We’ve started to hold our Sunday family calls via videoconference. Sister No. 1 helped my Mom a few weeks back, Zooming with her two or three times so Mom could get used to the process. Give or take a hiccup, she seems to have it down.
A surprise this week was the participation of our friend Ana (not her real name), a native of Belgrade who lived with our family as an AFS exchange student in the 1970s. (Belgrade was then the capital of Yugoslavia, now of Serbia.) She’s an attorney, married, with a daughter ready to graduate from college; they live in Brussels.
Ana: We had to stay in Brussels during the quarantine; they were not allowing any movement out of the city. I felt a bit crazy, the feeling that I couldn’t leave. Otherwise it wasn’t that terrible. Plus we had the pleasure and gift of having our daughter with us for two-and-a-half months. Now she’s back in London; she went back to clean her apartment and pack her things, and then she’s coming back on Tuesday. Then she defends her thesis on Thursday, and then university is over. The four years went by incredibly fast.
She had a perfect plan: she has a job waiting for her with Bain & Company in January, and she’d saved up money to travel and had a fantastic trip planned. But now travel is not a safe option. We’ll see what she does; I don’t want to put pressure on her, so I’m not asking questions.
We’re being careful with our health, but we’ll see when our daughter comes back from the U.K., which of course has not been doing well in the pandemic. We were going to help her move, but England introduced a quarantine for travelers on the 8th of June, and we would have had to stay in England for two weeks, which was not exactly convenient.
I was thinking of flying to Belgrade last week to see family. But at the last minute I decided not to go. I have mixed feelings: I’d love to go, but I’m scared of the flights. The airports are empty but the flights are full; they’re not leaving middle seats open; planes with 200 seats are flying with 200 people.
Business is fine. I have always mostly corresponded with clients by email, and then we’d meet at conferences around the world. Now the conferences are canceled and replaced by Zoom meetings. We went back to the office June 1st, but even when I was working at home I’d wake up and shower and dress up, a little. I wanted to have a working atmosphere, so I didn’t wear my pajamas. It was nice working from home for a while, but I prefer working from the office and then coming home. Our team isn’t big, and everyone has his own office, so we can stay safe.
Sister No. 2: I’m still in New York City; I’m not sure when I’ll be going back to the office [at a mid-Atlantic state university]. I don’t want to be in a position where I’m telling other people they have to be at the office and interact with the public if I’m never going in myself. The university is supposed to reopen to students on Sept. 1st, but I assume shortly after that we’ll have a flare up and all be sent home. No campus is going to be able to prevent 18- and 19-year-olds from mixing. Look at the bars now; it’s a perfect setup for the virus to spread.
Sister No. 1: I’ve been working every day [as aide to a mayor of a Western city]. City Hall isn’t reopening to the public until September, but the mayor is there every day, and I can’t not be there. Around town, tourists are coming and they’re not wearing masks; plus we’ve had protests for Black Lives Matter, and most of the protesters are wearing masks but standing within 6 feet of each other. Restaurants are open up to 50 percent capacity; they can put outside tables six feet apart. A lot of businesses are still closed — no movie theaters, for instance. And all the summer festivals have been canceled. But our case numbers are still tiny; we’re getting six new cases a week instead of one or two.
Everyone’s supposed to be wearing masks, but it’s complicated. Some stores say: No mask, no entry. Others ask, but don’t pressure; many managers don’t want to require customers to wear masks. Stores can limit the number of people inside; some of the bigger grocery stores have workers counting, then letting in people a few at a time. The police have a policy where they give people a warning, and then the second time — not that anyone’s tracking, but if they recognize you — they can fine you $50. They’re giving people masks if they don’t have them. But it’s too hard to enforce.
This city has always had a high percentage of alternative people. We have a vocal group who don’t like 5G wi-fi, who think it’s going to kill everyone. They’re intensely alternative and believe intensely in “alternative science.” It’s the same crowd of anti-vaxxers. They say masks are dangerous; they say we’re living at high altitude and people can’t get enough oxygen. We take their information, say “Thank you very much,” and ignore them.
Ana: I keep receiving information from a Serbian friend who lives in Madrid, who sends YouTube clips about why this talk of the Corona virus is all nonsense, how this is a normal flu, why masks are bad, why we don’t need a vaccine. I’m interested in different opinions, so I read it. But I’m not brave enough to think the virus is really nothing.
Sister No. 1: Well, look at total deaths from previous years — if you compare deaths from month to month in a city or state or region, the numbers are pretty startling. A lot more people are dying.
