Field Notes from a Pandemic

by Ethan Lou

  This time, it’s worse — and not just because our world is more connected. It will also be because it just feels worse, and it feels worse because we do not expect to be so shaken. COVID-19 will likely never kill the millions upon millions that died during the Spanish flu pandemic or at the height of the Black Death. But back then, as the historian Margaret MacMillan noted, people died all the time, women in labour, children in childhood, men at war, and more. Even a stomach infection could be fatal. And life was bitter and socio-economic mobility low. Now, the average life expectancy is just a handful of years under eighty. Even when we die before then, a leading preventable cause is eating too much. The first person to live to 150 has likely already been born. The death toll that would previously have been considered low is now just too much. In our bones and in our blood, our collective state of being is just too tender, for as we built civilization, that civilization, too, has shaped us. We have become built by, and built for, cities and their conveniences, not the frontier and its hardships. From free trade to open borders to instantaneous communications, all that humanity has accomplished has made it vulnerable. Victory has defeated this world.

  11

  Following my short stay at Elias’s apartment in Bayreuth, I went to spend the weekend with family friends not far from where I grew up. Uncle Niu and Aunt Yeung are not actually blood relations of mine, but our families have a bond tempered in the deepest depths, over the hottest coal of the harshest forge: Niu had met my father when he tried to copy off him in university. Or at least that’s how my father tells it. I’ve never heard it from Niu himself. From that allegedly ignoble beginning, the two eventually ended up best friends. Niu and Yeung still live within half an hour of Wuppertal, in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where we had all lived years ago. Niu works at a local university and Yeung runs a chemical company. Niu’s daughter, Jeng, a doctor, lives in Hamburg, about a three-hour drive northeast. I was last in Germany in 2018 for her wedding, after which her husband had taken her surname on special request from Niu, whose reasoning was that while his son-in-law has a brother, he has only the one daughter. Niu wanted his surname to live on and be passed to his grandchildren. Jeng’s husband — being a modern German with little notion of age-old patriarchal naming conventions — readily agreed. “He doesn’t know what he’s giving up,” Niu joked.

  Because of how the virus situation had escalated, Niu had decided to come pick me up, making a five-hour drive south to do so. His reasoning was that he did not want me interacting with strangers and risking infection before arriving at his house. Fair enough, I thought, and it saved me a ten-hour bus ride. It was after sundown when Niu arrived. We had a dinner of large schnitzels at the local pub before handing Risako back the keys to Elias’s apartment and heading off. I offered to drive, but Niu declined politely. Being European, Niu had a BMW with manual transmission, and I hadn’t driven stick-shift in nearly a decade. I don’t even own a car, being the downtown city-dweller I am. And most parts of Germany’s Bundesautobahn have no speed limits, a part of the country’s cultural identity viewed with awe by outside motoring enthusiasts and with terror by other foreigners. I did not insist on driving.

  I had been to Niu and Yeung’s red-brick house only when it was being built, in 2006. Conceptually, it was like many North American suburban cookie-cutter homes, mass-produced, newly built, and pretty-looking, yet with no discernible style. But it was a German house, with no front yard and a big backyard, because privacy is more important than image there, and it was a particularly dense structure. You hear no hollowness when knocking on any part of that house. It’s good for longevity but not so much for Wi-Fi reception.

  I gave Niu and Yeung a bottle of Glenfiddich single-malt whiskey that I’d bought at the Singapore airport duty-free store and some fried fish skin coated with salted egg yolk. I had a great time with them, a welcome respite from the upheaval of COVID-19 and a walk down memory lane in a place that was so close to where I grew up.

  Niu had kept a bottle of champagne nearly a quarter-century old, unopened, from the day my father obtained his engineering doctorate. I distinctively remember the party for that event, when my dad was much thinner and had more hair, and was just a little older than I am now. He wore a joke top hat that was a gadget in itself with lots of moving parts, like a wind-up toy — one of those traditions certain professions have for advanced degrees that I am unable to explain any further. A doctorate was a particularly big deal in Germany, which is especially strict on enforcing its law on who can use the honorific “Dr.” The bottle of champagne still bore my father’s signature and the date. “We’ll open it when you get married,” Niu told me.

