by Ethan Lou
Soon, of course, it wasn’t just China, as the virus spread. In nine days in March, U.S. president Donald Trump went from disregarding the crisis to saying he had “always treated” it “very seriously.” In the same nine days, the Western world descended into panic-buying, economic meltdown, closed borders, lockdowns, and social isolation. Much of the European Union and North America would declare states of emergency in the coming weeks, with most people kept indoors. Italy, with remarkably high infection rates and death tolls, would implement among the most extreme measures. It was just like how, in fourteen hours in January, while I was in the air between Toronto and Beijing, an entire city had been sealed off.
Even though many governments would be accused of acting too late, when they eventually did, it was swift and with little warning. “Decisions that in normal times could take years of deliberation are passed in a matter of hours,” wrote the Israeli historian and author Yuval Noah Harari. “Immature and even dangerous technologies are pressed into service, because the risks of doing nothing are bigger.” One Chinese national in Singapore would have his permanent residency stripped after authorities said he disregarded a quarantine order, an unusual punishment meted out within three days of the alleged incident. Singapore would pursue aggressive contact-tracing, roping in the police and military to meticulously comb the movements of known carriers of the virus and any people with whom they came into contact. Non-co-operation would be made illegal. As a city-state without a big country’s myriad levels of government, it could act quickly. In addition to making masks compulsory, Singapore banned all social meetings between people from different households and developed an app that recorded everyone with whom you came into contact. South Korea would follow comparable measures, underscoring a new gravity.
With lives on the line, notions of personal privacy and civil liberty eroded by the heartbeat in countries around the world, regardless of how entrenched, hard-won, or born out of some painful past those notions are. Turbulence in the twentieth century left Europe leery of authoritarian power —especially France, whose principles rose from earlier revolution. In the beginning, France’s interior minister, Christophe Castaner, dismissed digital tracking as incompatible with “French culture,” citing “individual liberties,” the New York Times wrote. But no more than three weeks and a tenfold surge in deaths later — an official count of eighteen thousand —President Emmanuel Macron said his government was contemplating a smartphone tracking app based on Singapore’s. In the beginning, many criticized China for what they viewed as its draconian telecommunications tracking and movement restrictions. “It’s not a good thing,” James Hodge, director of the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at Arizona State University, told the CBC, calling China’s mass quarantines “a fundamental human-rights violation.” Hodge was speaking just one day after the Wuhan quarantine. “That’s what’s patently unconstitutional.” It would not have been possible in the United States or Canada, he said. But a month later, elsewhere in the West, they did exactly that. Beginning with eleven municipalities in northern Italy, police cars blocked roads in and out of the regions and erected barriers. Two weeks after that, Italy — where the term “quarantine” was coined to describe isolation measures during the fourteenth-century Black Death — became the first country to have a nationwide lockdown. Much of the world would follow suit. And people in many countries, for the most part, were surprisingly okay with it.
When I left China, at the Beijing airport, travellers had to complete health declaration cards to leave the country, answering questions such as whether you’d been to Wuhan, where your address was in China, and whether you had been showing any symptoms. A QR-matrix code was plastered at the boarding gate for people to scan with their WeChat Chinese messaging app to aid in contact-tracing. Those measures seemed insignificant at first, barely registering to the mind. But they represented the beginning of something. The idea of the personal liberties Minister Castaner cited, a linchpin of the Western world, would lose ground to collectivism and individual sacrifice for the greater group.
There would also be a shift of a different kind, one harder to describe, yet one felt on a primal level. There would be events that, while not necessarily consequential to society in any big way, were just downright startling. The Netherlands’ health minister, strained by his work, would collapse in parliament. A state finance minister from Germany would see the virus situation as hopelessly bleak and kill himself. A German zoo, starved of funding due to the virus, announced it might have to start feeding some of its animals to other animals. The last to die would be a prized, twelve-foot-tall polar bear, the pale beast Vitus. In the United States, eventual meat plant closures forced one farmer to shoot his pigs and send them to the compost. In Israel, wild dogs started prowling the parks from which humans had shied away. It’s hard not to see these things as symbols of some sort. I’m sure those looking for it will find a metaphor there — amid the plague, our shepherds break; among baser creation, neighbour might eat neighbour, and the cloven-hooved carcasses pile and rot; and jackals descend upon the Levant.
