Chronicles of COVID-19

Title

Ray, Wales

Contributor

Ray

Subject

COVID-19 (Disease)

Coverage

Britain; Wales; 2020s:

Date

20 April 2020

Language

English

Creator

Cork Folklore Project

Rights

Cork Folklore Project

Description

GENERAL PHYSICAL LOCATION RIGHT NOW

West Wales - village of around 1,000 people

USUAL LOCATION

Same

Q. 1 STAGES

I was very aware of the coronavirus situation in China from about mid-January onwards, as my work involves a lot of contact with China. Initially, my concern was that Chinese citizens would be unable to travel to the UK due to the coronavirus, and that this would impact negatively on my organisation. I had Chinese friends who were in lockdown in China and who I was communicating with on a regular basis, and by early February, I began to feel concerned that the virus was going to spread beyond China. I remember being very struck by one colleague who told me that from the 11th floor apartment she was born in, she was hearing birdsong for the first time in her life. I was so struck by this that I made a note of it on February 7 as a little two line poem Wuhan As we fall silent The birdsong swells. She also described being able to go out once every three days to shop in the government market that had been set up on the ground floor of her apartment, and needing a pass to get past police checks if she wanted to leave her area of the city. Another colleague barely left her apartment in Nanjing for over two months, despite the fact that Nanjing was not one of the worst affected cities. She was alone, without neighbours or friends around, often not talking to anybody from day to day. Nothing beautiful to look at from the window and only a sense of fear. Her sense of fear was very intense, and somewhat infectious. I actually did some additional shopping (teabags, long life milk, muesli, a few extra bags of lentils) in early February as my Chinese colleagues were giving me such a graphic picture of the challenges of lock-down. On February 13, I wrote to the senior management of my organisation, flagging that coronavirus was likely to have significant impacts on our industry.
I remember talking to my mother in February (she and her partner the mid-70s and mid 80s respectively) and telling her that it would be a good idea to have enough food in the house to be able to survive for two or three weeks without going out. At the time, it didn't occur to me that this was stockpiling and would contribute to the kind of problems stockpiling later brought about in the UK. I remember not wanting to worry my mother or push her, but also feeling a real sense of urgency and asking her to do some extra shopping just to make me happy. It felt inevitable to me by mid-February coronavirus would come to Europe. My organisation started to have weekly meetings to discuss how we would prepare -we spent a lot of time discussing hand sanitizer and whether it was an appropriate use of resources or not, and what sort of posters we might put up. I tried on several occasions to move the discussion onto would cope with mass sickness, but the response was that we were not anywhere near that stage. I recall doubting my sense of worry and Wondering if I was overreacting. I feel that we were very slow as an institution to allow ourselves to imagine what might be coming, but in large part that's because the British government was reluctant to engage with the seriousness of the situation or to take drastic action. I felt very anxious in February and March. As the situation has grown in the UK, it has taken on a bizarre normality, and my anxieties are somehow less and they were when we had no deaths or just a couple of hundred deaths in the country. Over 16,000 people have lost their lives in the UK to date, and medics and care home staff are going to work on a daily basis without adequate protection and many are dying and very many more are in fear for their lives. The virus is spreading through care homes and killing large numbers of people who aren't counted in the UK’s daily figures and throughout, our government has been slow to act, and they acted against medical / scientific advice for weeks. Boris Johnson boasted of shaking hands with coronavirus patients despite all the medical evidence suggesting social distancing was the way to contain the virus..... Hundreds of thousands have been thrown into poverty in the UK, businesses are collapsing, unemployment is increasing, the government has made some very big financial gestures but the economy is still going to crumble, and with it much of civil society. The country has led by idiots whose wilful ignorance has brought us to this situation, and yet just a few days ago a neighbour wanted to talk about" poor Boris" and how he needs to "get coronavirus done now he has got Brexit done".... There's a sense of being in free-fall, and at times a curious kind of calm with that. Nothing to do except spiral down. At other times, there’s a kind of panic and not being able to do anything, at not being able to contribute usefully in any significant way. I live in a beautiful place and am working from home. So far, where I live is behind the curve and we have relatively few cases locally. So far, I am relatively untouched. Nobody I know and care about is sick or dying. I still have my job. I can step outside and be in a very beautiful place. I live in a community where neighbours talk to each other. I'm intensely aware of the inequalities in people's experience of lockdown in the UK, of the fact that this is not the case for many. I share the hope many I know that perhaps - "on the other side", "when it's all over" we might actively seek a fairer society as a nation. That we might not vote Tory next time, that we might value certain jobs more highly and insist that they be paid accordingly. That we might not allow future governments to destroy the welfare state and dismantle the health service. That we might hold onto the fact that the people who got us through this situation were nurses and hospital porters and bin men and people who work on supermarket checkouts - people we have suddenly realised are "keyworkers". Some of my friends believe that coronavirus will lead to a fairer and more equitable Britain. I'm not sure that I do.

Q. 2 EVERYDAY ROUTINE

No Response.

Q. 3 GROUPS

No Response.

Q. 4 WAYS WE TALK

No Response.

Q. 5 COMMUNITY RESPONSE

The community is definitely coming together to support its own - local community support face groups with lots of volunteers, neighbours shopping for each other and looking out for each other, people chatting more than ever and getting to know neighbours they hadn't spoken to before. Lots of little kindnesses. At the same time, there is an increased suspicion of outsiders in a village that normally welcomes large numbers of holidaymakers. Local residents lobbied very early for the caravan parks to be closed and for second homeowners to be forbidden from coming here. With very few ICU beds in the county that makes sense, but there was a certain lack of generosity or compassion to this which saddened me. As a community, we were certainly not willing to be a refuge for people fleeing from the cities. Back in the 19th century, this village played host to an entire public school who were evacuated from their urban setting due to cholera. This features very fondly in the local mythology. This time we shut the doors as fast as we could. It made me reflect on what it would be like to be a refugee with good people shutting their doors on you again and again.

Q. 6 THOUGHTS AND PREOCCUPATIONS

No Response.

Q. 7 SIMILARITY TO PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE

No Response.

Q. 8 CHALLENGES AND COPING

No Response.

Q. 9 THE FUTURE

No Response.

Q. 10 IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE THAT SPRINGS TO MIND?

No Response.

Q. 11 IN A NUTSHELL

No Response.

age

36-50

gender

Female