Field Notes from a Pandemic

by Ethan Lou

  The tightly wound clock became even more tightly wound, and little redundancy became zero redundancy. In keeping with my luck with travel lately, it turned out that the Munich train station was not intuitively designed. I had to transfer from train to subway to get to the airport, and platform 1, where I was supposed to go, was nowhere near where one would expect it to be, at the end of the line of platforms arranged in declining order. It was on the other side, underground. It was a lot of wasted time and long walks, made all the more torturous by the fell weight of twenty-four jars of schweinskopfsülze in my luggage. I arrived at the airport check-in counter precisely fifteen minutes after takeoff. Staff at the counter, seemingly unsympathetic to my plight, referred me to another counter, which referred to my mileage program, whose phone lines, running on North America’s times, were not yet open.

  I eventually did get everything sorted out, but the new flight was the next day, and I was already in Munich and had potentially nowhere to spend the night since, under pandemic rules, hotels only admitted guests under special circumstances. I probably would have qualified for an exception, but figured it just wasn’t worth the trouble. For a moment I thought I just might call Thailand’s king Maha Vajiralongkorn and his twenty concubines and see if they had a spare bedroom.

  I could, of course, have turned around and gone back to where I came from. It wasn’t that long a train ride to Bayreuth, only about three hours. It was noon in Germany, and I could still make it back to Elias’s apartment to sleep the night and then come back to the airport the next day. With the lack of conductors, I could probably do it for free anyway. But the thought of hauling the twenty-four jars of schweinskopfsülze to and fro — not to mention the potential unpredictability of the trains the next morning — was most unappealing. That night, in a largely empty Munich airport, I had some sushi and a Bayreuther Hell beer from the airport supermarket before engaging in a nice chat with a policeman carrying an assault rifle. And there I slept, my last night away from home. In The Plague, Albert Camus had written about “travellers caught by the plague and forced to stay where they were,” in particular, a journalist stuck in the locked-down town, “the most exiled.”

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  —

  The next day, at the airline counter weigh-in, it dawned on me my haul of schweinskopfsülze was pushing the suitcase to thirty kilograms, over the allowed baggage weight. In Thailand, I once used my hand to subtly and slightly — and successfully — lift my luggage while it was weighed to make it appear less heavy. At the Munich counter, I thought about how I should have done that again, and now, how many jars of the meat jelly I would have to eat to reduce the weight. But that was all unnecessary. Amid the layoffs and the lack of human traffic in the airport, I don’t think staff cared anymore about anything. The aviation companies were laying people off in the thousands. A job today might not be a job tomorrow. Nobody had the will or desire to raise an issue over luggage technicalities. The lady at the counter said nothing.

  The lack of congestion in the terminal was a welcome sight, but not the closed lounges and duty-free stores, my usual refuges at any airport. In fact, no shop was open, and it was breakfast time. I was hungry and had to remain hungry. I did not eat until I was on the plane on the second leg of my journey, after the stopover in Frankfurt. And the airplane food had changed. There was no longer anything hot. All that was available were cold sandwiches and packaged snacks. There was also no booze, the only drink available being bottled water. The idea, I’m sure, was to minimize contact, whether it’s between staff and passenger or between them and the food and drinks. This kind of inflight experience was fast becoming a worldwide trend, with everything pared down to the bare minimum and prices set to go up as airlines blocked the sale of seats next to each other so as to maintain physical distancing. Ireland’s Ryanair, once infamous for considering standing-only flights and charging for the toilet, would even require customers to make a special request to use the washroom, like raising your hand in class. I couldn’t help but think at least some of the less severe changes to air travel were here to stay. Travel is high-risk by nature, and that aspect is not going to change any time soon.

  Compared to the shock I registered at being greeted by a sea of mask-wearing people upon arrival in Beijing, what I was now seeing on Air Canada on the trip home seemed all very normal to me — cabin staff in protective gear and wearing masks; formerly unimaginable or unacceptable rules being enforced and hardly given a second thought; and everyone moving super carefully around each other, like some mime exercise. This is what it is now, I thought. The new normal, to borrow an entirely over-used phrase. I didn’t even mind the shoddy food that much. In fact, I’ve tasted nothing quite as good as that cold Air Canada turkey Caesar wrap.

