Viral Content (30/03/2020): Lockdown

Well, it finally happened: Ireland has joined several other European countries in entering a state of semi-quarantine. I was actually starting to get my hopes up that it wouldn’t be necessary—the government’s forecast of 15,000 infections by the end of the month turned out to be hugely pessimistic and there were a few days last week where the rate of new infections was holding steady—but less than 24 hours after a grim assessment of the country’s ICU capacity (which basically concluded that there isn’t any) went public, the announcement was made.

In case this hasn’t happened yet where you live and you want some idea of what to expect, it’s actually not as restrictive as you might think. People are allowed to go up to two kilometres from their homes for exercise, which easily encompasses the usual route I go on for my daily stroll, and there’s no driving restrictions on traveling to buy food. We’re just not supposed to travel anywhere for non-essential reasons.

This is obviously kind of hard to enforce, and there so far hasn’t been any clear indication of what would happen to people who are egregiously breaking the rules. I passed a police checkpoint in the middle of my town earlier today, and it looked like drivers were just being asked where they were going.

It’s been kind of funny seeing people online freak out about the idea of being stuck in their homes for weeks on end, given that this has frequently been my experience over the last three years due to my neurological condition. I spent the month leading up to this not really going anywhere except for walks around my local area simply because I didn’t feel up to doing anything else.

You could say that I’m the perfect quarantine candidate. You could even go so far—and I’m not saying I’m doing this, but one could if so inclined—to suggest that I’m the best at staying at home for long periods of time. I’m better than everyone else in the world at it. It’s me.

Anyway, the pace of the pandemic internationally has taken off over the last week or so; total numbers of confirmed infections are now increasing by more than 100,00 in less than 48 hours and several countries are experiencing alarming numbers of deaths every day. We’re well into the phase of algorithmic growth, and now all we can do is wait for the peak.

But thanks to China and Italy, we know what that peak looks like. As grim as the situation is, the virus can be brought under control…as long as strong quarantine measures are taken. As of this writing the UK has quietly walked back the herd immunity plan I complained about last time, and someone finally managed to convince Trump that his plan of getting things back to normal by Easter was utterly ridiculous. Apart from edge cases like Brazil’s Bolsonaro, world leaders are finally taking this seriously.

That is, despite the efforts of a disturbingly large number of prominent capitalists, think tanks and business people, many of whom are really letting the mask slip and just straight up admitting that they value the economy more than people’s lives. I’m hopeful that when this is all over, people will remember that.