Living in the times of Corona – 3rd week
This article is connected to my previous one, where I wrote about the first 5 days in Quarantine.
Current situation
3 weeks have passed since the city where I live (Berlin) started to apply measures against this virus. The measures are basically, all the shops are closed (except supermarkets and pharmacies) and, luckily we're not in lockdown yet, so we're allowed to go outside but groups of more than 2 people are forbidden.
Comparing us to other countries: Italy, Spain, France, etc. the rules we have here are not that strict. Nevertheless, I don't think this going to last for long ...
Some numbers
At the moment of writing this, the official number of infected people in Germany is 54k.
Only one week ago, the number was 20k, and by checking the graph, I realize that every day the number of infected people increases by around 5k.
Germany already declared the official lockdown in the zone of Bavaria. So if the numbers continue to grow like this, I can see Germany applying the same lockdown in the north too.
General feeling
Since the start of this pandemic, I followed the latest news closely. I was reading articles daily about the topic, listening to several podcasts and I even watched some documentaries about pandemics.
It's like one enters in this state of endless information circulating thought your head:
- Live updates of the numbers of infections per country.
- The measure to control the growth of the virus in X country.
- Different vaccines or cures for the virus.
- Too many Opinionated conferences by the president of X country.
And the list can go and go ...
I think that being informed about what's going is a good thing. But at the same time, it's quite unhealthy for ourselves. We're the whole time worried about something that sadly we can't fix.
What is the world doing?
The measures that mostly all the countries have taken was to suggest/demand/force/[use the verb you want] people to stay at home and do quarantine until the situation improves.
The main goal of this is to win time.
Something that is a true fact is this virus will be all around the world. At one point, everybody will have it. Therefore, if we can slow down the progress of the virus, we can save thousands of lives!
This strategy is widely known as Flattening the Curve. In the following image, you can see the relation between the amount of daily infected people and the time passed, and a second line highlighting the capacity of the health care system.
Given that there is no official cure or vaccine for the virus, this is the only thing we can do at the moment to fight the pandemic. But this solution created other huge problems.
DISCLAIMER: On this occasion, I don't want to talk about economics, politics or idealogy of what's ethically correct to do or not to do. Those are big topics and I don't have the time and knowledge to cover them well.
Quarantine + Uncertainty
I would like to touch the relation between this situation where we need to “stop living” (Quarantine) and wait for an unknown date (Uncertainty).
We, as humans, are continuously searching to have control over our situation. We like to know, what's going to happen and when. There might be some people that are more relaxed than others, but overall we like to have control over our life. Well, at least I like to have ...
The fact we don't know when this is going to end, it's what I'm most afraid of. When am I going to be able to live my “normal” life?
To be honest, I don't have a crazy lifestyle at all. But things like having dinner at home with my friends, or clubbing it's something that I definitely miss ...
The other day while talking with one friend. We were talking about how the Quarantine going for each other and, she said this phrase:
I'm worried that life won't be the same as before.
Well, I think she over exaggerated a little bit. I do think that life will be back to normality in one moment. But I would re-phrase it into:
I'm worried when life will the same as before.
And in the meantime, what can we do?
It's time to create new opportunities!
This is the moment when we need to switch our behavior from reactive to proactive, by pushing ourselves to try new things and we didn't do before of time constraints or maybe we didn't even know about.
For example, a lot of friends came to me saying they want to start programming. Others asked me about recipes, or how to do meal preps. And of course, I was very happy to help them!
In my case, I'm pushing hard to improve my German. Every morning, at least I do 1 hour of German before I even turn on my computer or check my phone notifications. And in addition, I have twice a week remote classes with my teacher (yes, I finally found a good teacher!).
To close
On a lower or bigger scale, we are all being affected by this virus. I hope you, your family and anyone in your inner circle are doing well. In case you want to talk, you can always reach me using the private messages of the social platforms or you can send me an email.
Thank you for reading.
Ema.