  * * *

  —

  According to my Google Maps tracking feature, I’ve spent so much time away from Toronto over the years that, aside from all the places I have lived in the city, my most frequently visited location is the airport. Arriving at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport again and seeing it so starkly empty was jarring. I was tempted to cup my hands around my mouth and shout, “Ricola!”

  Prior to coming to immigration, I was asked to fill out a form with my address and contact details, so that government workers could follow up to make sure I was self-isolating for fourteen days, as required for all incoming travellers. Once at the immigration counter, the officer made sure I understood the rules of self-isolation before letting me through. All said and done, it wasn’t so bad — at least I didn’t have a swab shoved through my nose like Risako, although the lack of any COVID-19 screening did surprise me a little.

  With my landing back in Canada, I sort of felt like those astronauts who had spent more than two hundred days on the International Space Station only to return to Earth amid the worst days of the pandemic. They — two Americans and one Russian — had of course heard what was going on back on Earth, but seeing it in person was another thing entirely. It must all have seemed so strange and otherworldly. It certainly did for me. My experience of the pandemic’s lockdown and disruption had happened only after I left home. Thus, in that base, instinctual part of my brain, it had been a foreign phenomenon. I did know on a rational level what was going on in Canada, what was closed, what was open, and the new dos and don’ts in society. But looking at it all from a distance had definitely been, in the words of one of the astronauts, “hard to understand.” Seeing everything in person made it no easier.

  * * *

  —

  After a week back in Toronto, a federal employee called to make sure I was, in fact, self-isolating for the required two-week period. She mispronounced my name in an oddly specific way, an error likely due to misreading my handwriting on the form I filled out upon arrival. An email later sent to me, with my named spelled exactly as she had pronounced it, confirmed my theory. That suggested the form was not cross-checked with electronic data or the border agency’s records of who comes and goes. Maybe I could have written Michael Mouse and nobody would have been any the wiser. Anyway, I told the bureaucrat I was doing what I was told, which was the truth, and she was satisfied. She had been pulled off her normal duties to make these calls, she told me. During normal times, she had a different government job. I didn’t ask what that was.

  By then, the world already had more than 4 million infected and at least 300,000 dead. In Canada, it was some 70,000 infected and 5,000 dead. It got particularly bad in seniors’ homes, whose residents are particularly vulnerable and where many live in confined environments. At one point, one-third of the virus deaths in the United States were linked to nursing homes. In Canada, nearly four in five deaths were associated with long-term care facilities. It got so bad, soldiers were called in to reinforce some of the homes, where it became clear how terribly underfunded and understaffed they were. A military report leaked to media detailed horrific conditions: residents left in soiled diapers or left cry
ing for help for long periods, and around them, cockroaches, flies, and rotten food. Medical supplies, including catheters, were allegedly reused, and “significant fecal contamination in numerous patient rooms” was found. Even in the higher-end ones, it was only a little better. In Montreal, an orderly at a long-term care centre wrote in her journal, published in a newspaper: “Ms. S, an 87-year-old patient, keeps saying how much she wants to die, how much she is tired of loneliness and confinement, how her loss of autonomy is driving her crazy and how she no longer feels a reason to live. She cries and asks for a hug.” Ms. S died a few days later. In the orderly’s journal, no cause was stated, but none was needed.

  The news about the death toll and horrific conditions in long-term care facilities hit home for obvious reasons, but it turns out my grandparents were okay. The seniors’ residence they were in appears to have successfully locked down their environment, probably right after I walked out the front doors. The good news was that it had even started to allow visits again, although limited and only by appointment, and eventually my grandmother had what she called a “very fortunate” day. She would finally get to see my Beijing uncle; my aunt, his elder sister; and my aunt’s daughter again. “Lots of elderly still haven’t seen their family, but they still hope for it every day,” she would write in the family WeChat group. “They have to depend on the residence’s staff for everything because 90 per cent of them do not have mobile phones.”

