X

Saturday 10 April 2020: Stayin Inside

Let’s take a moment while we’re all in lockdown and have literally no other choice to look into ‘The Eras (Errors) Of COVID-19.

The Pre-Panic Era: The One In Which They Stockpile All The Irrelevant Crap. This is your December 2019 – January 2020-type period, in which people first learned about the virus and its effects on the Chinese market – and then immediately started stockpiling resources as though society was inhabited by gophers, rather than people with brains the same size.

The Panic Era: Due to the consequences of the Pre-Panic Era, supplies of surgical grade gas masks and toilet paper began to dwindle, sending previously-reasonable people into now-mildly-justified panic. Despite the insistence on stockpiling masks and hand sanitiser, the virus continues to spread between countries – almost as though having proper Public Health policy is a better idea than just listening to the voices in your head as they scream. The virus spreads to more diverse locales, such as many European countries, helped in part by the Chinese New Year celebrations, and under-reporting of statistics in China.

The Post-Classic Panic Era: Due to the absence of hand sanitiser, toilet paper and masks from stores, customers began asking pointlessly for the exact things everyone in the rest of the developed world already had stockpiles of and were not using. At around about this point, the virus took hold in America, despite the insistence of one Dunce J Trump that the virus was a hoax. It would go on to kill (as at April 27) 46,000 people.

The Dark Ages: The virus is declared a pandemic as it takes hold in many countries and the worst-hit areas start either a) imposing their own lockdowns, or b) Having travel restricted by lockdowns and border restrictions in other areas. For example, America stopped travel to China and Europe, and wasn’t called racist when they did that. As it appeared the virus had become pandemic, so too did racism towards Asian people, although possibly people were simply waiting for an excuse for this. Interestingly, there was no such racism towards European people. So … the pot’s calling the kettle a virus. But only if that kettle’s a clay pot from China.

The Renaissance Panic Era: Panic resurged a few weeks later when it appeared that, despite everyone in the world’s best racism, the virus continued to spread. The lockdowns were helping … a bit … but not as much as expected, especially in countries like Italy and the United States, where the number of cases continued to rise exponentially. Countries like Japan and Sweden that had achieved early success against the virus suffered setbacks from importing cases from other countries due to incomplete border controls.

The Modern Panic Era: New Zealand became one of the only countries to completely flatten its curve with a one-month lockdown and total closing of its borders. Panic became more about keeping physical distance from everybody, rather than isolating or discriminating against specific groups. And it provided an excuse to stay home and in bed. Or working. Or working from your bed. Whichever you wanted, completely up to you.

The Post-Modern Panic Era: This whole crisis is still unfolding, so this is kind of an umbrella term for the future. A future in which the umbrella is folded up and will gently … unfold … over the coming weeks or whatever. Or just possibly explode outwards with a large amount of spring-loaded force and an enormous resurgence of cases that would ensure many more people would die. It’s too early to say just now, but it seems that the hope was never really to eliminate it completely. That just sort of happened. The hope was rather to ensure that the cases that did arise could be managed, and that there wasn’t exponential growth.