Field Notes from a Pandemic

by Ethan Lou

  Robert A. Jensen, the chairman of Kenyon International, a firm that helps communities respond to crises, told the Times the virus would leave a lasting mark. “The reminders will be cemeteries,” he said, describing European burial plots for the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which actually had little to do with Spain but killed 50 million people according to some estimates. Today’s graveyards, similarly, will have entire sections devoted to deaths during the pandemic, Jensen said. This comparison of COVID-19 to the Spanish flu pandemic was most poignant. While it is hard to find parallels for the coronavirus outbreak, with respect to the impact on the world, older pandemics come close, sometimes eerily so.

  There is something about COVID-19 that evokes history. The media is flush with such comparisons, particularly to an event even older than the Spanish flu: the bubonic plague, which has existed since the Bronze Age. The iteration that marked the fourteenth century, dubbed the Black Death, has been the most famous, wiping out upward of 200 million people and half of Europe. That was the beginning of the second plague pandemic. It took two hundred years for population levels to get back to where they were when the Black Death started, by which time another major outbreak loomed, as the pestilence repeatedly returned to haunt Europe and the Mediterranean. The great minds that feature heavily in Western education, taught and retaught in schools, such as Isaac Newton and William Shakespeare, were themselves shaped by the plague, producing some of their best work under the resulting disruption. In Europe and the Middle East, the plague has “occupied a central place in the collective memories of those populations for the last six centuries,” as the historian Suzanne Austin Alchon writes in A Pest in the Land. The Black Death has been the stuff of literature, entire museum sections, and popular culture, and even seared into the minds of schoolchildren.

  Comparing something like COVID-19 to plagues of the past is a natural and even useful thing to do, at least on some levels, but we should be careful in taking it too far, at least for the time being. For one thing, based on the present numbers, COVID-19 hasn’t killed nearly as many people. Biologically, it is fundamentally different from the bubonic plague. The current pandemic exists in a far more developed world. For example, during the Black Death, neither indoor plumbing nor the concept of washing hands had been invented. Medicine was only in its infancy at the time. But the similarities are sometimes uncanny, as observers of all sorts noted: European ports quarantined passengers from incoming ships. On land, during the second plague pandemic, cities formed “sanitary cordons” that restricted movement. Within their walls, health authorities hauled off plague victims for isolation. People were prevented from selling clothes. Public gatherings were banned. In France, an official would go to every house and lock the doors like a jail warden. Describing the Italian city-state Naples during the plague, the scholar Frank Snowden writes in Epidemics and Society, “Every activity of normal life ceased amidst shuttered shops, unemployment and hunger.” Rumours spread of malicious actors purposely spreading the plague, and across Europe, people blamed perceived outsiders such as the Jewish community. In the present crisis, now that Europe had had the world’s biggest COVID-19 outbreaks, all the current misinformation and fresh hostility toward Asians evokes vividly that shameful episode of continental history.

  And such evocations can go back even further, to the first bubonic pandemic, the Plague of Justinian in the sixth century. The economy and public spaces were decimated, and confinement and isolation ran rampant in society. Now, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Jordina Sales Carbonell, a researcher at the University of Barcelona, wrote that, 1,500 years ago, “certain similarities and parallels observed in human behavior with regard to a virus and its consequences seem so familiar and contemporary.”

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  Back in Singapore, after pre-drinks at Drew’s apartment, our party of seven had dinner at a Japanese restaurant by the river. It was close to downtown, but far enough that we had to divide ourselves into two hired cars, a most harrowing journey for Kevin, Drew, and two others. Whoever booked the car had typed the wrong address into the app, and that group unwittingly ended up at the restaurant’s corporate headquarters. It was about half an hour before they made it back to the correct place. Sacrifice is sometimes needed for the greater food.

  Drew had specifically picked out the restaurant, which specialized in a sort of Japanese savoury pancake called okonomiyaki. The restaurant had a rather cozy, at-home atmosphere — dimly lit, with shelves of manga comic books lining the walls. The restaurant was so notable, it had been featured on television in Japan. It was almost always fully booked, and that day, even as threats of contagion loomed, it was no exception. Of course, the virus was still never far from the conversation that night.

