Coronavirus II: Surf's Up

It's been about six months since I last updated. During the slightly optimistic update, I gave details about how the Czech Republic and IBM were handling coronavirus protocols, how the virus impacted the economy and border controls, and the constant changing and loosening of the restrictions. As I type this I had to pause because lol holy shit it's been six months. That being said, 

Ah, the second wave. If only the pandemics of the past had warned us of the increased dangers of relaxing restrictions that are ultimately keeping people safe and, I'll say it, alive. Since I've last written, the Czech Republic started implementing slight changes every couple of days, it seemed. The mask mandate was the first and probably most popular to be axed. Restaurants and pubs reopened as the days lengthened and the weather warmed. The borders, while still being monitored, turned out not to really be monitored at all. By late June, pretty much all freedom of movement had returned. There was even a "goodbye, Coronavirus!" communal dinner on the famed Charles Bridge to bid salutations to the stagnation we had all been experiencing for the previous three months. Our days of jerking off and watching Tiger King were over, and the pandemic was gone.

Due to the pandemic, Prague's tourism was disastrously uprooted by its old cobblestones. If you've ever visited Prague, especially in the summer, you're no stranger to the crowded hot mess it becomes. It's tough to navigate or have any sense of spatial breathing room. The hospitality industry took a huge hit, but not huge enough for Czech Airlines to introduce a tri-weekly flight to Ulaanbaatar in the height of summer. If opportunities like a semi regular flight to Mongolia was the baseline indicator of trying to get the economy to normalize, the Czech Republic had officially reached its benchmark of how desperate the country was to recover from the first wave of the pandemic. If you look at the clusterfuck in the photo above, Czechs are drinking and playing music and taking photographs and creating a congregation to revel in the close social contact they had been missing out on for months. I don't blame them, but again, if we had fucking learned anything from the very basic health science which is constantly being reported, we would have known this wouldn't be officially over. There was no ghosting the coronavirus. But if I suddenly had multiple options to fly to Central Asia in the next week, the pandemic must be over!

While a lot of people here were in a hurry to travel and soak up the remaining days of summer, I spent most of my time indoors. I actually don't even have tan lines this year, and I have now typed the word "immunocompromised" so many times in the last few months that my autocomplete now has a lil soft spot for it. Being Type 1 meant I had to practice social distancing and isolation regardless of the amazing send off from the Charles Bridge. My immune system is different and easily compromised. I was still wearing a mask on public transit and indoors even though it was no longer required. Sometimes I had some pride about it. I'm being the good example in a sea of bad examples! More than a few people back in the US have messaged me to find out how the Czech Republic has been handling the coronavirus. And it didn't matter how good our numbers were at the time; I always responded with "poorly." I'd like to not die, and I didn't need government regulations in place to tell me to stay safe, but apparently most people did. It was almost as if feigning normalcy and ignoring the presence of any virus was universally welcomed. Some people still experience an incredible amount of disdain when a mask policy is enforced upon them. 

Staying away from whatever transmission sources was made easier by IBM since they continued to keep us on home office. During the summer, there was talk of returning to the office based on the severity of our jobs and the amount of client-facing we would actually do per department. We were rumored to go back sometime in September, maybe October. It sounded reasonable. It wasn't so much the returning to the office I had an issue with. It was taking the one bus that went by my office during peak commuting hours. Have you ever people watched on a bus? Or just people watched? People are fucking gross, dude. If I could hide back in my corner cube with the desk open next to me, I was in a prime position to have minimal contact with any employees. I was okay with that starting in September or October. I'm sure I'd have to start sending Gossamer to therapy with my return to the 9-5, but he'd be okay. Just like people being made to wear a mask, he'd be okay. 

But then, school started. Entire throngs of families returned from their vacations while having contact with hospitality workers, airline employees, gas pumps, forks in restaurants that were only given a rinse over and not a full wash, a door handle at a post office, a toy unknowingly being shared, wedding guests who couldn't be bothered to not wear a mask or use hand sanitizer, a credit card reader at the pharmacy, the seat previously sat in by someone on public transit, and a whole slew of things people touch without so much giving it a second thought. I monitored the numbers for a few days in early September and started to isolate as much as I could while Czech health officials were hyper sensitive about the economy collapsing for a second time. I turned down a few comedy shows. I started limiting my trips out of the apartment to once or twice a week. I pretty much stopped taking public transit all together.