  Niu’s house is about ten minutes away from Blankenstein Castle, commissioned by Adolf I, Count of the Mark, in the thirteenth century, its main feature being a squarish tower. That town of Hattingen, population 55,000, also has among Germany’s best-preserved centuries-old fachwerkhäuser — white, timber-framed houses — many of which are uniquely top-heavy, getting wider the higher you go because property taxes were once calculated based on the first storey’s square footage. When Yeung and I walked through the downtown, she told me many of those houses have unfortunately become unpopular, at least to their owners. They cannot be demolished due to their heritage status, and the upkeep is prohibitively expensive. In Hattingen’s town square, amid the cobblestones, you can still see the medieval pillory for publicly humiliating criminals.

  We took leisurely long strolls through the town, which was pleasant and also necessary since the only other thing we really did all weekend was eat. Niu is a big foodie. “I think I will be very happy working as a chef,” he said. Yeung is also a great cook, and between them they made slight variations to the dishes I knew, which was always a pleasant surprise. Their zhajiangmian noodle dish had come with an egg, yolk still runny, which added to both the consistency and taste. There was a sprinkle of sesame on the baozi, which brought a delicate sweetness to the steamed bun with minced-pork-paste filling. Another one of Niu and Yeung’s treats was a beef noodle soup, made with a dark broth that included tomato, soy sauce, and the tender parts of the cow that melt in the mouth. I hadn’t had it in years, and there was no variation for that one. It tasted almost exactly like what my mother would make. The food, their company, the environment — it was a tonic, something I needed and greatly appreciated.

  * * *

  —

  The next stage of my trip was to meet up with some friends from university, who were coming from Canada. We had discussed such plans for years without actually making them, at least until about half a year earlier when we got serious. Aside from Germany, we intended to go to Ireland and Spain. We had been messaging throughout the crisis, hanging on to our hope that we could still pull it off.

  “Real talk tho boys - berlin has about 90 cases or so and with us out and aboot [sic] there’s a chance we might catch it,” Dillon, with whom I had shared both a university program and student housing, wrote in our group chat, four days before we were due to meet. “How is everybody feeling about it? Feeling lucky like the irish?”

  “I dgaf,” I wrote, a neutral if vulgar way of saying I had no opinion either way. Our friendship had always been marked by irreverence and dark humour.

  Clinton, who had lived in the same student housing as us, said, “If anything, less people in the streets means your [sic] less likely to catch it…im going, no way im going back to work.” His leave, from a software company, had been applied for and granted. Mentally, Clinton was on holiday. “Ive [sic] already checked out.”

  “I’m still down to go,” Dillon said.

  Cameron, Clinton’s friend, whom I’d met only once, was down too. Sometimes, things happen for a reason, so you meet them with reason. Sometimes, things happen without reason, so you simply meet them. We had only one dropout: Nick, my former roommate, a software-company project manager, always more level-headed than me.

&nbs
p; Two days later, though, while I was with Niu and Yeung, Spain declared a state of emergency, so that country was out. And what seemed like icing on the cake: everyone’s company stipulated mandatory work-from-home policies for people who were returning from overseas. Berlin clubs closed. The headline of an Irish Times article, posted to the group by Dillon, read, “Ireland is ‘exactly 14 days behind Italy’ in terms of coronavirus cases.” We were still undeterred and decided to pare down the trip to just Ireland. Then Dillon posted another article to the group, in which Canada’s foreign affairs minister, François-Philippe Champagne, said, “We recommend that Canadian travellers return to Canada via commercial means while they remain available.” Flights were being cancelled, and travel restrictions were going up with little notice. You might be stranded overseas, the government warned. Suddenly, events had escalated way beyond what my friends had a tolerance for:

  “Well. Shite,” Dillon said. “Sorry guys I think that about does it for me. At this stage doesn’t seem worth [sic] anymore.”