  Everyone at our dinner was some sort of exile from Hong Kong or mainland China, waiting out the worst in what was thought to be a safer place. While the tropical city-state technically had more virus cases, Hong Kong is right next to the mainland and had not restricted travel from there on a similar level. The territory was thus deemed as bad as mainland China, an extension of it — due not so much to the virus itself but to the social and societal disruption caused by it. I was in a different situation from the others, but there was a fundamental similarity: I was supposed to be in Hong Kong, but I was not. It didn’t feel like it at the time, but looking back, ahead of what is possibly the biggest crisis of our generation, we were already fleeing the infected areas.

  Eventually, the world would see a greater version of what could be called the flight of the rich play out in New York, which later became a major outbreak centre. Analyzing smartphone location data, the New York Times would find that populations in the city’s wealthiest neighbourhoods decreased by nearly half during the pandemic. Altogether, nearly half a million people would flee New York. The hardest hit in the city would be the poor, exactly as they were during the plague seven centuries ago.

  The comparison of COVID-19 to historical pandemics isn’t so much in the specific traits of the pathogens or how we are equipped to handle them — or even the death toll. “The most disturbing similarity…lies not in the diseases themselves but in their social consequences,” wrote a doctoral candidate at Durham University. It’s the widespread disruption caused, the realization that the world we have come to know has become foreign. In recent memory, in addition to SARS and MERS, we’ve weathered AIDS; the H1N1 virus, with different strains called swine or bird flu; and Ebola. But the scale of the disruption to daily life brought by COVID-19 dwarfs them all. As the Barcelonan researcher Sales Carbonell wrote about the Plague of Justinian, “despite the tragedy we are all personally experiencing, it remains a source of wonderment how history repeats.”

  If that is so, though, if we can see our current situation so clearly in our past, then we can see our future, too, in how those historical events resolved. The natural inference is that all the changes to our existence now are only the beginning. After all, the bubonic plague did not just change the face of society at the time of its outbreaks. It also shaped its future.

  6

  The long-prevailing system in medieval Europe, after the fall of the Roman Empire, was that the king owned all land, which he partitioned to aristocrats, who in turn had serfs who did the farming and paid a portion of the proceeds to the crown. The serfs were quasi-slaves who, themselves, typically earned nothing. Europe was also severely overpopulated at the time, Ancient History Encyclopedia writes, a condition that upheld the status quo; there was no shortage of serfs, who had little bargaining power because they were so easily replaceable. Such was life, plowing the land from the time they could until they collapsed, a life lived with a bowed head. Then their children did the same. But when the Black Death gutted the population, labour became a valuable commodity. The smallfolk started dressing and eating better. They started forgetting their place. Three major uprisings of the lower classes broke out between 1358 and 1381, and it wasn’t long be
fore serfdom became rare in Western Europe. The better lives that most eventually enjoyed — the greater longevity and the upheaval of the long-standing socio-economic order — were a direct consequence of the plague. Cardinal Francis Aidan Gasquet, a twentieth-century British historical scholar, writes that the plague had created, for the first time, a middle class.

  There was also an upheaval of the mind. In the Black Death’s aftermath, “doctors,” who had thought the plague spread by bad air or “miasma,” and who had come up with no cure, came under scrutiny. So did the clergy, which had previously so dominated society, for all the charms and amulets, religious gatherings, prayer, and fasting did nothing to ward off the plague, Ancient History Encyclopedia writes. Whatever god or gods people prayed to were dwarfed by the one whose name was Death, who gave no preferential treatment to friars, monks, nuns, or priests. Yet, such a close brush with mortality, such trauma, also led to extreme outpourings of religious piety from some survivors. Suffice to say, the result of the Black Death was a great increase in critical thinking and introspection in society. There are some who even say that it was this shift that heralded the Renaissance that began in Italy, a period of rapid development in art, architecture, politics, science, and literature in Europe. This is often challenged, of course. Such historical causes can only be attributed hundreds of years later, and there is often little definitive way to prove theories right or wrong. Nothing ever has just one factor. But what is undisputed is the timing. The Black Death marked a turning point.