Ana: I haven’t known anyone who’s died, but two friends have had the virus. One friend was able to stay home, but she had a difficult time for two weeks; her children had it, she lost a lot of weight, and she’s still very tired. Another friend had to go to the hospital for 10 days; he was on oxygen; it looked bad for a while. He’s 69, but he was a super-sports person, cycling 100 kilometers in a day, riding up 2,000-kilometer mountains. You don’t think someone like that would lose his breath, but he said it was really tough. When you know someone, it’s easier to believe how serious it is.
In much of Europe the numbers have diminished very fast, so the reopening is in full force. In Serbia, Novak Djokovic organized a tennis tournament with eight players; they were in Belgrade last weekend, in Croatia this weekend, and then I think Bosnia. They look like they had a lot of fun, but 4,500 people went, and they didn’t respect social distancing at all, and a lot of people are questioning how many new cases we’ll have after this.
[Note: Tonight’s final match in Croatia was canceled when a player, Grigor Dimitrov, tested positive for Covid-19.]
Sister No. 2: We don’t have any good treatment; there’s no vaccine; the virus is still in the world. This idea that we’re somehow safe — well, we slowed it down by behaving a certain way, and now that we’re not behaving that way, what else will happen? Is there better contact tracing in Brussels?
Ana: I’m not sure how well that’s working. I know there’s no app yet, the way they have in some countries in Asia. I think it will not be used here, because so many people have privacy concerns. A lot of people have an issue with being traced.
Me: Cases are down in New York City, but I read the tracing program here is off to a rocky start. People are concerned about privacy, and they’re not responding to calls from tracers.
Brother: I just got home from a trip to Southern California, and it’s pretty much like Northern California — in some places most people wear masks, in others not many are wearing them at all. I had a meeting with executives from a company in China, where they take the virus seriously; they wear masks all the time. I went to warehouses where all the workers were wearing them. But a lot of the people who work in my business are politically conservative, and when I walk into one of their stores they say, “You don’t have to wear a mask in here!” I don’t take my mask off, and sometimes others in the store will see that and put theirs on.
People who are militantly not wearing masks are shaming other people to not wear them. To me, it’s just stupid. I don’t get it at all. Maybe people will have to know someone who gets put on a ventilator or dies, and they’ll realize it’s serious. But 30 to 40 percent of people just don’t believe the virus is real. The president has been so successful at getting people to not trust the media.
Mom: I don’t know what has turned it all around. I remember when we all went to get the polio vaccine — we went to a school on a Sunday, all six of us. And we were thrilled that we could do something about polio.
Sister No. 1: I remember. We ate a sugar cube; it wasn’t a shot. It was the best vaccine ever.
Mom: And it worked. I don’t know what has created all this suspicion, so people think the government is trying to interfere in our lives. If I were a medical person I’d be horrified.
Me: Look what happened this week in Montgomery, Alabama. The city council couldn’t even pass an ordinance to make people wear masks. Doctors came to the hearing in their white coats, said people are dying in city hospitals, asked for help to protect them. Councilors voted against the law anyway.
Sister No. 2: That cultural shift has been building for a long time, at least since Reagan. This rhetoric that experts are elitist, they’re against the regular people -- now Trump has taken that to its apex. Everything you politically disagree with is not just a disagreement but a lie; you can’t trust data or facts. That part feels like we’re living in an Orwellian land, where the truth is not the truth.
Let’s change the subject. Isn’t your husband about to retire?
Ana: He’s planning on retiring next year. He’s working half days from home, and he likes it.
Mom: How about you?
Ana: I’m not thinking of retirement yet. But I don’t like exclusively working from home or the office and not being able to travel and see clients. If that continues, I’ll reconsider. But for the moment I want to continue doing my work. We have a combination of clients, big and small companies, so there’s always something to do. But we don’t know about the future. States are helping a lot of these companies, and once the help stops, we don’t know who’ll survive and who won’t.
Sister No. 1: There’s so much uncertainty. The finance director of our city, the person dealing with our multi-million-dollar budget, says there’s no correspondence to any previous event. Depressions, downturns, the financial crash of 2008, which hit us in 2009 — there’s no correlation to this drop, nothing to compare it to. How many months will it take to come back? No one has a clue. It makes practical planning impossible.
Ana: We read that in the States a lot of cities had problems when schools closed, because the only hot meal many students were getting was in school. It was terrible to read about. In Europe there are a lot of people without money, but they can get social help. Closing schools wouldn’t affect communities in the same way.
Sister No. 2: This crisis is revealing all kinds of problems. Schools can’t take care of the social ills that we ask them to. We ask police to do all sorts of things to maintain social order, and they’re not equipped to do it; they’re not trained to help people having psychotic breakdowns, for instance. Our society doesn’t want to pay taxes to make sure we provide proper health care, proper mental health care. We’re seeing American weakness exposed from all sides.
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