At one point in late March, the only country in Europe without a coronavirus death was the Czech Republic. We were also one of the only countries to completely close its borders with the exception of overland freight. Italy went into lockdown and after seeing their sudden decline, many other countries followed, and not just their neighbors. But the Czech Republic was praised in international news articles for our rapid response to the growing concerns during the first wave. We were clearly doing something right, and the little second world country was getting some big talk among the big dogs. At roughly 400 new cases per day in early April, our numbers were looking pretty good compared to those who were floundering under a collapsed health system.

But in September and October, our cases and deaths skyrocketed. Our peak resulted at 15,000 cases in one day. It was announced within IBM that we would be working from home until further notice since clearly there could be no estimated timeline to rely upon. At one point, 40% of the tests performed were coming back positive. Almost half. We've gone through three Ministers of Health in two months, and precautions aren't staying in place long enough to fully monitor the effects on the population. The restrictions also aren't as strict as they were despite the exponential increase in deaths, as seen below: 

As of now, we're supposedly in a plateau, probably because of the restrictions put in place. Weird how that works. For most of the pandemic, Europe has been using a traffic light system to indicate the severity of the virus in each country but also the precautions which need to be taken to successfully travel safely. But yesterday, the Czech Republic introduced this fuckery errrr system called "PES" or DOG to keep "better" track of the situation:

Someone thought an ample amount of visuals was required to illustrate the growing threat of coronavirus. Since numbers are no good and potentially a thing of the past, the country is using colors and the mood of a cartoon dog to convey the severity of the pandemic. You may notice the dog is a Doberman, and typically only Nazis and junkyard security guards rely on Dobermans, so it surprised many people when it appeared, and not just appeared, but appeared happy on a Czech Republic coronavirus infograph. Obviously purple (or seething anger) is the worst case scenario, but right now the whole country is red (heightened anger with minimal teeth). Because of this Doberman terror fiasco system, we'll probably have a new Minister of Health by the end of next week. Nine months into the pandemic and somehow the concept of numbers and the dark horse known as science are still being ignored. 

While I gripe about the situation here, idiots en masse in the United States are forcing their own political issues on people who actually want to be safe. Covid safety is not a political issue, yet many are making it that way as you may have in the second Borat movie, Glorious Nation of Oh God It's Something Like That But I Can't Remember Exactly So This Might As Well Be It. Lakewood, Washington and Olympia, Washington made appearances and it only seemed to bolster the underlying, but pretty obvious message of the mockumentary. There is a serious problem in the United States when it comes to doing the right thing for the safety of others. 

I realize nowhere in the US Constitution does it state "Conscionable physical distance must be given in times of war, pestilence, etc." But I didn't wait for the Czech government to introduce a safety plan to keep myself and others healthy. Citizens of both CZ and the US are highly skeptical of what the government is telling them, the US because Trump is a fucking idiot and the Czechs because their numerous regime changes throughout the 20th century led to some serious mistrust throughout multiple generations. 

Why is the idea of science combined with creating actions reflecting our consistently changing knowledge so hard to come by? How many sources or pieces of evidence are needed to convince someone in your Facebook comments that they're actually wrong? Over the last nine months I've separated the unscientifically hard-nosed into two groups, those who are consciously refusing to accept the outcome of a scientific study (or an election) and those who simply do not get it. They will not get it. Their biases impede them from taking all of the evidence and really digesting it into a new concept they hadn't previously thought about, and I don't have the energy for that anymore. I can't muster the energy to dissect someone's shitty grammar and their thoughts about masks being ineffective. I'm tired, so I'm going to do what is in my power to help myself and others: stay home. 

My days are very monotonous but I'm churning out more creative substance as I sit here. I'm drawing a lot, like a lot a lot. I've read more books this year than I have in recent years. I took another stab at poetry. The hardest time I'm having right now during this second wave is the lack of human contact. I live by myself and on the days I do leave the house for the grocery store or the pharmacy or drug store, I'm usually getting yelled at because my Czech can't be understood underneath my mask. Yesterday while I was buying toilet paper and shampoo at the drug store counter, a woman sidled up next to me hard as she was trying to put her basket down in the area where my items were as I was paying for them. I stood my ground and asked her out loud in English "What are you doing? What are you doing," and rolled my eyes. Even if there wasn't an ongoing pandemic, this situation would be uncomfortable, so here's my specific question: what does the death toll need to be in the Czech Republic or the United States before measures are actually enforced or taken seriously? 

We've been at this nine months now and it's getting infinitely worse, so your shitty dive bar comedy show dick jokes can wait. Don't have Thanksgiving or Christmas this year. Shop during non-peak hours. Minimize touching public surfaces. Isolate if you even feel remotely sick. And wash your motherfucking hands. 