  Cameron: “Yeah. I don’t feel confident in this.”

  Dillon: “I think we need to postpone this.”

  Cameron: “Hard to tell if I should cancel or rebook.”

  Dillon: “I’m waiting until tomorrow to make a decision.”

  Cameron: “Fun times guys. Makes you feel alive.”

  Clinton: “Never felt like an adult until today.”

  And so, my university friends cancelled the trip to Europe, leaving me with a two-week hole in my schedule. I did not try to sway them, never weighing in on their decision-making in the group chat, even though, truth be told, I still wanted them to come. It was not my place to steer them, and I understood their concerns. I knew Minister Champagne, although faintly, having been in some media events with the trilingual lawyer, and once even having a nice conversation with him at the urinal, of all places, and he did not strike me as a man who would give the warning without good reason. Dillon wrote: “We worried that the situation would change more. I’m just wondering if Ireland could turn into an Italy situation. Ireland is okay for now but I’m almost certain that won’t be the case in 2 weeks.”

  It wasn’t so much the situation at the time that felt so risky or how truly unprecedented it was, at least in my lifetime. It was how quickly it had become so, which applies whether you look at the small picture or the big — like the economy, every local COVID-19 situation was somehow also a microcosm for the whole. Just a few days ago, everything was all right. The world-famous clubs in Berlin were still open. Then they were not. Spain and Ireland looked totally doable. Then they were not. If everything can change to this extent so rapidly, I thought, sitting in this small town in western Germany with dear old friends, then surely events will escalate at least as rapidly in the days ahead. As the level-headed and, in retrospect, very farsighted Nick said, “These things move quick and exponentially.”

  12

  When an unprecedented crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic meets a world so uniquely sensitive to it, there is only one outcome: society will emerge transformed. We are already seeing social and economic upheavals that have what can only be called a lingering effect. Working from home, demand for delivery, and use of Internet-based entertainment are set to increase. Office-rental, conferences, shopping malls, air travel, tourism, and labour-intensive foods are poised for decline. But the signs are already there for something greater.

  Public officials everywhere warn of growing contagion and further restrictions on movement. An Internet publication misquotes the billionaire Bill Gates as saying he envisions chip implants in people showing infection status, and the dubious news spread like a prairie fire, for it’s not really that farfetched. Chile had already announced so-called “immunity passports” for people potentially less susceptible to the virus, who will be “freed from all types of quarantine or restriction.” Hong Kong slapped trackers on the wrists of those under home quarantine. The device was big and hard to hide, granting it the secondary function of marking people bluntly, like a brightly coloured badge, an anti–immunity passport. If you went out, everyone would know you weren’t supposed to. There is nothing more fundamental than the relationship between citizen and state, between people and those who hold power over them, and COVID-19 is set to redefine that balance.

  Like most things, at least part of this has to do with money.

  * * *

  —

  In response to the 2008 financial crisis, to put it simply, the dominant solution was for governments to bail out the banks and big corporations. The idea was that when the giants remain afloat, the economy carries on — the money they get trickles down. Yet that did not happen. Not all the money was reinvested in the corporations, passed on to their workers, or pumped back into the economy. American banks were asked to expand lending, but they did not. Their executives did, however, give themselves bonuses of nearly $20 billion. Enforcement of the conditions imposed on bailout money was weak. Within a year, U.S. corporate profits were rising again. And since then, the United States has reduced taxes by about $1.5 trillion, the benefits of which nearly all went to the richest. Whatever little funding was available for helping individuals during the meltdown, such as government programs for mortgage relief, was obscured by disarray, complexity, and deficiency. Societal resentment at the lopsidedness of who benefits built as a result. The top-down approach that assumed giving money to banks and corporations would solve everything was evidently not working. Even until 2015, the median U.S. household income did not climb back to pre-crisis levels. The rise of U.S. president Donald Trump, and to a certain extent, Senator Bernie Sanders, can be directly attributed to this; large swaths of disaffected Middle America resented their various levels of government and voted with that anger.

