Thoughts from Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain 7:4.20

 Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.   

- Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain*

 The C Word

• Below is my Overview, written this morning for a US friend. Open to challenge, of course.
• Spain and Italy: The numbers - though still high - are at least trending in the right direction.

Life in the Time of Something Like Cholera

• María's Chronicle, Day 23
• In line with the latest thinking, Spain will make the wearing of masks compulsory, as and when there are enough to go round.
• On this, I was astonished to see this situation, as regards masks, in a Mercadona supermarket  last night:-

- Staff: 100%
- Customers: 5-10%.

Perhaps they have no choice, if there's a shortage. Or perhaps they're not aware of the new WHO guidelines. Or perhaps they just don't give a toss.

• Here's someone's schematic of our future into early next year, when we might get close to normality:-

The USA   

• This is an article lifted from The Local. It's fair to say not all of my American friends in Spain share it. Or not all of it at least. The author is ceramic artist and Living Room Concerts music series founder and director Nichole Hastings. She is an Asian-American originally from Seoul, South Korea. She was adopted by white Americans when she was two years old and had a traditional conservative upbringing in the village of Grantham, New Hampshire. She lived in Norwich Vermont for five years before settling in Madrid 5 years ago. She's sharing her thoughts about this in the hope that it will make others realise they are not alone with their concerns, and to encourage them to open up and talk to others about their experience:-

Three weeks ago it all became a bit too much and I spent the best part of two days in tears. I put it down to isolation, fear of an unseen threat and being disconnected from my friends and family back home.

I didn't share my feelings or discuss my mini-breakdown with anyone until last weekend when I spoke to another American friend who expressed his own frustrations and it was so timely. It was a relief to find someone felt the same way. Then I talked to a few other friends and discovered they too had been having the same experiences.

So here's a breakdown of what we realised:

1. Our American friends and family back home will demonize us for speaking the truth. They became angry and then simply began to ignore us and our warnings. Instead of welcoming the information and our experience they pushed back; Facts became opinions.

2. We realized that our American friends' and family's refusal to believe us is based on ignorance and a culturally ingrained arrogance which has them believe they are better, more knowledgeable, more capable, more intelligent, et cetera, than everyone else in the world. Including and especially us because we left to go live in a foreign place.

3. We realized how little international news is actually shown in America, and that we are basically providing the majority of it to them. Friends knew little to nothing about the situation in other countries because there was very little in the news other than what Trump is saying. And his lies and misinformation were confusing them; they didn't know who or what to believe.

4. We know that our friends' and family's chances of dying (and some likely will) are much greater because they refuse to self-isolate, do proper social distancing (or even do any social distancing at all) and or aren't taking the virus seriously and or think it's a hoax.

5. Our foreign friends and loved ones around us, whose countries are taking the proper measures, won't understand our pain because their friends, families, governments are taking the virus seriously. We express these frustrations to them and they talk about how terrible our president is. (Yes, we already know.)

6. We realized we're safer and have more reliable access to healthcare in our foreign country than back at home.

7. We feel helpless, frustrated, and upset that our friends' and family won't listen. We worry for their health, safety, their lives.

8. We know we can only control what we do, not what others do .... But that doesn't make friends' and family's words and actions dismissing us and all our warnings any easier to digest.

9. We wonder if continuing to try and inform our friends and family will eventually help them realize how serious this all is. Or will it simply be an exercise in futility until they or someone they know ends up in a hospital on a respirator, or worse.

English

• Percussive maintenance: The use of physical concussion, such as a knock or a tap, in an attempt to make a malfunctioning device or person work. 

Spanish

• Phrase of the day:- Mantenimiento de percusión: Percussive maintenance, says Google but I'm not convinced. Reverso has Mantenimiento por percusión. I prefer Mantenimiento de/por martillo but need advice on this.

Finally . . .