  Such is the power of a great plague, typhoid supposedly smoothed the conquering path of certain conquistadors. Measles or smallpox is said to have contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire. The bubonic plague was speculated to have done the same to its successor, the Byzantine Empire. Infectious diseases throughout history, scholars, media, and historians say, have crushed revolutions, sparked socio-economic reform, tipped the scales of wars, and reshaped how entire countries viewed religion. Beyond their death tolls, every plague has left a lasting legacy. We live in a world defined by past pandemics. From a longer-term perspective, the repaving of the path of Europe is actually the least of the effects of the second plague pandemic that started with the Black Death.

  One of the reasons COVID-19 is so evocative of that ancient pestilence is, perhaps, that many of the containment measures we’ve seen during the present crisis were developed back then. Quarantine came from the term quaranta giorni, Italian for forty days, the period visitors to Venetian ports needed to be isolated. Across Europe, the segregation of the infected; the locking of people in their homes in plague-ridden towns; the monitoring of people’s health and their registration in a central database; even the regulation of butcher meat — all these were done back then, in a widespread and systematic manner, largely for the first time. The authority given to enforce these measures was the first form of an institutionalized public healthcare, the scholar Frank Snowden writes. And that had much wider implications.

  Beyond taxation, medieval governments had had little direct role in their citizens’ lives. But with the plague, what began as temporary health agencies eventually became permanent, heralding “a vast extension of state power into spheres of human life that had never been subject to political authority,” Frank Snowden writes in Epidemics and Society. When states started assuming responsibility for the safeguarding of health, they also started to have a greater role in the upholding of borders, in record-keeping, and in the organization, segmentation, and monitoring of their people. According to the philosopher Michel Foucault, the plague-induced rules and restrictions on daily life evolved into systematic power structures, and the close eye kept on people under lockdown gave birth to the concept of government surveillance. With the pestilence, there was a radical expansion in the role governments had in the lives of their people, which endures to this day as the modern state, Snowden told an interviewer: To do more, those in power needed more taxation, more hospitals, more laws, and more people to enforce them. Greater government often begets even greater government.

  7

  “You just came back from Beijing?” C.J. asked me rather pointedly as we sat at the Japanese restaurant, waiting for Kevin, Drew, and the others to finally arrive after going to the wrong spot. There was an unmistakable worry in her eyes and voice.

  I had never hidden that fact. I had been in constant contact with Kevin, and he knew full well where I’d been, so I’d assumed C.J. knew. And I had posted liberally on social media. In the car over to the restaurant, I had mentioned the trip rather casually. Now I was regretting it.

  “Shouldn’t you be isolating yourself?” she asked. “Nobody said anything to you at the airport?”

  Nobody did, in fact. And truth be told, while I did read the news at the time, I hadn’t paid attention to any specific travel restrictions or containment measures. All I knew was that, for me, travel went on largely as normal. Still, C.J. was clearly uncomfortable, and that made me uncomfortable.

  “Do you want me to leave?” I asked.

  When the rest arrived, we switched topics. The matter wasn’t brought up again, even as, sometimes, we still talked about the virus itself. That night, C.J.’s concerns were never far from my mind.

  Turns out, it wasn’t just my mind this thought weighed on but pretty much the whole population of Singapore. As the number of cases there grew, instant noodles, rice, and toilet paper started flying off the shelves as residents stockpiled in a frenzy. More and more, the masks went on.

  One day, I was at a supermarket with my mother. All I wanted was a pack of potato chips. There had been a craze in recent years for hipsterish, hyperlocal flavours based on national dishes such as chicken rice, whose fragrant grains are made in a special blend of poultry broth and garlic; laksa, seafood noodles in a spicy, creamy base made with coconut milk; and nasi lemak, rice made with coconut milk as well, and served with fried chicken and sweet chilli. Another trend in snacks had been fried fish skin coated with salted egg yolk, which tastes like a better version of potato chips. My mouth had been watering just thinking of those. But when we saw the queues that formed long into the empty aisles, my mother and I decided to just go home.

