The Return of Blessed Isolation

Isolation doesn't happen in isolation. The world changes around it and isolation changes within. The last few days have been more distracting than usual. I barely touched my novels, which is completely out of habit for the previous two months. In fact, for someone in isolation I've felt rather sick and listless. Sick - but don't get any ideas! I've got a well-established cold that regardless of the rest I'm getting doesn't seem to be shaken in any way. And I have what used to be the regular bane of my existence, and I hope this doesn't give "too much information": an ulcer on my tongue. The latter in particular is a problem because it's on the tip and if I want to avoid aggravating it, I can't speak properly. The cold symptoms are mocking me at this rather globally stressful point in time: There's a deadly epidemic the disease of which I'm literally quarantined for, and you give me a cold?? (I must mention that coronavirus and cold symptoms are quite different - I have no cough, no fever, no headache, no vomiting, just a head full of gunk.)

Anyway. Back to the pandemic. Things are still bad. Another city (Wenzhou) appears to be in lock down. Chongqing also appears to be in the stages of locking down. The latter is a megacity, not belonging to any province and reports it's numbers with other provinces just like Beijing and Shanghai. If if were counted as a province, it's is the province that has the ninth most cases. But just two deaths. Wenzhou is a significant city but no officially reported deaths either. If the lock downs manage to get number of cases to fall, the turning point is due.

In fact the last two days have had a noticeable turn in the number of new cases, which might mean the "extraordinary methods" used might finally be curbing the spread. Meanwhile the death number charges on. The number went from 637 to 814 in the two days between blogs. It's putting up about 90 people a day and that number is increasing as either cause of death, a difficult issue, is established; and also the critical cases run their courses.

On 31 January, I went into prophesy mode and said in an e-mail: "Hubei's numbers are horrific and will account for over 90% of what will be a big number of cases and probably 98% of deaths. Their numbers alone are the biggest problem - the province alone will have more deaths than SARS did worldwide by the time we leave."  Well, yesterday, three days after our original return date, it did come to pass. Hubei cruised past it. And although there are more provinces with fatalities than two days ago - Henan for example went from 3 to 6 in that period - 122 were in Hubei. 

It feels like at least the momentary trend is towards control, of waiting for cases to run their courses, of posting of literature about the new drug that could be the savior, and of pointing to the US flu numbers and wondering why they haven't locked down any cities or states to save the people from the scourge of the flu season. Fingers crossed this is the flavour of the week.