.” For many, the work was a necessity in a time of crisis. A young woman known as “La Flaca,” who joined us in delivering fruit, did it to support herself and her young child. Another fruit deliverer, named Luisca, supported his ex-wife and his aged mother. I was paying for rent and services both at home and for the shop, where our nearly 100 bicycles continue to gather dust.

Ceasar’s delivery group distributing food to a neighborhood in Bogotá. Courtesy of Mike Ceasar.

The streets have gotten harder to ride in recent weeks. Even as the pandemic has worsened here, Bogotá has returned toward its chaotic normalcy. The city’s deadly air pollution, which had taken a holiday during the lockdown, returned with the smog-belching trucks and buses. Main streets now teem with pedestrians and vendors as people struggle to find a way to survive and keep themselves sane.

“Can you imagine what it’s like being shut up all day in a tiny room?” Gabriela, an older woman and street vendor, asked me.

Truth be told, the pandemic has hit Bogotá relatively lightly, with only about 500 deaths in a city the size of New York, despite much higher levels of poverty and a weaker hospital system. However, rather than any government policies, I suspect that Bogotanos can thank their high elevation, which seems to reduce infection rates. The epidemic has hit so lightly, in fact, that I’ve noticed an expanding belief that the virus doesn’t really exist and that the epidemic is a hoax—perhaps to facilitate corruption.

No wonder official efforts to quarantine the public aren’t working. One afternoon, a police officer stopped me while I rode my bike through a crowded market area. The officer stopped about half-a-dozen cyclists, but meanwhile dozens more pedaled past us, and crowds of hundreds of shoppers milled about.

“Your I.D. cards,” he demanded. “And your permits to be out on the street during curfew! And proof that you own those bikes!”

I looked at the hundreds of shoppers milling about us and wondered what reality our city leaders were inhabiting.

None of us detainees had all the documents. Finally, bowing to reality, the officer let us all go, and looked for more cyclists to stop to justify his salary.

For me, the most difficult part of the delivery work is neither being victimized by senseless laws, nor straining up hills pulling an overloaded trailer, nor getting misled by confusing addresses. Instead, I am plagued by a new sensation of vulnerability, because I’m a foreigner.

Colombia sealed its borders in March. So, by April, all foreigners still in Colombia had been here far too long to constitute a danger of spreading the virus. Nevertheless, many Colombians treated all foreigners as threats. When groups of tourists stranded in Bogotá tried to visit Paloquemao, the central fruit market, they were either stopped at the entrance or followed around by guards once inside. I often had to argue to get in, and then argue again when guards tried to kick me out. I explained over and over that the danger came not from foreigners, but from anybody who had recently returned from overseas.

As the lockdown lengthened and hunger increased, Bogotá’s low death toll has made many here wonder whether the cure is worse than the disease. Several times each week, we push shopping carts through the market and collect donations of ripe fruit and vegetables which the vendors would otherwise throw away. Often, we get hundreds of kilograms of moldy and damaged produce, which we load onto our cargo bikes and give away to foundations or to hungry households who tie red rags to their windows to signal their desperation.

Despite our work and government food distribution, the need is overwhelming. When the food ran out in one neighborhood, ironically named “La Favorita,” those still in line started yelling and seemed on the verge of rioting. Those of us doing the delivery left in a hurry, promising to return soon. But with so much need elsewhere, we never have.

Even so, Bogotanos are relatively fortunate. In lower-elevation parts of the country, the pandemic appears to be accelerating. Neighboring Brazil, whose right-wing president keeps denying the epidemic’s reality, has become a global epicenter of the epidemic. To Colombia’s east, Venezuela’s economy and health system have long been in free fall under the impacts of corruption, U.S. sanctions, and collapsing oil prices. Now, its authoritarian government is unwilling or unable to report the number of COVID-19 cases there. Meanwhile, millions of Venezuelan refugees have fled back and forth across Colombia, potentially carrying the epidemic with them.

I am trying to imagine what the future here looks like. We’ve transformed our bike shop into a neighborhood market. Unfortunately for us, however, several of our neighbors had the same idea, and the barrio is now saturated with markets. At the same time, the neighborhood, which depended on tourists and university students, shrinks in population.

In the meantime, I expect to do even more deliveries—at least until a vaccine arrives.

The post A Letter From Bogotá, Where Hunger Feels More Threatening Than the Virus appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In ordinary times, no person is an island. We are connected to other people through touch and words but also through the exchange of species, most benign, some even beneficial—on our bodies, in our homes, and more generally in our daily lives. These species may be bacteria, fungi, protists, and even small animals. You kiss a loved one and transfer life from your lips to their cheek, a shimmer of species.

But now we are aware that the kiss can be dangerous or even deadly. As we isolate ourselves in order to reduce the connections in the web, what happens to the whole society of viruses, bacteria, and mites that exists on and between us? What happens when each person, or at least each home, becomes an island?

This is something ecologists and evolutionary biologists have studied for several hundred years now. On islands, with enough time, some species become more common, some go extinct, and some evolve. Charles Darwin famously gained insights into the workings of evolution by considering the differences among species of birds isolated on different islands of the Galapagos archipelago. With collaborators, I have looked at similar issues in face mites and bacteria in armpits.

First, there are species that become rarer. We know from thousands of studies of fragments of forest that, as forests are cut into smaller and smaller pieces, species go extinct. For species that live on bodies, it seems likely that the fewer people who live in your home, the more likely it is for any particular body-loving species to go extinct. If it goes extinct on you, it has fewer places from which to recolonize. In normal times, species pass from one person to another, one being to another, when we touch. Roller derby players who bump into each other exchange skin bacteria. The more you bump, the more you share. But in our isolation, we bump and share with fewer people and so colonization is less likely and extinction more permanent. Indeed, this is what we hope happens with the virus that causes COVID-19: that by disconnecting from one another, we give it no island close enough to land upon.

In forest fragments, losses occur in a predictable order: Predators go extinct first, when there are too few prey. Indoors, leopard mites that eat dust mites that eat our skin as it falls from us everywhere we go are almost certainly more likely to go extinct before the dust mites themselves. So too skin or gut microbes that depend on other skin or gut microbes, the wolves of our bodily Yellowstone.

Species evolve more rapidly, as we know from studies of islands, if they have large populations and multiply rapidly. And if these populations become isolated and face different conditions, they tend to diverge. By studying the microbiome, we can see evidence of previous separations among humans. Lice species diverged genetically among populations of Paleolithic humans as they spread around the world. Similarly, I’ve collaborated with my friend and colleague Michelle Trautwein to study divergences among face mites. Of the two most common species of face mites, Demodex brevis nestles deeply in pores, while Demodex folliculorum lives more shallowly. We think that the deep dweller is less able to move among humans, spending so much of its time in its cave. As a result, it is more likely to diverge among human populations during times of separation.