Coronavirus I: Outbreak or Break Out

A few days ago, I was trying to think of the first time I heard the term "coronavirus."

After putting a bunch of thumbtacks in my wall and connecting them with different colors of yarn over a period of days and nights, I concluded it must have been some time in early January. I spent the first ten days of 2020 staying in a hotel thanks to the displeasures of Czech plumbing and all the tests of time it continues to fail. After some water from my bathroom had leaked into the apartment below mine, a Czech repairman opened a small hatch in my bathroom wall and shined a flashlight off of an actual broken shard of mirror into the brick abyss behind my toilet. From this scrutinizing investigation, he realized the toilet and entire back wall of my bathroom needed to be "completely demolished" as he showed me via Google Translate. I asked him in broken Czech "how many days?" and in drunken Czech he told me "three days," which usually means I need to multiply the original amount of given time by at least 2.5 and then I'd know the more accurate answer that was never planned on being revealed to me in the first place.

I called my property rental agency after being given the flippant guesstimate. They asked if I could stay somewhere on short notice, but I hadn't exactly told them I had Gossamer here, who would also need to be relocated during the construction. I was told I could get a hotel for the duration of the repairs so I packed up what I needed for about six days and not the finalized time of eight days that I ended up staying for.

I brought everything over to the hotel except Gossamer. The mid-range chain hotel in Brno is about 1.5 miles away and closer to the amenities I usually need, so the location was good. But the actual level of accommodation predated me in many aspects of the design and functionality of this room. Having been the victim of bedbugs, multiple flea infestations, and lice all as a college student (thanks, Evergreen) I was careful to even put my belongings down on any surface before I could check the room thoroughly. I put my stuff in the tub and cased the seams of the mattress, shook out the towels, and looked for anything bigger than asbestos dust on all the surfaces. It seemed safe as far as cleanliness went, but it definitely had pre-democratic features I just assumed were common in most Czech hotel rooms. There was a bathtub but no shower curtain. A glass ashtray was still screwed into the wall next to the toilet. The curtains were undoubtedly flammable. The phone was heavy enough to be used as a weapon. I giggled about my discoveries and made sure to plug up all of the awkward nooks and crannies Gossamer could definitely get into but possibly not get out of. After the room was baby-proofed, I returned to my apartment to grab him.

The downside of living hotel room life on the cheap was not having anything to cook with. I had a mini-fridge but that was it. The plus side of the situation was I now had a TV to watch dubbed Law & Order: SVU, The Simpsons, and international news stations in English. You might remember at the start of the year 2020 came in hot with multiple escalated conflicts with Iran, the Ukrainian Airlines flight that "crashed" as a result of "engine failure" in Tehran, and something called "coronavirus" had killed 130 people in China. I spent most of my time watching Sky News, the BBC, and Al-Jazeera since I've never had continuous access to them.

It turns out hotel life isn't that great, especially when you're sick. I undoubtedly get sick in January no matter what. Most women's bodies are in tune with their biological clock or something but mine is slowly weakening its own immune system more so than it already has to give me a massive sinus infection maybe twice a year, one almost always being in January. Type 1 diabetes plus an already depleted immune system from mono/Epstein Barr make me a great candidate for the act of showering just so I can blow my nose into my hands. Sometimes it's worth it. Actually it's always worth it.

Little by little the news of this virus infected most of my social media. People began to share theories without thinking, everything from the new 5G cell towers causing the virus in the Western world to Americans developing the disease in a lab and unleashing it in China. It turns out the initial explanation of bat snacking was even under scrutiny because that alone sounds like a conspiracy theory to most of the world, places where the virus wasn't even present yet. But as soon as the internet got ahold of it, it became a rapidly spreading clusterfuck. In February 2020, the media did a deep dive into what caused the virus, who is at risk, what the level of threat was outside of China, and hypothesizing that it was jUsT tHe fLu. As it started to spread, many were convinced it wasn't that big of a deal and that the mainstream media had a hard on for reporting about it, much like they do with Trump, missing planes, and whatever Elon Musk's been up to. News of the virus continued to dominate multiple platforms even though the country I'm from and the country I live in now weren't within coughing distance of infection. This swiftly changed in early March as Italy got hit hard, some by means of an Austrian ski resort which also had vacation Czechs on the slopes. The virus descended upon Europe much like the Axis. For some time, Central and Eastern Europe remained impervious to the infectious purge. Myths began to grow that alcohol consumption actually warded off the disease, but it died on the table as soon as medical professionals caught wind of babushka's old remedies. Meanwhile, a hospice care facility outside of Seattle was the new Ground Zero in the United States for the emergence of the disease. The "jUsT tHe fLu" theory held fast because many of the first victims were in the late stages of their lives, some into their 90s. Then it began to impact the immunocompromised. Even today, roughly two months later, Americans are still battling it out on the steps of state capitols with or without masks, with or without swastikas.