Later, while reading about the pandemic, out of the corner of my eye, I would chance upon a quote from Russia, about mortality and destiny. We’ve come to the point that we’re quoting those gloomy Eastern writers from the nineteenth century, I thought. Was that Lermontov? Or Gogol? Has to be Chekhov, right? No. It was the modern Russian information official. “Those meant to die will die,” he said on television. “Everyone dies.”
In a few short weeks, everything would change. A seriousness would descend quickly upon the world. It was as if you were hanging around with pals, beer in hand, telling some off-colour joke, and then Henry Kissinger walked into the room.
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On my flight to Singapore, travellers were given their food in boxes instead of trays. Everything they touched was to be thrown away and not used again, just like in the Air China lounge. Even as I left the land, there was a reminder of its virulent sickness that dogged me. I kept my Honeywell H910V mask on for the whole flight.
At the same time, I tried not to think about it. I looked forward to being in Singapore, which was decidedly not Beijing. At the time, outside China, the world had under three hundred cases and just one death. Despite being smack dab in the middle of Asia, Singapore, population 5.6 million, had some thirty infected and no dead. There wasn’t much of a virus consciousness in society there. Life was as it would be during any other time. I looked forward to the friends I would see, the fun I would have, the normalcy that I would finally enjoy after two weeks of lockdown.
In leaving Beijing, my dementia-ridden grandfather was also very much on my mind. I wondered what he would make of everything going on around him. He has seen a lot in his lifetime. In China’s post-Mao economic reform, he saw his city’s metropolitan area quadruple in population to 4 million. Shijiazhuang gained both a subway and an airport in the last decades. My grandparents’ previous five-storey, elevator-less apartment building, whose plumbing could not handle toilet paper, was built a year after Mao died. It had been torn down and replaced with a towering condominium whose lift automatically punches in your floor when you swipe your key fob. It was already an unrecognizable world for my grandfather, and in just a few days, it would change again in no less great a magnitude.
I wondered if I would ever see him again, and if I did, how much of my yeye would remain. As disorienting as everything was for me, it must be so much worse for him — the confusion, the fear, the loneliness — assuming he could process such emotions. I thought back to when I got kicked out of the residence, when I sat on a stool on that green spongy floor and held my grandfather’s hand. I don’t know how much he understood at that moment, but that day, as I was letting go, he held on with all the strength he could muster.
5
Singapore’s main airport has duty-free stores for arriving passengers after they clear immigration. If
you did not buy tax-free booze before your flight, you have another chance when landing. I know about fifty other countries whose airports also have this, including China, but I’ve somehow never noticed it outside of Singapore. To me, arrival duty-free has always been uniquely Singaporean, speaking to two interrelated perceptions of the country: 1) it is run like a company, ruthlessly efficient and prioritizing profit, and 2) it taxes alcohol ridiculously. If you skip Singapore’s arrival duty-free, there will literally be a price to pay. According to one survey, a typical beer at a bar costs $13.47 in Singapore, nearly 50 per cent more than in Beijing — and that survey was done in 2013. However, when I landed at the airport, it was not beer I had in mind as I made directly for the dizzying array of fine single-malt whiskies, which I make a habit of only buying duty-free because of the price and value.