That would take years or even generations in quarantine. But before that, we would expect the bacteria that live inside the mites to diverge on the island of each person. Each mite hosts a large population of rapidly multiplying bacteria in its gut microbiome. And the viruses—even more numerous and rapidly multiplying—that attack the bacteria that live inside the mites that live on your face would diverge even faster still.

We are not only “gardening” our microbes by subtracting from their web, absentmindedly weeding; we are also giving them additional new foods with our new quarantine regimes and hobbies, and lack thereof.

Consider, for a moment, your armpits: They have a special organ called an axillary organ, containing apocrine glands, whose sole function is to feed bacteria. These bacteria produce aromas that wick along the armpit hair (which are different from other body hair and appear to serve no function other than such “wicking”). While we don’t yet understand why the axillary organs evolved (chimpanzees and gorillas also have them), they clearly show a social relationship between primates and bacteria that is somehow about sending messages via smell to other primates.

When you wear antiperspirant, you alter the messages that your armpits send. Specifically, as a study my colleagues and I did several years ago shows, you favor fast growing, weedy Staphylococcus bacteria in your armpit that are not very stinky. Conversely, if you don’t wear antiperspirant, you favor a slow-growing, stinky, old-growth microbial community, like those found in chimpanzee and gorilla armpits—something like the redwoods of the armpit. These two communities, the weeds and the redwoods, send different messages to other people.

What those messages mean and how they are interpreted, we don’t know. We are at the step in the science in which we have discovered a language, but not decoded it. But if you are alone in your apartment and not putting on antiperspirant or deodorant, you are gardening an ancient wilderness of species similar to those found in the armpits of chimpanzees and gorillas. These species aren’t harmful and may even be beneficial, so go ahead and let them blossom.

Then there’s the relationship you may be forming with sourdough bread, which is a great deal more complex and reciprocal than it seems. Several years ago, my colleague Anne Madden and I did an experiment on sourdough starters, the microbial communities composed of bacteria and fungi that are used to leaven bread. Though all leavened breads were once produced using starters, they have a mysterious element: Where did the microbes in them come from? One possibility was that the microbes came from the bodies of the bakers themselves, as is the case with many fermented foods, like beer yeast, which comes from the bodies of wasps.

To test this hypothesis, we had bakers from around the world use the same ingredients to make a sourdough starter. We held all the ingredients constant, except for the hands of the bakers and the air in their bakeries. As it turned out, the individual bakers and/or their bakeries did have a modest effect on the microbes in their starters and thus on the flavors of the resulting bread. In other words, you can taste the baker in the bread.

But we were surprised to find that the story was more complicated than that. We swabbed the hands of the bakers (after they went about their ordinary morning ablutions) to learn what they might be contributing to the bread. Their hands were unlike those of any people yet studied. Lactic acid bacteria are key to the flavor of sourdough starters, making them acidic. In most studies, the proportion of lactic acid bacteria on peoples’ hands is small, around 3 to 6 percent. On the bakers’ hands, though, up to 70 percent of the bacteria were lactic acid bacteria. The baker’s hands also had much more yeast than the hands of other folks. In short, the bakers’ hands looked like sourdough starters. Their daily immersion in bread had changed their microbes. Sure, you could taste the baker in the bread, but the bread had also remade the baker.

The curious reciprocity between the microbial world of our foods and the microbial world of bodies also shows up in yogurt, whose bacteria are originally from human mouths and the guts of mammals. In commercial sourdough bread, the most commonly used bacteria appears to have come from the gut of a rat. Many fermented drinks around the world, such as chicha in the Amazon, rely on human body microbes for fermentation. As with sourdough, these fermentations influence our bodies, changing our microbiomes, affecting what we can digest and how we smell. We forget that we, too, are gardens.

Actual outdoor gardens also have the potential to change the species on our skin. We know from studies in Finland that children whose outdoor environments include a greater variety of plants tend to have more kinds and different kinds of bacteria on their skin, including bacteria that help to keep them healthy. Exposing yourself to the wild microbes of the garden and forest can have a big impact on your body’s wildlife, though we don’t know how much exposure it takes to make a difference. One sample of the skin of a child who grew up in the Amazon rainforest, living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, found more kinds of skin microbes on the forearm of that child than the total number we observed in a study we did of the belly button microbes of hundreds of Americans. How much would you need to garden to achieve such an effect? I suppose the answer is a lot.

Another big player in your microbial life is your dog, with whom you may be spending more time. Whether or not you have a dog is the single biggest predictor of which bacteria are floating through the air in your house. Children who live with dogs tend to acquire some dog gut microbes. Whether the same occurs with adults is less clear. I don’t advise intentionally acquiring dog microbes. But we know that kids, especially in cities, that grow up with a dog in the house are less likely to develop some allergies and asthma. Something about a dog in the house, microbially, can be good.

As for cats, the jury is still out. One microbe, called Toxoplasma gondii, associated with cat feces, can get into human brains and lead to changes in human behavior. In the garden of your daily life, it is definitely a bad weed.

I look forward to the day in which we can reconnect and share, anew, communities of microorganisms with others. In the meantime, I’m ever more aware of the thousands of species on my own body, in my own house and yard—virtually none of which have been studied, and many of which, though we spend so very much time with them, do not even yet have names.

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So it’s unfinished, this business of escape artistry, of finding the new in a delimited world.

My partner and I live in northeast London, a mosaic of Victorian terraces and forest remnants cut through by small rivers. From Walthamstow to Wanstead, it’s been home since the 1980s—and our entire world since March. Some weeks in, I found myself scouring the London A-Z and Google Maps for green spaces nearby. They were maddeningly featureless. But maps are products of cultural consensus. They’re not the territory, and certainly not the experience of the territory. So we became terranauts of the local, seekers of the sort-of known—even a “universe next door.”

When we first moved here, it was barely signposted. We discovered its history in stages and on the ground. Wanstead Park, for instance, is a zoo of monuments including an Italianate temple and decaying grotto crouched among towering oaks and limes. I discovered that they are all relicts of a “lost Versailles,” a Palladian-style villa and formal gardens sold off and broken up in the 1820s. Further back, the Tudor Henries (VII and VIII) hunted here, and the dubious favourite of Elizabeth I, Robert Dudley, owned a hall on the site where she partied up a storm in May 1578.