  Perhaps that taught the United States and other countries in the Western world a lesson. In response to the pandemic, there were still the old bailouts, accused of the same faults as before. But governments also decided to try something else: giving ordinary people money, so that they would spend and thus stimulate the economy, bottom-up instead of top-down, doing for the masses what had in the past been done for Wall Street. Across the world, even among those who would consider such a thought anathema not that long ago, the idea of a universal basic income — granting an unconditional periodic payment to everyone — is actually starting to take hold.

  It’s an old idea. Proponents have said it would be a net benefit: the economy gains when people eschew immediate payoff for future higher-value jobs, instead of worrying about sustenance; reducing problems arising from poverty, such as crime and ill health, means less drain on public resources; and the economy is sustained and society kept at peace when rising automation reduces jobs. But for a long time, universal income had been a fringe concept, among its most prominent champions the one-time U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang; it was popular but had little establishment backing. Then three Democratic senators, two of whom ran against Yang, endorsed a version of that idea. So did Republican U.S. senator Tom Cotton. And Pope Francis, who had been “caged in the library” in Rome. Even the United Kingdom’s Conservative prime minister, Boris Johnson, indicated he might consider it.

  In countries including Singapore, the United States, and Canada, governments have rolled out widespread income support, with money doled out with few to no restrictions as a direct reaction to COVID-19. With these payments came something else. The Spanish government, an unprecedented alliance of left-wing parties, said it would not only grant basic income but also make it a measure that “stays forever…a permanent instrument.” A Canadian parliamentarian from the ruling Liberal Party said of his government’s pandemic income support, “Hopefully, this is a policy measure that we’re able to build on into the future.” And he may just get his wish. A taste of basic income isn’t quickly forgotten, particularly if people realize that if they had it in the beginning, the pandemic recessio
n would not have been that bad. In countries with those programs, there may just be endurance for some form of universal basic income post-pandemic. It might prove politically difficult otherwise.

  That concept of a basic income is just one wave in a bigger tide. It represents a fundamental shift in our view of the role of the government in people’s lives — which is markedly increasing. Recall the parallels in past pandemics. The philosopher Michel Foucault said seventeenth-century public health efforts expanded political power drastically, with constant supervision and penalties for noncompliance for communities under lockdown. The plague and its chaos were “met by order.” In Epidemics and the Modern World, Mitchell Hammond writes that the plague had led to co-operation among city-states such as Florence and Genoa, overriding competitive urges—who knows, maybe today’s united Italy had some roots in that pandemic. Cholera and typhoid in the nineteenth century sparked a sanitary movement that resulted in marked increases in urban planning in Western cities, building sewers, enforcing construction codes and maximum occupancies, and paving boulevards and parks, historians have said. Frank Snowden, author of Epidemics and Society, has said that even the nineteenth-century sanitary movement helped shape the present-day state. With pandemics, the world becomes a laboratory for greater government, the results of which last even as the experiments pass.

  Every time there is a crisis, the governmental arm grows a little. Income taxes were introduced in the First World War in Canada, and Finance Minister Thomas White made a statement that, as the CBC noted, aged badly: “A year or two after the war is over, the measure should be reviewed.” In the Second World War, Canada introduced a “baby bonus” payment to parents, a form of which endures to this day. It is, of course, debatable how much change is sparked by any single event, and how much is just the broad sweep of history. There are those who say that, in addition to redrawing the map and defining the international order under which we live, the Second World War also gave birth to the modern European welfare state, as the warfare state of the time had given everyone a taste of big government. For Canada, that conflict birthed its national healthcare system, which never went away. At the time, the Canadian Public Health Journal wrote: “Gains must be consolidated. The last war left its lessons. There can be no reduction in public expenditures.” Policies introduced during crises, when legislative paths are smoother, are always harder to remove than implement.