  My aunt posted a photo of my grandfather. He was little changed. Already ridden by both dementia and his failing body, he had been confined in the pandemic in a way that really wasn’t any different from before. I wondered if he knew the chaos that had sprung around him, the lives lost and changed, the lockdown that had descended and left, and the upheaval that had come and would come again. I’m sure my grandmother talked to him, and that he could hear the newscasts she played and the small talk of the orderlies around and see that everyone was in face masks. My grandfather may not understand or retain much of anything, but I’ve come to believe there is a baser, more resilient part of his brain that took in the raw emotions of all of that, the sombreness of the television, the tension in the voices everywhere, and the cold emptiness of the room. I like to think he could feel the weight of the darkness, that he recognized it on some level, and that, in his own way, he resisted it. His toothless mouth agape in an almost hairless head, my grandfather had thus far weathered the pandemic largely unaffected, stubbornly and soundlessly, raging against the fates and the fading breath.

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  PROLOGUE AND PART ONE: YEAR OF THE RODENT

  Agence France-Presse. “Beijing Reports Capital’s First Death from Coronavirus.” January 27, 2020.

  British Broadcasting Corporation. “China Coronavirus: Death Toll Rises as Disease Spreads.” January 25, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51245680.

  Bowker, John, and Loni Prinsloo. “South African Airways Nears Collapse with Plan to Fire All Staff.” Bloomberg, April 18, 2020. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-18/south-african-airways-nears-collapse-with-plan-to-fire-workforce.

  Chambers, Madeline. “Germans Snitch on Neighbours Flouting Virus Rules, in Echo of the Stasi Past.” Reuters, April 2, 2020. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-germany-denunciati/germans-snitch-on-neighbours-flouting-virus-rules-in-echo-of-the-stasi-past-idUSKBN21K2PB.

  Chiang, Nora. “Middle- Class Taiwanese Immigrant Women Adapt to Life in Australasia: Case Studies from Transnational Households.” Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 10, no. 4 (January 2004): 31–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/12259276.2004.11665979.

  Corkery, Michael, and David Yaffe- Bellany. “Meat Plant Closures Mean Pigs Are Gassed or Shot Instead.” New York Times, May 14, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/business/coronavirus-farmers-killing-pigs.html.

  Feng, Jiayun. “All the Hilariously Aggressive Coronavirus Propaganda Banners Found in China.” SupChina, February 11, 2020. https://supchina.com/2020/02/11/all-the-hilariously-aggressive-coronavirus-banners-found-in-china.

  Frost, Natasha. “All Over the World, Countries Are Imposing Travel Bans on Visitors Who’ve Been to China.” Quartz, February 2, 2020. https://qz.com/1795615/coronavirus-travel-bans-on-china-imposed-by-growing-list-of-nations.

  Fuller, Thomas, Mike Baker, Shawn Hubler, and Sheri Fink. “A Coronavirus Death in Early February Was ‘Probably the Tip of an Iceberg.’ ” New York Times, April 22, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/santa-clara-county-coronavirus-death.html.

  Goh, Timothy. “Man Who Breached Coronavirus Stay- Home Notice Stripped of Singapore PR Status, Barred from Re- Entry.” Straits Times. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/coronavirus-singapore-permanent-resident-who-breached-stay-home-notice-stripped-of-pr.

  Harari, Yuval Noah. “Yuval Noah Harari: The World after Coronavirus.” Financial Times, March 20, 2020. https://www.ft.com/content/19d90308-6858-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcca75.

  Hodge, James. “China’s Mass Quarantines; Fifth Estate Investigation into Death of Preston Lochead; Hip Hop Ambassador Toni Blackman.” The Current. Interviewed by Matt Galloway, January 24, 2020. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-jan-24-2020-1.5438975/friday-january-24-2020-full-transcript-1.5439431.

  Kiernan, Samantha, and Madeleine DeVita. “Travel Restrictions on China due to COVID- 19.” Think Global Health, April 6, 2020. https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/travel-restrictions-china-due-covid-19.