  The stockpiling we had witnessed had something to do with beliefs in the breakdown of supply chains due to increasing travel restrictions, which could theoretically cause food and necessities to become unavailable. It also had something to do with the belief that a potential lockdown would just unilaterally keep everyone indoors, forbidding any venturing outside. News of supply shortages in Hong Kong did not help. Besides being a huge inconvenience, nothing says end-of-days panic like fevered stockpiling.

  In a leaked audio clip, it became clear this wasn’t lost on Singapore’s trade and industry minister, Chan Chun Sing, who looked like he cut his own hair, even before the eventual COVID-19 lockdowns. He called the stockpilers “idiots” and “disgraceful” in an unusually slang-filled tirade, even for him. In formal settings, Singapore is a land of English, but in day-to-day life, that English is often watered down with loan-phrases from the local Chinese, Malay, and Indian communities. It’s a bit like Jamaican patois. Chan’s past colloquialisms have been trademark. This time, caught in an unvarnished private moment, Chan was an unprecedented blend of buddy-buddy politician and beng, local slang for a ne’er-do-well young man of low education, like a British chav or yob.

  The audio clip of Chan was unique for how funny and lowbrow it was. He had always been informal, but never like this. The man had graduated from the University of Cambridge! Chan’s tirade stood in stark contrast to the measured, roundabout answers he normally gave when I was a reporter there. This recent twenty-five-minute soliloquy was complete with diarrhea and masturbation jokes and included endearing terms such as sia suay (“disgraceful”), buay tahan (“cannot endure”), and wah lau eh (a catch-all exclamation whose origin is debatable, but which some say is related to male anatomy). What wasn’t funny about his tirade wa
s what it symbolized — the image of a breakdown in authority in a place where authority just doesn’t break down. How quickly, I thought, it can all go to pieces.

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  Despite Minister Chan’s profanity-laden stand-up routine and the shell-shocked shoppers I saw, grabbing instant noodles like Incan gold, the eventual lockdowns hadn’t yet descended. The life that I had in Singapore in February would become nearly unfathomable in a month’s time; I had some sort of social engagement almost every day I was there. I was at pubs. I was at restaurants. I was on public transit all the time. I went axe-throwing. I went to a professional wrestling match for the first time. My friends and I tried out an escape room, failing miserably. I went rock climbing three times a week. I even went to Malaysia, twice — a time-honoured national pastime for people in Singapore, no more than an hour away from the peninsula from any part of the island.

  Such travel is a popular Singaporean activity mostly for financial reasons, and its origin goes back decades. Sometime after the Second World War, with the British Empire fading, the former colonies Malaysia and Singapore became one country. Then, Singapore became, to my knowledge, the lone nation in the history of the entire world to gain independence involuntarily. Malaysia kicked it out. Singapore’s leader at the time, the country’s first prime minister, was Lee Kuan Yew, father of Lee Hsien Loong, who later became the third prime minister. Back then, Lee the elder had cried on television at the separation, and it was all a very big deal. But it turned out to be a blessing, as Lee, by many metrics, managed Singapore well. What was once a one-to-one exchange between the Singapore dollar and Malaysian ringgit became almost one-to-three. At one point, so many Singaporeans were crossing the border for lower-priced petrol, the country forced every car going into Malaysia to have at least three-quarters of a full tank. Everything in Malaysia was significantly cheaper. One of its slogans had been, “Malaysia Boleh!” which had been interpreted by Singaporeans as “anything goes in Malaysia.” There, among certain young men, various places of ill-repute are, in fact, especially reputable. Nicotine vaporizers, illegal in one country, are plentiful in the other. Fine dining can be had for the price of takeout. Whatever your taste, many different sorts of entertainment can be found for a reasonable price just an hour away.