Quentin Quarantino
Jan 26, 2020
BACK HOME, I get a visit from two pompous pensioners wearing clunky military-issue gas masks and acting (I presume) on behalf of the local residents’ committee. I ask them to come in but they refuse. I move towards them and they step back, afraid of contagion.
They ask me when I returned from Wuhan. They tell me that there is an epidemic going on, don’t you know, as if I’m a feckless idiot who took a train to Ground Zero because I didn’t know any better. They seemed apprehensive. I now know what a leper feels like when the people near you bristle and recoil at the very hint of your presence.
I then get a call from the regional Xuhui district office responsible for controllling infectious diseases. A woman asks me for the details of my recent itinerary and then calmly and solicitously explains that she will send round a team of medical professionals to my home tomorrow to check whether or not I am showing any symptoms.
I ask her whether the “advice” to stay at home is mandatory and whether I am allowed to go out and get any shopping. She doesn’t say my quarantine is absolute and unbending, but she says I should “do my utmost” to stay indoors. Meanwhile, I receive a leaflet saying that a refusal to comply with the requirements of home quarantine could result in harsher measures.
At a Shanghai government press conference, a health official says the city is now inspecting 95 suspected cases, and I find myself wondering if I am included in that statistic. The central government, meanwhile, is telling the world that the virus appears to be getting more infectious.
Scientists are saying that each coronavirus victim appears to be infecting at least two other people, at current rates of transmission. This will no doubt trigger the same sort of panic that greeted similar warnings about SARS seventeen years ago, when some were even forecasting that the whole world would eventually be infected. At present, the number of infections seems to be about 2,000, with 56 deaths, which is tragic but not a large number in the scheme of things.
I have experience of health scares, and when stationed in Shanghai during the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in 2003, I watched dire forecasts of global doom get debunked. As medical pressure groups and charities appear on the TV and talk up the crisis, I personally remain sanguine. Most of the deaths so far seem to have been among the old and immuno-compomised.
But I am a little concerned about the panic. And I am concerned about how my neighbours react when two health professionals turn up at my door tomorrow morning, dressed in protective suits.
When we were reporting in Hubei last Friday, we were mindful of the possibility that Shanghai could take action when I returned. Everything depended on what constitutes the Hubei exclusion zone: its borders appear to be fluid and capable of being defined retroactively.