Browsing the shelves, I took off the face mask I wore on the plane. The store was full of passengers arriving from everywhere, from Europe and Africa and Kyrgyzstan, and only a handful of people, notably from the China flights, were wearing masks. Far from the epicentre, I reverted to my pre-China mentality and kept mine off. That turned out to be a bad decision. When I greeted my parents after checking out of the duty-free store, they took a picture with me and posted it to the family WeChat group. My aunt quickly berated me for my bald-faced audacity.
Still reeling from the shame, I walked with my parents to the airport’s multi-storey carpark and was instantly slammed by a wall of jarring heat. Singapore’s airport is heavily air-conditioned, making the difference between inside and outside all the more apparent. This is a country so close to the equator that there are no seasons and the timings of both sunrise and sunset are nearly constant throughout the year. Every time I go to Singapore — and I’ve been a lot — I am jolted by the swelter, particularly this time. I boarded my flight amid snow and hail and emerged in a furnace.
* * *
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Settled at my parents’ place, one of the first things I did in Singapore was go for dinner with my friend Kevin, his girlfriend C.J., and some of their quite-well-off friends, who all worked in aviation or finance or aviation finance. Or something like that. I didn’t really know any of them, but I’m always up for meeting new people, and anyway, I had been virtually starved of company back in China. One of Kevin’s friends, Drew, lived right downtown and had organized pre-drinks at his place. In Singapore, a pad in a location like his can easily cost $2 million. It’s likely that Drew did not own it, and his company had simply rented it for him, but still.
I went for drinks with Kevin first, one-on-one, at a craft beer pub with haphazardly strewn furniture, Christmas-esque lights, and a barmaid who seemed too old for her braces. It was in an area called Telok Ayer, which was full of colonial shophouses from back when Singapore was still under British rule. Friday to Sunday nights, some streets are closed to cars, and all the drunken revelry literally pours out onto the road. The area is an interesting mix of beige, short little houses butting right up to the harsh grey and stony towers of banks, law and investment firms, and fancy condominiums like Drew’s.
But the contrast is only superficial. The same people work in one area and drink in the other. Beneath all the buildings’ facades, beaten daily by the same unforgiving sun, flowed the same money. One of those shophouses, three storeys at most and with little floor space, could easily sell for $10 million.
After each spending $30 on two beers, Kevin and I met C.J. outside her downtown office before going to Drew’s apartment, where we would move on from beer to harder liquor and spicy peanuts. I hadn’t seen C.J. in person since my internship days eight years ago. Bespectacled and thin — just like Kevin, actually — she looked exactly the same as when I saw her last. The one difference was she wore a face mask.
C.J. was taking the virus a lot more seriously than anyone else in our party of seven that day, and, in retrospect, for good reason.
On the surface, Singapore’s tens of cases back then really didn’t seem like anything to worry about. But at that point, that was the highest figure outside China, if the Diamond Princess cruise ship, anchored off the Port of Yokohama with what was then sixty-one cases, was not included in the count for Japan. Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, told his country that many of its cases did not appear to have been brought in from the outside. “We’ve seen some cases which cannot be traced to the source of infection,” he said in televised remarks. The virus was likely already spreading locally within Singapore, instances of transmission between those who had never even been to China. “These worried us,” Lee said.
It was barely two weeks after the epicentre of Wuhan had been sealed off. It didn’t take a lot or long for the virus to journey some three thousand kilometres south to Singapore, crossing borders and the South China Sea. But then again, such things never do. Even just two weeks earlier, when I’d landed in Beijing, two days before the Year of the Rat began, COVID-19 had fanned out with a ferocity that nobody at the time knew. As later investigations would suggest, far across the Pacific Ocean, within California’s Bay Area community, the virus was already spreading.
* * *
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COVID-19 is not the first of its kind. In make-up, it is much like SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), of the early 2000s, or MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome), of 2012. They all belong to the family of coronaviruses, named with the Latin word for crown because their shape under a microscope looks like one. They spread through the air in droplets produced when an infected person coughed or sneezed, or through contaminated surfaces. The first so-called super-spreader of SARS, a fishmonger in southern China, infected thirty nurses and doctors when he went to the hospital. Within a month after that, SARS had spread as far as Canada, when a woman brought it to Toronto from Hong Kong. She infected her son, who then brought the virus to the local hospital, resulting in an unprecedented World Health Organization warning for the city. I remember those days in Singapore, when schools were suspended and suspected carriers quarantined.