I was pleased too to find that an artistic hero of mine, the proto-socialist imagineer William Morris, grew up in Walthamstow. And that at the turn of the 20th century, it became ripe ground for techie innovation—not least in early cinematography. We have drunk it all in, the tangible and the intangible, a spirit of place that has somehow expanded mental space.

But these were discoveries of pre-pandemic times. As isolation wore on, I began to think laterally on my feet, nipping through gaps in hedges and gates passed a hundred times. I found old sewage works and scrubland, semi-wildernesses alive with birds. I heard cuckoos, now vanishingly rare, and saw thousands of swifts in flight. And I chased the new in the known. Wanstead Flats, for instance, is a 330-acre grassland I thought I’d “done” long ago. In social-distancing terms, a place where you can see someone coming for miles is a godsend. I went back.

Now, I see its subtleties. A protected acid grassland, where skylarks sing from the tussocks at sundown and kestrels hunt over the broom. Magisterial plantations of hundred-year-old oak, beech and hornbeam. A handful of iron barrage-balloon tethers from the Second World War. And I learned its history. A grazing land from the 12th century to 1996, a haunt of travellers, a military drilling range, the Flats have escaped enclosure and development through a combination of public will and, ultimately, protection by the City of London Corporation.

Proust noted that voyages of discovery are not about visiting strange lands, but possessing new eyes. By paying attention—knowing a place by inches rather than glances—I have become grounded. My mental map bulges with detail. In that process I recalled how young children map as they immerse in the physical world—an interplay of body, brain and environment that builds an interior cartography of space and our position in it.

So it’s somehow fascinating that up to the age of four, children apparently believe they can’t be seen when they shut their eyes, but only when meeting the gaze of another. The science writer Philip Ball noted this in his 2015 book Invisible, concluding: “how extraordinary it is that the self is not located from birth in the body.” I wonder whether the sense of self snaps in when we roam space—and I include imaginative space—with relative freedom. Whether we must move to be centred. Proprioception, sometimes called the “sixth sense,” is the feeling of our physical position, movement and balance in space, modulated by specialized neurons in the muscles and joints. It’s thought to be key to the sense of self.

Balance can be challenged by constraint. But children can see a cosmos in a backyard. The micro-odysseys of lockdown brought me back to mine, a few acres on London Road in Duluth, Minnesota, bounded by trees, a river, and the waters of Lake Superior. From that road, it may have seemed ho-hum. On the map, it was largely blank. But from the inside it was a multi-layered wonderland. It was also not a little weird.

The acid grasslands of Wanstead Flats in northeast London are a haven for birds—from kestrels to the iconic skylark. Courtesy of Barbara Kiser.

I grew up next to a disused lab, a long, imposing 19th-century pile. Once a fish hatchery, it looked as if it had spawned—clustered around was a clapboarded shoal, our ‘cottage’ and three outbuildings. The most mysterious of these resembled a playhouse on stilts, jutting out from the hill next to the lab, with a catwalk leading to the top floor. Down below were tucked a small, windowless octagonal structure and an inscrutable hut. The whole was like an exotic village inhabited only by us.

My father, who taught fine art, rented the cottage from the University of Minnesota. From this perch, I’d look over at the lab and wonder that a building so substantial could be forgotten. But then, we lived at the point where London Road becomes the old Highway 61, at a bridge spanning the mouth of the Lester River. We were denizens of a space both liminal and transformative. In that edgeworld, our complex had a fairy-tale air, half Grimm and half Perrault. It felt dropped off the map.

The old hatchery’s necessary siting near water made it a natural paradise too, an ecological and geological miniature, exquisitely compressed. Hazards came with the territory: the hatchery pond was a muddy sump, black bears legged it through the elms, and in a bush-choked pond across the road lurked a snapping turtle that could, my father noted with clinical relish, “take your arm off.” I learned to observe, and fast.
 
We can be possessed by spirit of place at points all our lives, but there is no intensity in that process like a child’s. To keep my bearings, I became a namer of places. The Smooth Rocks was an expanse of glacier-ground basalt at the river mouth; the turtle-haunted copse the Little Wood. A hollow cupping a humming sewage processor was the Dell. Shore End was a spiked metal barrier a mile along the beach. Yet close, pressing on the imagination, was the ragged edge of the boreal forest biome. We camped in it, hiked along its fringe, but it was something I couldn’t yet map: a vast realm of moose, bear, great grey owls and the deep darkness.

That tension, between known and unknown, is of course the spring of all discovery—leading humans across oceans, to the poles and tin-canned to the Moon. But I was a kid. I acquainted myself more deeply with what I could reach, and that was in any case in constant flux. Not just a rabbit’s nest under a bush, unpeeled momentarily by the lawnmower, or a gust of cedar waxwings drunk on fermented berries. But the primordial mud and slush of spring giving way to brief summers, the snap of smoky Octobers, the epic winters when the lake froze over and, between blizzards, you held your breath amid silent drifts. And we were always seeing with new eyes—my father urging us to look again and deeper, at the ethereal layers of a wasps’ nest or a cobalt shadow on snow.

Meanwhile, I was reading. Books perfectly meshed the quest for certainty with the quest for the new. When I first saw Ernest Shepard’s endpapers for Winnie the Pooh, it was with the shock of recognition. The world of Christopher Robin and Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood was one I understood and soon inhabited: Eeyore’s Gloomy Place became as solid in my mind as the Smooth Rocks. Shepard’s genius was to give a bird’s-eye view of places of the mind, to zoom out just enough from extreme locality to keep it personal.

A handful of WWII barrage-balloon tethers on Wanstead Flats are a visible reminder of its long human history. Courtesy of Barbara Kiser.

We left London Road when I was nine. Long after, navigating new cities, states and countries, I discovered that I had the dreaded “lousy sense of direction.” I found unfamiliar urban grids as confusing as off-road expanses of the Sonoran Desert. Map-reading I learned, but it was meaningful only when I did the route on foot.

Some years ago I was drawn to Wayfinding by the science writer M.R. O’Connor, which investigates human navigation in the satnav age. O’Connor’s research took her to Australia, where she wrangled with the idea that the Dreaming tracks of indigenous peoples are a “mnemonic device” for finding one’s way—a memory palace with the landscape itself taking the place of mental model. She meets Bill Yidumduma Harney, an elder of the Wardaman people who has memorized thousands of stars, and tells her that many long tracks align to them. She quotes the scholar David Turnbull on the Dreaming in Maps Are Territories: “The landscape and knowledge are one as maps, all are constituted through spatial connectivity.” This “noospheric highway system,” she writes, manifests as a sense of direction in the mind.