  Kormann, Carolyn. “From Bats to Human Lungs, the Evolution of a Coronavirus.” New Yorker, March 27, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/from-bats-to-human-lungs-the-evolution-of-a-coronavirus.

  Lim, Min Zhang. “Coronavirus: SAF Helps with Contact Tracing, Calling Those on Stay- Home Notices.” Straits Times, April 3, 2020. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/coronavirus-saf-helps-with-contact-tracing-calling-those-on-stay-home-notices.

  Lou, Ethan. “Coronavirus in China: My Travels Through a Land in Lockdown.” Maclean’s, March 3, 2020. https://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/coronavirus-in-china-my-travels-through-a-land-in-lockdown.

  Malito, Alessandra. “ ‘I Would Rather Him Be Lonely Than Dead’: How to Manage When Someone You Love Is in a Nursing Home.” MarketWatch, March 23, 2020. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/i-would-rather-him-be-lonely-than-dead-how-to-manage-when-someone-you-love-is-in-a-nursing-home-2020-03-18.

  McDonnell, Tim. “What We’ve Learned from Past Pandemics.” Quartz, March 17, 2020. https://qz.com/1820233/what-past-pandemics-can-teach-us-about-responding-to-coronavirus.

  Merolla, Sabrina. “All China’s Fast Food Dreams.” PRIVATE Photo Review, January 14, 2015. https://www.privatephotoreview.com/2015/01/all-chinas-fast-food-dreams.

  Moscow Times. “ ‘Those Meant to Die Will Die,’ Russia’s Coronavirus Info Chief Says.” May 20, 2020. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/05/20/those-meant-to-die-will-die-russias-coronavirus-info-chief-says-a70322.

  Onishi, Norimitsu, and Constant Méheut. “France Weighs Its Love of Liberty in Fight Against Coronavirus.” New York Times, April 17, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/world/europe/coronavirus-france-digital-tracking.html.

  Palma, Stefania. “How Singapore Waged War on Coronavirus.” Financial Times, March 22, 2020. https://www.ft.com/content/ca4e0db0-6aaa-11ea-800d-da70cff6e4d3.

  Patterson, Kevin. “Anatomy of a Pandemic.” The Walrus, March 11, 2020. https://thewalrus.ca/anatomy-of-an-epidemic.

  Qin, Amy, and Vivian Wang. “Wuhan, Center of Coronavirus Outbreak, Is Being Cut Off by Chinese Authorities.” New York Times, January 22, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/world/asia/china-coronavirus-travel.html.

  Salcedo, Andrea, Sanam Yar, and Gina Cherelus. “Coronavirus Travel Restrictions, Across the Globe.” New York Times, May 8, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/article/coronavirus-travel-restrictions.html.

  Schaart, Eline. “Du
tch Health Minister Collapses During Coronavirus Debate.” Politico, March 18, 2020. https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-health-minister-collapses-during-coronavirus-debate.

  Schuetze, Christopher F. “Zoo May Feed Animals to Animals as Funds Dry Up in Pandemic.” New York Times, April 15, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/world/europe/germany-zoo-coronavirus.html.

  Secon, Holly, Aylin Woodward, and Dave Mosher. “A Comprehensive Timeline of the New Coronavirus Pandemic, from China’s First Case to the Present.” Business Insider, May 22, 2020. https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-pandemic-timeline-history-major-events-2020-3.

  Vaswani, Karishma. “Coronavirus: The Detectives Racing to Contain the Virus in Singapore.” British Broadcasting Corporation, March 19, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-51866102.

  Zhong, Raymond, and Paul Mozur. “To Tame Coronavirus, Mao- Style Social Control Blankets China.” New York Times, February 15, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/15/business/china-coronavirus-lockdown.html.

  PART TWO: ANATOMY OF A CRISIS

  Al- Arshani, Sarah. “US Coronavirus Models Increase Anticipated Death Toll to 74,000, the Second Increase in a Week as States Begin to Lift Stay- at- Home Orders.” Business Insider, April 27, 2020. https://www.businessinsider.com/new-us-coronavirus-death-toll-models-estimate-deaths-august-2020-4.