While similar, though, COVID-19 is also different. Neither SARS’s nor MERS’s death toll even pierced the four digits. Among them, COVID-19 is the lone disease classified as a pandemic, an epidemic that has spread across a large region — multiple continents or worldwide, for example — affecting a large population, and whose numbers have not been stabilized. This new coronavirus was worse than what had come before. One of the reasons for this, ironically, is that COVID-19 is less deadly and debilitating.
The symptoms, such as breathing difficulties, are more severe for SARS, so the infected are rushed to the hospital and treated. Or they die. About 10 per cent of SARS patients die, whereas only some 3 per cent of COVID-19 carriers do. And dead and hospitalized people generally do not go out into the community to spread the disease, wittingly or not. With COVID-19, on the other hand, most do not require hospitalization, and sometimes the symptoms do not even present. You go about daily life, passing it to others, who pass it to even more others, possibly never knowing that you ever had it. “That’s why ‘nightmare’ viruses — like those with 90 per cent mortality — thankfully aren’t always very successful,” Dr. Zania Stamataki, a lecturer in viral immunology, wrote in the Guardian. “To survive and thrive, a virus must operate like a spy in enemy territory, skilled at passing its genetic material.” While it took eighty days for the United States to get to 500,000 cases, it took just eighteen days to double that to a million. Because of how mild it is, COVID-19 spreads more quickly and widely, so much so that even though the percentage of infected people it kills is small, the sheer numbers are staggering, and along with them, the panic and fear they cause.
Among the most dreadful projections was one by Imperial College London, which predicted a worst-case scenario of 510,000 deaths in the United Kingdom and 2.2 million in the United States. That model assumed no physical-distancing measures, however, so it is highly unlikely the numbers will escalate to
that level. Other estimates for U.S. deaths have ranged between 71,000 and 1.7 million. But the thing with such wildly varying forecasts — and not to mention the rapidly changing situation — is most will turn out inaccurate. The main projection model put out by the United States government initially put deaths at reaching 60,000 only in August 2020. It passed that figure in April. The truth is, we can’t really know the scale of it. Even official counts are often too low. In the United Kingdom, the Financial Times estimated actual deaths to be more than double the figure given by the authorities, what with some people dying in their homes or without being tested. In Indonesia, according to a Reuters analysis, it could be nearly triple. Some hospitals ran out of body bags. And even though people do die all the time, and a couple of million may not seem to some to be significant for a planet of billions, the COVID-19-era dead are not people who would have died anyway. The New York Times calculated its city’s mortality rates during one month of the crisis. It found the figure to be more than twice the usual number of deaths during the same period in previous years, far outstripping even the month of the 9/11 extremist attack — and still, that might not be the full tally. “Even this is only a partial count; we expect this number to rise as more deaths are counted,” the Times wrote.
There are the indirect impacts. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s projections suggest 2.4 million to 21 million of the infected could require hospitalization — internal figures leaked to media — but the country has under 1 million staffed hospital beds. People with non-COVID-19 ailments face a stretched healthcare system. They might even avoid hospitals or the doctor’s office because of the fear of being infected. A cardiologist told the Times he was particularly concerned about patients with heart conditions — “that the overall toll is much greater.” It is in fact impossible to tell how great the total deaths will be. German chancellor Angela Merkel notably said up to 70 per cent of her citizens would end up getting infected by COVID-19. The Czech Republic’s prime minister accused her of causing panic. But Merkel’s was a view backed by experts, and it opened the floodgates for other politicians to speak the same unpleasant truth.