So what is happening to our sense of direction under quarantine? Tragically, it has rocked many to the core. I feel it has also clarified what matters. I am looking deeper at where I am, redrawing my inner cartography to get to the other side, wherever that is. That has not been just a journey in space. It’s time travel into moments of improbable humanity: barrage balloons, Virgin Queen, and all. That I’ve pinned down the functions of all those outbuildings on London Road seems no less improbable. My Eden there is no longer a place of enigmatic decay. It’s restored, and on the map. But the beach, the rocks, the curve of land are the same. For now.

What lasts, and what doesn’t, preoccupy us all in this pandemic. There is no real escape from it. On walks in a vast cemetery near the Flats, we have seen ranks of spoil from many new graves among the historic trees. Once we entered a glade and stumbled on a fenced marquee—a temporary morgue for COVID-19 spill-over.

We restless bipedal apes have survived plague, famine, century on century of war. But on this leg of the journey we face interlocked crises—ongoing environmental neglect and damage, self-serving politics and greed-driven industry—in tandem with terrible injustice. All of it plays out on a limited Earth.

I know that science has laid the depth of necessary fact, that technology can leverage potential solutions, that the blueprints and roadmaps proffered by international organizations have their place. But there is another kind of knowledge.

In my bones—or at least my hippocampus—I know how irrevocably we’re tied to nature. An early drenching in it tends to do that, bolstered by exposure to the science, from the stardust floating through us to the seething cosmos of the human microbiome. The wonder comes first, then curiosity—and respect. Perhaps, like Bill Yidumduma Harney, we need to memorize more stars to feel the path beneath our feet.

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The Black Death hit Europe from 1346 to 1353 and gave us the word “quarantine.” Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik, Croatia) was the first city known to establish quarantine for all ships wishing to land at their port. Ragusa required ships to spend 30 days on that rocky island off the coast—Mrkan. This time was used to determine whether sailors or their goods were infected. Tainted vessels and their crews were forced to remain there indefinitely; corpses of the dead were hurled into the sea.

This practice of quarantine became a law in Ragusa in 1377, though quarantine was not a Dalmatian word. It comes from the Italian quaranta—for the number 40. This number became the preferred time for isolation because of its Christian significance. Forty appears in the Bible many times—from the Israelites spending 40 days and 40 nights in the desert, to Jesus fasting in the wilderness for 40 days. It was thought that the passing of 40 days led to purification. New mothers were expected to remain resting for 40 days after they gave birth.

Quarantine may feel new and shocking to the world now. But it’s very old. What’s different with COVID-19 is the scale of quarantine—almost everyone around the world has had to stay at home, a self-isolation that for some may go on indefinitely.

Another difference between the Mrkan quarantines, and what we face today, are the modern technologies that allow us to learn of cases on the other side of the globe within seconds. Before the 20th century, plague felt scarier because we knew so little, and there were fewer humans.

Back in the 14th century, over those seven years of Black Death, every country in Europe, the Middle East, and the northern coast of Africa were affected. And there was frightening uncertainty about the disease’s origins (it came from rats infested with fleas that transmitted the disease to humans through bites), and a strong belief that the Black Death was divine condemnation (which only made people feel emotionally worse).

Plague thus created claustrophobia. It injected fear into any contact and pulled communities, villages and households into tight fists, fearful that any outsider could be pestilent. This fear deepened the already common xenophobia of the times, and inspired witch trials, pogroms and other scapegoating of people and groups different from the norm.

Plague kept people close to home. For 16th-century residents of Florence who were hiding out from a bout of plague that halted normal life, the extent of the known world was about as big as the Duchy of Tuscany (some 9,000 square miles, about the size of New Jersey). Traveling further afield took extreme effort, bravery (to dodge bandits), and significant money. For 99 percent of the world’s population, life consisted of little more than their hometown and its surroundings. The only people who traveled farther afield were either soldiers or pilgrims.

When Giorgio Vasari—the godfather of art history and court painter to the Medici in the mid-16th century—traveled from Florence to Venice, the journey (about a three-hour drive today) was fraught with danger. You could go by horse to Padova, though the roads were regularly patrolled by bandits, which meant risking your life.

Once at Padova, a raft would escort you along the Brenta River until a vast mud bank stopped further access in the direction of Venice. The raft would be dragged by pulleys onto a wheeled carriage and then hauled, by many men straining at winches, to the mouth of the Venetian lagoon, where it could once more be used to float to one’s destination. This whole procedure took between 12 and 36 hours. A contemporary of Vasari’s was said to have spent nearly three days on this journey spanning 22 miles—and that was outside of times of plague.

The closest historical equivalents to our current situation involve not only plague but also siege. Cities under siege were subject to hoarding, which they had to stop while still preventing the attacking army from blocking supply efforts.

Some sieges lasted for years. The Siege of Philadelphia (the Byzantine city attacked by the Turks, not the home of the Phillies) stretched from 1378 to 1390 and entailed storms of arrows, diseased cows catapulted over walls as weapons, and the prospect of mass pillage and murder at any moment.

What ultimately put an end to quarantines was the development of vaccines, a modern idea with ancient roots. A process called variolation was used in China as early as the 10th century, though some sources suggest it was in practice even in the 2nd century AD. The earliest recorded examples, practiced in both China and India, involved grinding up smallpox scabs into a powder and blowing it (or inhaling it) deeply into the nostrils. The goal was the intentional infection of healthy individuals with a mild version of a disease so they could build immunity to the heavier incarnations of it. It took a very long time—about 700 years—for the rest of the world to catch on.

In 1762, British physician Edward Jenner noted that those exposed to cows seemed to be immune to smallpox. He deduced that humans who contracted cowpox, a disease in cows that is harmless to humans, developed immunity to smallpox.

Jenner gave himself smallpox by placing a single smallpox scab taken from a patient into a wound in his own skin. A week later he got symptoms of the disease, but mild ones, and they passed in a matter of days. (Still, he needed weeks to recover his strength and to cease feeling poorly.)

Smallpox remained a threat well into the 20th century, with the disease striking in 1945 throughout the United States, South America, Africa, Europe, and South Asia. During the 1950s, there were 50 million cases a year. As late as 1967, 15 million people were diagnosed with smallpox, and 2 million died in that year alone.

Now as we await a vaccine for COVID-19, we are scared, even though getting the virus is no longer the guarantor of death that it was in prior pandemics.