The more the virus impacted communities, the more it began to change our concept of normalcy. IBM offices across the continent were starting to reevaluate how to maintain production while keeping everyone safe, which was honestly a surprise coming from a company with over 440,000 employees worldwide. But it made sense. The amount of travel being done had to be limited to stifle cross-office contamination. Most of the offices I communicate with are in the Czech Republic, France, and Poland, each of which had varying degrees of coronavirus precautions and, how should I put this, a wildly concerning lack of precautions, some old tradition, some religious.

But IBM didn't send us packing right away. When the first few cases emerged within the Czech Republic, my office was told we could work from home if we were uncomfortable coming into the office. Immediately we all started coughing and feigning some mild respiratory irritation. About half of us took advantage of the offer and the other half trekked to the office south of Brno to maintain the normalcy which would no longer be available to us.

Our State of Emergency officially went into effect on March 12 so home office was now mandatory. Since I was already working from home twice a week, another three should have been fine. Some of my colleagues were concerned because with the State of Emergency came a ton of travel regulations, flight cancellations, border restrictions, and immigration suspensions. International train and bus service was stopped. All immigration applications are still on hold until July 17, so if your application is pending, you can stay in CZ without violating any temporary mandates. Bars, restaurants, shops over a certain size closed up. All "non-essential" businesses ceased operations. Schools closed. The tram and bus doors started opening at each stop instead of requiring a passenger to push a button, therefore minimizing contact with the physical outside world. Face masks are mandatory until further notice. Foreigners cannot enter the country. The post office closes at 4pm. Certain shopping hours were set aside specifically for the elderly. If you went out and about, it had to be for essential means only. You couldn't be in a group of more than two people.

Throughout this entire experience, I realized how well the Czech Republic takes care of its citizens and the foreigners who live here. If you're self-employed and cannot work, you're entitled to a monthly stipend equalling about $700. Salaried staff unable to work will receive 80% of their pay. Health insurance will go unaffected as it's socialized by the state. Keeping track of the bureaucratic changes in two different countries began to eat away at me about 30 days in. There was always something changing, especially when each state in the US developed their own strategies of dealing with economic and medical hardship. My best friend lives in a state, let's call it Texas, and she works for the subsidiary of one of the top corporations in the world. Texas is now one of the states trying to reenter the economy while not abiding by medical protocols or precautions put in place. Her place of business requires her to come in contact with clothing which may or may not be infected from first responders, nurses, doctors, and fatigues. In the height of the pandemic, the corporation she works for applied for receiving part of the small business loan relief, even though they are by no means a small business. She's the only employee at her location wearing a mask and gloves while her coworkers don't (or refuse) to follow social distancing measures. At one point, her manager sent a group text to the employees and told them what to do in the event they get laid off or need to request the unemployment funds they were ineligible for. She's put herself at risk for weeks, and even though she's full time making a less than livable wage, her hours were cut so her place of business could fraudulently receive small business loan stimulus money so they could avoid paying their employees.

I'm fortunate to have a job where I can do it from anywhere, and when I mean anywhere, I mostly mean bed. Working from home started off at my desk with a cup of tea but it slowly turned into sleeping next to my laptop and rolling over in the morning while opening it all in one motion. Gossamer sleeps next to me while I work. Occasionally he wakes up to watch my mouse go between a bazillion different Excel sheets. In the beginning, my "quarantine life" didn't seem all that different. Depression and low energy has kept me indoors for some time and I have a habit of isolating peacefully. The idea of taking two trips anywhere has always been exhausting to me. The physical change wasn't so much different but the emotional change reared its head a few times. In the past, it was my choice to be indoors and not that of the government. Trust me, this post won't turn into somebody's pussy diatribe about how important it is to get back to work while simultaneously hijacking it into a 2nd amendment issue.

But the reason I'm indoors is for the greater good because it's not about me. It's a "not me, us" thing (sigh). I'm under the impression it's only going to work if we all do it. As soon as the Czech Republic saw how bad it was getting in Italy, and then Spain soon after, the Czech Republic shut shit down. As I write this, there are roughly 8,000 cases in the country, 4,000 of whom recovered. There have been 260 deaths, and for a while we were the one country with the highest amount of cases and zero deaths. Clearly we were doing something right.

