Lockdown lessons and culpability

Author Ottessa Moshfegh reflected on a novel she published in 2018 - My Year of Rest and Relaxation - in which a young woman in New York didn’t leave her apartment.

“She doesn’t want to feel the resulting grief of being orphaned in her 20s, so she tries to bypass it by sleeping,” she explained. “She theorises that if she spends long enough asleep, her cells will regenerate the number of times necessary for them to forget the memory of trauma they’ve stored inside. If grief were an illness, sleep is the cure.”

The primary difference between the protagonist in the novel and the self-isolation much of the world is currently in, she pointed out, is that she is in control.

She recalled talking to a former inmate about what it was like to ‘do time.’

“[They] told me to go into your bathroom and lock the door and don’t leave. I tried it. About six minutes in, I started to panic. Even as someone who has made a career out of her “dark” imagination, I didn’t like it in there. I lasted 10 minutes. “

She asked what, if anything, we will learn from being in lockdown.

“We will try to piece out how the experience of self-isolation changed us,” she said. “Did we take advantage of it? Were we even able to? Did we enjoy being with our families, or did we want to hide even from them? Did we actually unplug, or did we plug in harder?

“Did a break from society free us from a system that holds us captive, slaves to commerce and media? Or did time outside of the system paralyse us? Are our minds really free?”

The Daily Express

Paul Baldwin argued that ‘whatever way you look at it China is responsible for the pandemic.

“Taking the charitable view perhaps Beijing was just unlucky that the country’s wet market culture allowed a virus to somehow mutate in a Wuhan cafe and jump from a bat to a human,” he said. “Or, less credulously, something went catastrophically wrong at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a top security virus research lab about a five minute walk away from the market which researches, among other horrors, the coronavirus.”

He said we needed to fight out what had happened because the repercussions are going to ‘cost us all.’

“Economics swots at the Asian Development Bank told Bloomberg this week they reckoned the global cost of coronavirus would be almost £3.5 trillion – about a third of what WW2 cost in today’s money,” he said. “When we won the war on May 8 1945 we borrowed a mere £27 billion (in today’s terms) from the US to help rebuild Britain. We finished paying that loan on New Year’s Eve 2006.”

He said that if China had wanted to decimate the economy of every other country there could hardly be a more successful way than with coronavirus.

“The US and WHO repeatedly offered expert help to Beijing in the early days of the Wuhan outbreak and they were snubbed. Perhaps too close co-operation might have unearthed the true cause of the outbreak which China continues to shroud in mystery.”

No secrets remain so forever, he said, particularly ones ravaging the planet.

“ If China really is culpable, then yes we, the whole world, need to demand our money back.”

The Scotsman

Dr Lewis Hughes is a doctor in one of Scotland’s 16 hospices and said they were having to limit visitors contact with loved ones by asking them to wear masks and gloves.

“For me, a hospice is a place where it’s truly a privilege to work,” he said. “Patients and their families only get one shot at a good death and we are lucky to be able to help make it happen for them, whichever way each individual may see it.”

He said most of the funding for hospices came from fundraising and donations, not from the NHS or government and they already faced a deficit.

“With this crisis however, there is a question over the funding of hospices as they’ve seen retail and fundraising opportunities evaporate – charity shops can’t open and fun runs are out of the question,” he said.

“Keep your local hospice in mind too when thinking about the daily heroism that continues even in these strange times.”