•  One of the funniest funnies doing the rounds:-

COVID-19: MY OVERVIEW

Some possibly indisputable facts:-

1. Covid-19 is not just the common cold or the same as the flu. It has characteristics which are very different and consequences which can be much more serious. Plus there is no vaccine for it nor any effective drug.
2. The key issue is that C-19 - though not fatal or even serious for most people who get it - hits certain people very hard - essentially the 'sick' and/or elderly - and can cause death among a significant proportion of these.
3. Unlike the flu - which causes its X thousand deaths over the entire year  - concentrate d in the 5 months of winter - the C-19 virus causes deaths in a shorter time span and it has a mortality rate which seems to be much higher than flu. Though what this actually is won't be known until all the accurate data is in.
4. This leads to the most important fact: Whatever the healthcare system in place - be it in the USA, the UK, Germany or Holland - the R rate of C-19 and its consequences are such that the system is at risk of being quickly overwhelmed. This has serious political consequences, especially in countries - such as the UK - where 11 years of austerity have reduced the capacity of the system and left it without any cushion of surplus resources to deal with a crisis bigger than the perennial winter flu 'crisis'.
5. The 2 basic reactive strategies are:- 1. Go for herd immunity, or 2. Containment through one degree of lockdown or another. Here in Spain we've had total - police enforced - lockdown for 3 weeks and face at least another 3 weeks of it.
6. The UK started with strategy 1 but rapidly switched to 2, when it became clear the NHS would certainly be overwhelmed, and there'd be pictures on the TV of patients lying on the floor, etc. etc. Political dynamite.
7. Sweden had adopted and is maintaining strategy 1, on the basis that, firstly, the achievement of herd immunity (60% infection level) prevents second and third outbreaks like those of the 1918-21 Spanish flue pandemic which took 50m souls and, secondly and most importantly, that their (centralised 'socialist/communist') healthcare system can cope even in the worst-case scenario. But there are local scientists who disagree with this. So, the jury is out, and the country is being closely watched.
8. This pandemic is not a surprise. All epidemiologists forecast its arrival. (See the celebrated Bill Gates video of 2014).
9. All governments were aware of this and had contingency plans, especially after the Ebola, SARS and MERs episodes . The respective strategies were/are of differing application and efficacy in respect of the C-19 outbreak. And, anyway, it seems that few of them were implemented in timely fashion.
10. The outbreak started in China. All nearby countries reacted much more quickly and effectively than Western countries.
11. All Western countries reacted slowly and inefficiently. Some moved more quickly than others to the containment strategy, with Italy being the earliest and the USA very possibly being the latest.
12. All Asian countries have fared better than Western countries, Japan surprisingly so and Vietnam (no deaths) astonishingly so. Economic damage from the (panic-driven) extensive lockdowns will, therefore, be less in these countries, though they'll obviously be affected by a severe global downturn.
12. Italy and Spain (very badly hit for as yet unknown reasons) have begun to 'flatten the curve'. There might well be an easing of the restrictions in May. See the schematic attached/below. The UK is maybe 2 weeks behind Italy and 1 week behind Spain. Given the extent and speed of infections, this is very material. The USA is also behind Italy but I don't know by how many weeks. And this probably differs from state to state. The lockdown there seems to be less restrictive (and less effective?) than in other countries. In some states, churches are exempt from the rules on numbers gathering. Which can only make sense if you believe your god is protecting you. And everyone - atheist or otherwise - you come into contact with.

So, draw your own lessons from this. My main one is that the lockdowns and their humungous economic consequences could have been avoided in the West, as they have been in the East. As to which Western country will come off worst, this remains to be seen. As is true of the consequences of the actions/inactions of the US administration and the respective state/city governments.

Sadly, the truth seems to be that, once the early errors were made and the pandemic allowed to happen, there was no way of avoiding the extreme measures which have lead to massive economic consequences. And, very possibly, a much-changed world.

In this blog post, of today Richard North makes the point that it's not right/fair to blame Johnson - or any other current leader, I guess - for the mistakes made in strategic/contingency planning over the last few decades.
http://eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=87570

But this is not to say no current leader has avoided mistakes in the last 3 months . . . .

Time will tell.