As airline routes were axed and important concerts postponed until 2021, watching the United States try to get it together in response to a pandemic has been fucking atrocious. I'm not sure if it's because I'm lucky to live in a little country with roughly 10 million people, or if it's because Trump really is that bad of a fuck up, but it's been so, so awful to watch what some call "the greatest country in the world" so vehemently accept the concept of death instead of taking care of its citizens. I watched the first few White House press briefings, and it was basically a dog and pony show if the dog was trying to shoot the pony on live TV. Nothing was handled well, promises weren't kept, and millions of workers had their health jeopardized by the slow, confusing response of no response at all. San Francisco "shut down" the same week CZ did and their numbers are "better" than the rest of the metropolitan areas in the United States. New York quickly became the epicenter while cities like Houston, Atlanta, and Los Angeles are still struggling. The ensuing chaos in the US could have been stopped...but it wasn't. Right now, if I were somehow able to leave the Czech Republic and go to the United States and try to return to CZ, I wouldn't legally be able to get back in due to the fact that I was in the United States of America.

Most of my time now is spent trying to keep track of the quickly changing regulations, both in Brno and the country as a whole. Every inclusive decision and announcement should come with an asterisk because even the stipulations have stipulations:

The borders are open!*

But only for Czech citizens who can prove they must complete essential travel to countries who will allow them to enter.

No foreigners allowed!*

But you can cross the borders if you provide a negative coronavirus test and/or quarantine for 14 days as long as you're not coming from a high-risk country.

You can be in a group of no more than ten people!*

But everyone needs to wear a mask and it must be with immediate family. So far the border situation has been the most confusing, mostly because not only do we need to abide by our regulations but also those belonging to our neighbors. In my case, Germany, Poland, Slovakia, and Austria are in negotiations with us to see when the borders will fully open and not just for truckers, government officials, healthcare workers, or emergency organ transplant transport. Every day it's something different. But CZ is taking it seriously. A German guy in the Czech Republic tried to cross into Poland on foot and warning shots were fired from officials near by to deter him. I mean a German guy trying to get into Poland when it's generally frowned upon, that's a little hack. The regulations are relaxing here, but I'm wondering if it's too soon. I wanted to feel better about this pandemic so naturally I read a book about a worse pandemic, Pale Rider by Laura Spinney. I liked her background on the Spanish Flu because she already assumes you have some concept of the world and recent history but she also doesn't treat you like a fucking idiot. She covered a lot of how pandemics get named, how they used to spread between communities prior to technology and more advanced technology, and the social distancing people should have used but didn't and oh weird millions of people died crazy!

The one example Spinney used to illustrate the ineffectiveness of not social distancing was coincidentally from Spain, but it wouldn't be the cause for the pandemic's namesake. Bishops would travel from city to city to urge people to congregate and pray, exactly what not to do, and Spain's body count took a huge hit while people looked to religion as a physical and emotional cure. And we're still seeing some of it 100 years later. A poll in Poland (yikes) revealed only 50% of people were going to observe social distancing with the main culprit being religious gatherings. Behind Romania and Greece, Poland is one of the most religious countries in Europe but they somehow staved off larger numbers despite ignoring mandatory protocols. There's now more testing available in Central Europe, even though the tests cost about $140 in the Czech Republic. CZ also ran a series of antibody tests that were open to different demographics, and the number turned out to be very low. It's a little bit of a relief, a little more comforting, but the amount of relaxed behavior isn't promising. If I'm in a grocery store, I'll briskly walk by someone if I'm within six feet of them to avoid stagnating. But if I'm stationary and someone casually approaches me with absolutely zero spatial navigation awareness, that's when I'll make a questionable face from behind my mask and hope the offender catches on. I'm not sure how to say "hey back the fuck up" in Czech but I have a feeling it would directly translate to "hello the fuck up is back."

I'm probably going to continue doing my own social distancing for the time being regardless of what protocols are in place. Yeah it was a "not me, us" thing, but I'm nowhere near confident resuming life without a face mask or latex gloves. IBM estimates we'll be going back into the office sometime in July so that's another two months of Gossamer snoring next to me while I click and clack. It's also been required for employees to take mandatory vacation days to ensure there is at least some workforce left in Europe once all of our borders take a sigh of relief. I'm heading into a long weekend but it'll honestly be spent just like any other day in quarantine. So this is kind of...just how it is now.