TRAVEL

Traveller’s tales

Guest post by Antoine K

A story among millions

The appearance of a disease is swift as an arrow;

its disappearance slow, like a thread.

~ Chinese Proverb

I landed at Pudong International Airport, on the new side of Shanghai, by the sea, in the late afternoon of Thursday, February 6^th. It was a typically bleak, winter day, with a sky blanketed by grey clouds. I went through security faster than expected, got my temperature checked, my passport examined, it seemed even more thoroughly than usually, and went off through the deserted hallways of the huge hub. It was not completely empty, but the travellers were few enough to make anyone feel uneasy. I opted to use the superfast magnetic train to get downtown, but decided against the subway from there to home, and called a taxi. The streets were empty, the cars rare, the buildings dark.

I had left sunny Nagoya a few hours before that day, and a week earlier, I was skiing near Niseko, northern Japan, enjoying the Chinese New Year customary break. One evening, after taking my skis off and while checking the news, I had received the e mail informing us that our school in Shanghai, like the majority across China, would remain closed after the holidays. Naturally, we had followed for the previous two weeks the raise of that Coronavirus epidemic with attention, yet no worries, convinced as we were that, like H1N1 or MERS, this new illness would not really affect us and would remain an epiphenomenon. One of my Chinese friends was already very concerned, but isolated in my expat bubble, away from social networks madness, and generally dismissive with irrational fears, I had told her to calm down. Things seemed under control. I know now they were not, but that the Chinese authorities had assessed how serious the situation was, and were acting accordingly. Indeed, the Thursday before the holidays, our last day of school, China announced a quarantine imposed to the whole city of Wuhan. 11 million folks confined, forbidden to travel, days before the New Year celebration and the largest human migration on Earth. That started to trigger very serious warnings in our heads.

I had extended my stay in Japan by a few days, and had been hosted by friends in Nagoya. Despite my family’s best efforts to convince me to do otherwise and stay in Japan, or go pretty much anywhere else but China, I decided to come back home – my apartment in Fa Zu Jie, the Former French Concession in Puxi. Back then, I was not sure it was the right call, but it turned out to be so – as I am writing these lines, confinement in Shanghai is over, businesses and shops are somewhat running, making us privileged ones, when about 3 billion people worldwide are strictly confined, or supposed to be. We are now in the next phase, which means controlling, testing and quarantining all new comers and suspected cases. Schools remain closed so far, though they should reopen in a few weeks. Any major event is still cancelled. Temperature checks, often along with the request to leave your name and phone number, are still in place for restaurants, shops, malls. Masks are worn everywhere.

The confinement here took full effect right when I came back. It was not as strict here as it was in the province of Hubei, or in Beijing or in Hangzhou, and I could go out when needed without authorization. I stayed home, alone most of the time. I made my apartment as cozy and work-friendly as possible, as I have to “teach” from home. I cooked. I shopped for groceries, with weekly trips to the supermarket, something I had given up doing for years. Public transportations have been running uninterrupted from the start, though wearing a mask and getting your temperature checked upon entering the station became mandatory in early February. They gradually replaced the cheap laser-gun thermometers with fancier infrareds cameras. Since there were already some make-believe security guards in place for each station, with X-Ray machines for luggage, it was easy enough, I suppose, to upgrade and implement new measures… An interesting reflection on what security and surveillance can quickly turn into.

Each compound, building, or neighborhood in Shanghai quickly closed all entrances but one or two, systematically checking the temperature of anyone coming in. All deliveries are made at the gate, and in some cases, you need a specific ID card to even get in. These measures, put in place by the local committees representing the Party, change from one place to the next, ranging from frankly lax to extremely strict, depending on the decision made above, or the seriousness of the staff. Things are certainly getting less tight, for the last few days.

I spent most of my first six weeks reassuring family and friends that I was safe (and it certainly felt like it) and that things were gradually getting better for us (they were), as we all here had our eyes on the graphs and the slowly flattening curves. However, like most people, I failed to see that authorities in the West were not taking the SARS-CoV-2 spread seriously. It’s only when the number of deaths in Europe (then mostly in Italy, France and Spain) became higher over the course of two weeks, than they had been in China over the course of two months, that I personally realized that a terrible, disastrous pandemic was inevitable. It was ten days ago. Within a few hours, I went from calmly reassuring my folks and friends, to frantically urging them to follow the brand-new instructions that had been, finally, issued in Europe: stay home and respect confinement measures.

As I had the time and the access to information, I did my best to learn objectively; understand the situation, grasp the real risks, assimilate what common folks like me can comprehend about such a virus, avoid the fake news, oppose stupidity whenever encountering it online or in conversations, whether it takes the form of absurd conspiracy theories, nonsense, fear fuelled by ignorance, or good plain ol’ racism. There’s been plenty of it, from pettiness of scared folks stealing toilet paper, to infuriating declarations from public figures, pretending there is nothing serious happening. Thankfully, there’s also been a lot of good, solidarity and intelligence at work. As always, smart and caring, and idiotic and selfish cohabit everywhere.

However, I recently stopped looking every day at the graphs: Numbers keep rising exponentially, and we can expect hitting and passing tomorrow or Tuesday the bar of 100,000 new declared cases per day worldwide, and reaching the million of total declared cases by Thursday or Friday. It’s too depressing, and like anytime numbers get too big, it’s too impersonal and impossible to make sense of, emotionally.

Most of our school community, such as my fellow teachers or our students’ families, had left for the break, and chose to remain abroad when the epidemic reached Shanghai. Though many came back, some are still away today, and they might stay away for a while: The latest piece of news was that, since Saturday morning 12 a.m, China partially closed its borders, preventing any non-national from coming in, regardless of their visas or permits. My understanding is that they can’t cope with the influx of people returning here, as they test and isolate everyone arriving on the territory. As a result, they are prioritizing the triage of their own citizens, which makes sense, legally and practically.

The next months and even the coming year, promise to be difficult. One can expect very limited freedom of movement worldwide, and the return of confinement measures every time a new outbreak happens. Eventually, we will either find a vaccine (which will take maybe a year) or we will have had enough people getting sick and immune to have the Covid-19 sickness joining the Spanish Flu in the History book. The economy will be shattered. Many small businesses will collapse. Everyone will know someone who got sick, and many will know personally someone who passed away because of the virus. Death will be part of daily news.

Maybe, just maybe, this health crisis will be the electro-shock we needed as a species to realise that we must and can change our ways. It will be the wake-up call that, yes, we are screwing things over, as the scale of the catastrophe is clearly related to our activities. It will be the epiphany that we can be in control of what we do, if we work collectively. Perhaps. I doubt it.

Will Covid-19 be the alarm we finally listened to, to tackle and put down the monstrous political-economical-ecological hydra that we created, that becomes stronger by the day? Or will it be the beginning of our downfall, the first new major crisis of a long list?

© Image and text by Antoine K