When plague hit the city of Ragusa in the 14th century, people had to retreat into their residences and make do. The streets were policed to make sure no one was out without permission. The poor, with no place to live, could be expelled from the city to the wilderness (ironically, that may have been the safest place to be—it put them further away from the urban rats whose fleas caused plague). Interactions were undertaken by using water as a purifier. So, shopkeepers accepted coins placed in a vessel of water, in exchange for goods.

Doctors were few in number and almost completely ineffective, as attempts to treat disease were often nearly as bad as the disease itself (leeching and lancing wounds, common medieval methods, only weakened patients and did nothing to alleviate symptoms). Bodies were burned and the stench of cremating flesh hung in the air.

As difficult as our current self-isolation might seem, it was worse before home delivery of goods, modern medicine, and online entertainment. Today, our minds can journey, even if our bodies cannot. If history teaches us anything, it is that there is much to be thankful for even in today’s Corona World.

The post The Forbidding Little Adriatic Island Where Quarantine Began appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Those horns, and the relentless sensory assault they constitute, are among the features that define my experience of this city that has somehow become home. As a Beirut resident for three years before the quarantine, I found that every time I returned to the Lebanese capital after a visit elsewhere it would take me a few days to readjust to the onslaught of noise you experience as you walk down the street.

The taxis, an ad-hoc cavalry of battered ’80s-era Mercedes, normally slow to a crawl and honk insistently every time a driver spots someone on the sidewalk, regarding every pedestrian as a potential fare. I would consider this sort of behavior to be the precursor to a sexual harassment incident in a U.S. city—so when I was new to Beirut, I would tense up. Eventually the honking became nonthreatening background noise, to be dismissed with a head tilt and click of the tongue.

The taxis did not disappear from the streets after the quarantine order, but their numbers thinned—especially after the government limited the days that cars can be on the road based on their license numbers. Before the coronavirus, Beirut was not a place where traffic regulations—or most regulations—meant much, but fear of the virus briefly amended the social contract. In those first weeks of the lockdown, the taxi drivers, like the rest of the city, appeared dazed and subdued. The streets were strangely silent, but not entirely: for the first time, I could hear the chirping of birds.

Before coronavirus, Beirut was many things, but it was never subdued. There was a constant nervous energy, an electric current that you always felt was ready to blow—and sometimes did.

The most dramatic outburst during my tenure in the city came on October 17, 2019. Pent-up frustration—over the country’s deteriorating economic situation, its electricity shortages, its decades of corruption, and its sectarian political parties that had competed for their pieces of the pie since the end of the civil war, until the pie was gone—came to a head when the government proposed new taxes. These new levies included the now-infamous “WhatsApp tax” on internet-based calling services, which most Lebanese rely on for communications because regular phone calls and texts are prohibitively expensive.

At 7 p.m. that October evening, I finished my shift at the downtown office of the local English-language newspaper where I was still working at the time, even though the publication was two months behind on paying our salaries. On my way home, I passed by a small group of protesters in Riad al Solh Square, where they were outnumbered by the line of riot police guarding the nearby Parliament building and the seat of the Prime Minister. The protesters weren’t chanting. They were simply standing, and waiting.

I stopped to interview a couple of the protesters and continued on my way. I had an appointment to meet the man who I was going to fall in love with, a Palestinian journalist. We had met before as friends; this would be our first official date. We sat in a café in Manara, next to the sea, and drank tea, oblivious to what was going on elsewhere.

Later, we walked up toward Hamra and stopped into Abou Elie’s, a smoky hole-in-the-wall known as “the communist bar,” to have a glass of arak. We were the only ones at Abou Elie’s that night, which was strange. The bartender told us that the protests had swelled over the past couple of hours. The bar’s usual patrons had left to join the beginning of what would be dubbed the October Revolution.

As the numbers in the streets grew, the protest turned into a night of rage. Protesters smashed storefront windows in the pristine downtown district, normally considered out of reach to all but a wealthy few, and blocked roads with burning tires and overturned dumpsters. Watching the pandemonium unfold via Twitter and WhatsApp messages, my friend and I asked each other if we should go down to document it. Perhaps we are bad journalists, but at the time it seemed more important to drink arak and talk until midnight. By the time we left Abou Elie’s the streets were empty, lit by the remaining embers of torched tires and construction debris.

The next morning, and for the months before COVID-19 made “social distancing” a popular phrase, it felt like all of humanity was cramming into the squares. There was anger, but also joy. It was as if everyone in this often-fragmented society had been waiting for a reason to be squashed together by the hundreds and thousands, shouting, singing, and holding discussions that went on for hours.

By the time the first coronavirus case surfaced in Lebanon in late February, the numbers in the streets had dwindled, and divisions had emerged in what had at first been a unified cry for change. The lira’s value had plummeted, and the economic desperation in the country grew. The protests, while smaller, had become increasingly aggressive; the security forces’ response grew more violent. Even before the pandemic’s arrival, hospitals struggled to get medical supplies, which had to be imported using dollars that had become scarce and expensive.

When the government announced a countrywide lockdown beginning March 15, no one debated about it harming the economy, because the economy had already collapsed. Everyone seemed to agree that the country could not bear a public health crisis. When the quarantine order came, there was a sense of resignation and, perhaps, relief. After months of anti-government demonstrations in the central squares, people retreated to their neighborhoods and family villages.

I had been planning to travel to the U.S. in early April, and then to the wedding of close friends in Oaxaca, Mexico. But the wedding was postponed, and the Beirut airport was closed anyway. I could have gotten on an American embassy-chartered flight to Dallas or Miami for $2,500, but I wasn’t interested. After tweeting about this decision to stay put, I made an appearance in a CNN story about Americans refusing repatriation because they felt safer in Lebanon, which briefly turned me into a minor local celebrity. At the time, I was flippant about my lack of desire to return to the States, but as the weeks went on, I began to wonder when, actually, it would be safe to go back, and what my country would look like when I did. I watched from a distance as the number of U.S. deaths shot up and reports surfaced of shortages in masks, gloves, and ventilators, and of people hoarding toilet paper and lining up to buy guns.

A view of the Corniche, Beirut, Lebanon. Photo by Abby Sewell.

Before the virus, when Lebanese people learned that I was American, they used to ask, “Why would you come here? Everyone here wants to go to America.” Now, when people hear that I’m from the U.S., they ask if my parents are safe. (They’re fine; thank God).

In my neighborhood in Beirut, economic crisis notwithstanding, the pharmacy never ran out of masks and the stores never ran out food, or even toilet paper. Thanks to the majority Muslim population in my part of the city, toilet paper was never going to be a major concern, since most bathrooms are equipped with a shatafa, a handheld bidet sprayer. The gun stores I’ve passed since the beginning of the quarantine have all closed, and no one was complaining about it (although I’m sure that anyone who really wanted a firearm could still get one). The hospitals didn’t run out of ventilators or ICU beds, and, somehow, the number of COVID-19 cases—and COVID-19 deaths—crept up only gradually. Reported deaths have reached 26 as I write this.

“We don’t really know why, but the situation is under control,” a friend who works at the American University of Beirut Medical Center told me.

It has been a relief that one thing has remained under control. As the quarantine reached its second month, the lira continued its freefall. From the official rate of 1,507 lira to the dollar, it reached 4,000 to the dollar on the black market. Prices for goods doubled and tripled; those who were still getting a salary lost more than half of its value. People with money in the banks couldn’t get it out. People without money slid into destitution. While the streets remained largely empty, the increasing number of beggars was striking. With no significant safety net to offset the forced unemployment, people despaired, and regulations became insignificant once again. And perhaps the enforced isolation, which runs totally counter to Lebanese culture, had become too much to bear on top of everything else.

On April 24, the first day of Ramadan, I visited Tripoli—a notoriously disenfranchised working-class city on the northern coast dubbed the “bride of the revolution” for its massive protests since October—for a reporting trip. The souks were bustling. In one sweets shop, a fight nearly broke out between men jostling for their place in line. Economic anxiety far trumped fears of the virus. “We’re not afraid of the corona. We’re afraid of becoming Venezuela,” one shop owner told me.

In Beirut, even before the government officially began to relax restrictions at the end of April, municipal police officers had largely stopped shooing stray pedestrians off the Corniche, the seaside walkway that used to be full of families, joggers, vendors, and fishermen. Army trucks were no longer stopping cars out driving after curfew. In the Mar Elias Palestinian camp, volunteers still stand guard at the entrance to take the temperatures of entering residents and visitors, but after iftar, people come down to the street and sit in a circle, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.

And the protesters returned to the streets, with much of their anger now focused on the banks. Some wore masks, but social distancing quickly went out the window. On one of the first nights of renewed protests, in front of the Central Bank in Hamra, I watched uneasily from the edge of the crowd as a group of young men chanted, “We don’t care about corona! Riad Salameh is corona!” They were referring to the embattled Central Bank chief. Security forces futilely threatened them with tickets, for violating the 8 p.m. curfew order.

In the days that followed, demonstrators began to lob Molotov cocktails at bank offices. In Tripoli, a young demonstrator was killed in a clash with the Army. In a particularly poignant video widely shared on social media, as police scuffled with a group of protesters blocking the highway in the Beirut suburb of Jal el Dib, a protester shouted into an officer’s face, “I’m hungry!”

“I’m hungrier than you!” the officer shouted back.

Today, the number of taxis on the street is still smaller than before the virus hit, but they have resumed honking. The last time I stopped a cab was during the first few days of the quarantine, to interview the driver for a story about workers who couldn’t afford to stop during the lockdown. He told me that the cost of gas was often more than the fares he collected from the few riders he picked up. But he kept it up because he didn’t have another option.

I felt guilty for stopping him, taking his time, and potentially putting him at risk—even though I was talking to him from outside the passenger side window and wearing a mask (he wasn’t). When we finished the interview, I tried to give him the equivalent of a fare, but he wouldn’t take it.

The post A Letter From Beirut, Where the Taxis Have Resumed Honking appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We’re now more than six weeks into the “enhanced community quarantine” for Luzon. Just as the Milky Way is an archipelago of stars, the Philippines is a nation of islands, with Luzon being its largest. I live in Quezon City, on the northeast side of greater metropolitan Manila.

As I’ve learned to live the life of a recluse, my vision has improved—I see more clearly my own neighbors. I can see more of those Milky Way stars in the newly clear sky. And I more clearly see myself.

For weeks, I have kept to a simple routine. Wake up at five a.m. Attend to personal needs and do some exercises. Have coffee while surfing the internet, then eat my breakfast and have some social-distanced conversations with family, before heading back to the laptop and modern multi-tasking. I work with an NGO called Institute for Political and Electoral Reform, which is collaborating with Congress and the executive on constitutional reforms. And so I write papers and articles; attend to my emails, Facebook posts, and Viber messages; and sometimes join a Zoom conference with colleagues or have a phone patch interview if the media calls. In between such work, I have fun with video games or watch a Netflix movie or a YouTube video.

After lunch, I try to get in a nap. Then at four in the afternoon, as temperatures drop into the 80s, it’s time to monitor the update from the government on the COVID-19 situation. These updates are fascinating, covering the march of the pandemic across our country and changes in government policy, with an emphasis on the enhanced community quarantine here on Luzon. Afterwards, I have an early supper, then head back to my refuge of reading books and watching TV, before heading to bed for at least six hours.

This routine at first was voluntary and precautionary. I chose to seclude myself because I’m 64 and have some health issues. But recently it became stricter, as the unseen virus insinuated itself into our subdivision. A confirmed COVID-19 case was found right next door.

She is a doctor and she was infected in the hospital, right along with the head of the health unit, who died. She underwent hospital treatment and survived; she was able to come home just the other day.

In the meantime, her family members were considered Persons Under Investigation (PUIs), a euphemism for people who had a history of travel to virus hotspots or were in contact with confirmed cases. Protocols kicked in—the whole household was put in quarantine, and barangay (village) health workers started monitoring the occupants and bringing them food.

The authorities also stationed a 24-hour watch on our street to prevent people from roaming around outside. Authorities issued one quarantine pass per household to permit departures. And only one person per household was allowed to go out to purchase food, go to the bank, or to buy other necessities.

Suddenly, sticking to my indoor routine became a requirement, and a deadly serious one at that. According to the protocol, my age meant that I should not leave the house at all. There went my outdoor exercise, which consisted of walks and jogs within the subdivision. Now I’m limited to walking up and down the stairs and doing calisthenics on the third-floor balcony.

One luxury does allow me to get around: I have a service car from the office. With it, my driver and I are able to go out and see for ourselves what life is like in the region, as long as we stay in the car. This has allowed me to see the nearby neighborhoods with new eyes.

The village outside my subdivision is a relatively poor community with a lot of informal settlers eking out a hand-to-mouth existence as vendors, tricycle drivers, small shopkeepers, or itinerant workers. In normal times, such people may be easily ignored and dismissed. But now that they must stay inside, I see a void where a wealth of human interactions and enterprises once filled the street.

Today, the village still teems—but with barricades and checkpoints, standby ambulances, and police and barangay tanod (village watchers) who implement an Extreme Community Quarantine (ECQ). It’s extreme because the village has the unenviable status of having the highest number of confirmed cases in the whole city. It has become a COVID-19 hot spot.

This depressing reality is not just local; it’s our new normal. Authorities have just announced the extension of the month-long quarantine of the whole island of Luzon until May 15. Even if the quarantine is lifted by then, authorities are speaking of a gradual return to normal economic activity, with lots of precautionary measures until the pandemic is over and we have a vaccine. President Duterte himself predicts a two-year process.

Adjusting to this reality, I’ve turned inwards. I’ve taken stock of my priorities; I’ve found that I could do without unnecessary things in life, like electronic gadgets, and have seen how much I need human relationships. I already feel like I have new priorities—family affairs and legacy work that will survive me.

Many experts here in the Philippines—economists, political analysts, social scientists—are forecasting direr things to come in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Among these are slower economic growth, even a recession, far from the Philippines’ consistently six-percent annual growth in gross domestic product (GDP) for the past 10 years. In my middle-class subdivision, my neighbors whose businesses are tied to the globalized economy could feel the strongest impacts; in the villages outside the subdivision, those with poverty-level jobs in the formal economy, which also has global ties, are most likely to suffer.

Some are saying a political crisis is in the offing, particularly if the nation’s leadership is perceived to have bungled the pandemic response and if the people find the new hardships unacceptable. We have crucial presidential elections in 2022, an active rebellion, and a restless poor.

It is too early, I think, to dwell on those things until we have “flattened the coronavirus curve” and decisively defeated it. The time to take stock of the damage to the country and assess the probably profound impact on our lives is still in the future.

In the meantime, I live for each day. In this time of the coronavirus, one has to see and appreciate the silver linings. I suddenly have the time on my hand to write all the things I always wanted to write, to read all the things I’ve always wanted to read, and watch all the things I’ve always wanted to watch.

But my favorite pleasure is that of the sky above. Manila is one of the most polluted cities in the world. In normal times, one can barely discern the Sierra Madre mountain ranges to the east of the region, or the Bataan Death March cross that sits atop Mount Samat in the west. But thanks to the coronavirus and the quarantine, the skies have cleared up, and air has freshened up. And I can see these landmarks, sharply and clearly, from the subdivision.

I find myself thinking back to my boyhood days in the provinces, when communing with nature was the norm. Could the future be more like that? I savor the pleasurable leisure of looking at the night sky in the evening. Now, despite the glaring city lights, I can see the planets and even the faint smudge that is the Milky Way. And it is full of stars!

The post A Letter From Quezon City, Where the Stars Have Come Back 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.

For this peculiar time, there may be no more desirable California place than that small strip of coastal Monterey County, within the city of Pacific Grove. Asilomar is more than just an unusual state park that includes a state beach, and a historic hotel and conference grounds. It’s also a versatile refuge where you can either isolate yourself or be with others.

And in a state as crazy and wired as ours, Asilomar is the rare place where Californians might actually find some peaceful sleep.

I’d been pining for the pines of Asilomar long before the coronavirus shut down our daily lives. A few months ago, I made reservations for my family to spend a long weekend of the kids’ early April spring break there with my mother-in-law and father-in-law, who have never been. My wife suggested the trip because Asilomar is that rare location where I, an annoyingly energetic person who works all the time, can actually shut down and relax.

Two weeks ago, however, Gavin Newsom blew up our plans. The governor invoked his power over the state park to close the conference grounds and hotel so they could be used to quarantine passengers exposed to COVID-19 on the Grand Princess cruise ship. As many as two dozen passengers may already be there. And there are strong hints that Asilomar could become a major center for quarantines as the pandemic worsens.

This prospect has sparked considerable Monterey-area media coverage, with county officials and citizens raising questions about what’s happening at Asilomar. Adding to the concern have been unexplained patrols of the property by U.S. marshals, and temporary layoffs of hotel employees.

Such worries, while understandable, miss the point of the place. That Asilomar would play a comforting role in this crisis is completely in keeping with its history; just as California has been a refuge for people around the world, Asilomar has long been a refuge for Californians. In that sense, it’s long been one of California’s Californias.

Merrill Hall at Asilomar. Courtesy of Wayne Hsieh/flickr.

Asilomar’s origins lie in the story of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), and its efforts to shelter young women as they relocated from farms to cities in search of jobs. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the YWCA offered not just housing but training and education in subjects from finance to typing. That created a need for spaces in different parts of the country where YWCA leaders and the women they served could gather, rest, and strategize.

Asilomar was the result of the efforts of some of the leading women of early 20th century California—among them Phoebe Apperson Hearst and Ellen Browning Scripps, both from famous publishing families—to create a West Coast conference grounds for the YWCA. The Pacific Improvement Company donated the land and the architect Julia Morgan, later famous for Hearst Castle, was hired to design it. In 1913, the grounds opened for a YWCA student leadership conference. For a contest, a Stanford student, Helen Salisbury, invented the name Asilomar by combining the Spanish words for refuge (asilo) and sea (mar).

In subsequent years, more land and more Morgan-designed buildings were added to Asilomar, allowing the property to accommodate more than 500 people. By the 1920s, Asilomar was being used year-round, by camps, colleges, churches, conferences, and gatherings of all sorts of Californians seeking refuge.

In those days, the summer still belonged to the YWCA, with its leadership conferences and summer camps. Meanwhile, a distinct and enduring vibe of “quietness” had formed. A 1931 newsletter produced by camp workers described the “differentness” of life where the sounds included “the moan of the wind and the drip of water from the fog-clad pines” and the sights consisted of “the whiteness of the sand dunes, the blueness of the ocean, and the rare beauty of the sunsets.”

The document observed how refuge at once removes us and connects us:

Jobs and folks and life in general are new to each other, and for these reasons a certain amount of adjustment is necessary. Selfish desires must be given up for the sake of the group. But as the summer moves on week after week, this adjustment is soon made and the individuals are moving as one united body, ready to work or to play as occasion demands.

Asilomar nearly didn’t survive the Great Depression and Second World War. In 1934, the YWCA, unable to keep funding its conference facilities, voted to close Asilomar and sell it. But no one would buy it. And so Asilomar was leased for a few years to motel owners. As the country moved into war, it became a National Youth Administration training camp and then a temporary living quarters for the military families of Fort Ord and the Defense Language Institute.

Post-war, the YWCA reopened the grounds as a money-making conference facility, even as it was trying to sell the place. By the 1950s, Pacific Grove residents and other local communities, who were afraid the property would be sold to a glass company interested in sand extraction, formed a Save Asilomar Committee. That touched off a series of conversations and state legislation that led to Asilomar becoming a state park in 1956.

The place has grown and changed in the years since. In the 1960s and ’70s, new structures were added, as part of a master plan created by San Francisco architect John Carl Warnecke, perhaps best known for his “eternal flame” memorial to John F. Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery. The state acquired nearby land for environmental reasons, extending the park beyond 100 acres, and has worked diligently in recent decades to preserve and restore Asilomar’s dunes.

Over time, Asilomar has developed a reputation as a good location for serious thinking—especially for Californians getting together to talk over the future of science and technology. Most famously and controversially, in 1975, a meeting there produced a historic agreement in which scientists ended a moratorium on recombinant DNA research and designed new “Asilomar Conference” guidelines for genetic manipulation that effectively constitute a voluntary honor system. More recent Asilomar conferences have examined the risks of everything from artificial intelligence to climate change interventions.

The ethos of this collection of small buildings and small dunes remains simple and rustic, which is part of what makes the place so versatile and valuable. It also feels gloriously disconnected. The rooms don’t have phones or televisions. The beds are simple and comfortable. The rates are reasonable.

You don’t do much at Asilomar—you can walk the trails or the beach, do some bird-watching, rent a bike, play volleyball, or play pool at the tables at the main lodge. Those guests now in quarantine can’t leave their rooms, but, for that, I somewhat envy them. Asilomar is a terrific place to catch up on sleeping and reading.

On my last Asilomar visit, I re-read Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and underlined this passage: “Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness.” 

The post Quarantine Me at Asilomar! appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The event itself represented a novel attempt to cope with the challenges of coronavirus. For the first time in its 16-year history, Zócalo, which has produced more than 600 events to date, presented its first last night without a live audience. Instead, the evening discussion, entitled “How Does Music Change Your Brain?,” was conducted live on Zócalo’s YouTube channel, with the panelists speaking over internet video links while remaining at home, as California authorities have mandated.

The format produced a fast-paced discussion between panelists—as well as freewheeling exchanges among the hundreds of audience members on YouTube’s live chat. At one point, after actor and songwriter Mary Steenburgen, one of the evening’s panelists, explained how she had been drawn to the accordion, the Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, who also plays accordion (and is a Zócalo board member), appeared on the chat and offered to jam with her once the discussion was over.

NPR host-at-large Elise Hu, the event’s moderator, began the night by asking why the effects of music on the brain are so powerful and meaningful. That touched off a conversation that mixed the musical and the medical, with panelists discussing both detailed neurological research as well as their personal experiences with music.

Steenburgen, an Academy Award winner, recalled how she woke up from a 2007 surgery on her arm, which required a general anesthetic, and “felt very different … I felt as if the sound of my brain had changed. I was obsessed with anything musical.”

At first, this was distressing. “I wanted my old, much quieter mind back,” she said. But when she realized her new reality wasn’t going away, she decided to “take what [she] was hearing and then express it in songs.” After considerable work with other songwriters and a music lawyer, she became an award-winning songwriter herself. “Glasgow (No Place Like Home),” a song she co-wrote for the 2019 film Wild Rose, won critics’ and audience awards, and was short-listed for an Oscar.

Steenburgen, now star of the NBC TV drama “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist,” about a young coder who develops the power to hear people’s innermost feelings through song, still isn’t sure what happened. “But to this day, my brain is different from what it was,” she said. “Logic would tell me that I got access to something that was there already … I had a grandmother who was extremely musical. Sometimes I’ve wondered, ‘Could I have done this all along?’”

UCLA neuroscientist and ethnomusicologist Mark Jude Tramo, who directs the Institute for Music & Brain Science, said that Steenburgen’s experience reminded him of Dr. Oliver Sacks’ account of Tony, a patient who got hit with lightning and became preoccupied with piano music. Tramo added that surgeons often listen to music as they work, and it may have an effect on them and their patients. “I recommend that you ask your surgeon what he was playing,” he said.

Tramo laid out both evidence and anecdotal experience of how music can affect brains, and noted that these insights are not new: “Remember, Apollo was the god of both medicine and music,” he said. But Tramo stressed that we need more research—including clinical trials—so that medicine can make better use of music in actual treatment.

Music treatment, as he pointed out, “is effective, but it is not available to everyone because of Medicare and third-party payers.” Tramo, who also serves as co-director of the University of California Multi-Campus Music Research Initiative, later quipped that we “want to make the hospital a little bit more like Disneyland, and a little bit less like Salem”—during the witch trials, that is.

USC Brain and Creativity Institute research psychologist Assal Habibi, who is also a classically trained pianist, described her research with children, starting at age 6. She noted that children who study music improve their emotional development, are better at being empathetic, and show improved cognitive skills and executive function. When asked why, she noted that music training changes the function and structure of the brain. She added: “We know that children, when they’re moving to a rhythm, … they tend to be more social.”

Habibi also cited evidence that music can help with depression and anxiety—and not just in children. In one intervention in her research, older adults were put into a choir, and the experience helped with their hearing skills, which allowed them to enjoy socializing more, and that in turn improved their overall well-being.

The current pandemic came up repeatedly throughout the evening, including during a question-and-answer session that featured questions drawn from suggestions made by audience members on the live chat.

Habibi suggested that people make use of this time to “have an artistic experience at home as a family.” Have children play on pots and pans, and experiment with music. “I would emphasize that they play whatever they want to play,” she said.

Steenburgen took note of the powerful scenes of people in Italy singing from their balconies. “It not only put smiles on their faces and lifted them up,” she said. “But it lifted all of us up who saw that” online.

Perhaps that could be an inspiration, Steenburgen said, just as the difficult moments after her surgery convinced her to embrace songwriting for the first time. “Maybe during this time when we’re all stuck in our houses,” she said, “people will say yes to some things they’ve never said yes to.”

Several audience members asked what books the panelists recommend on the subject. Here are a few:

Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks
Emotion and Meaning in Music by Leonard Meyer
The Unanswered Question by Leonard Bernstein
Music of the Hemispheres by Mark Jude Tramo (forthcoming)
The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio Damasio
This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin

A few of our favorite independent bookstores:
Powell’s Books, Diesel Bookstore, The Last Bookstore, Skylight Books, {pages}, Kramerbooks, Politics and Prose Bookstore, and Stories Books.

The post How Music Heals—and How It Can Help Us Find Solace in the Time of Coronavirus appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.