Life Under Lockdown (I)

So the coronavirus is now the only news story. I'll be covering all the usual stuff here and on my other blogs, but it seems appropriate to keep a personal record of events during this unprecedented situation. Updates will be sporadic, as and when appropriate or there's nothing else to do.

I've been self-isolating since Friday last, not because I have much chance of actually having it, but because minimising contact with everyone else should by now be common sense. All through the parameter space of possibilities that range from "it kills me stone dead" to "I'm a symptom-free carrier", there's no region at all in which staying at home isn't the best option by far. I know old people can do irritating things like vote for Brexit or tell long-winded stories that don't go anywhere, but even so, I don't actually want to give them a potentially fatal disease.

Plus, no-one cares very much where the research gets done, and I can work just as well from home. By chance we were given official advice to work from home the same day I decided to anyway, which just goes to show what a sensible bunch astronomers can be. It helps that we're not a teaching institute, so we have no lectures to cancel. Whether I'm here or there, the galaxies will still be way up in the sky, so going home makes almost no difference. The only thing I need to do to work from home is to avoid catching the metro every morning.

Personally I'm in a pretty much ideal situation. We have a spacious multi-floor apartment, a back garden, a small fluffy dog, a high-speed internet connection, plenty of books, ample provisions for the week*, and Shirley also has an employer who understands the situation so we're home together. A gilded cage may still be a cage, but hell, it's a lot better than a feckin' scorpion pit.

* Panic buying hasn't been much of a thing here so far, with the occasional exceptions of pasta and rice for some reason. I'd guestimate that 95% of shelves are stocked at normal capacity.

Actually, it's barely even a cage at all. The Czech Republic may be under "quarantine", but the quotation marks are certainly needed. They've been incrementally applying stricter and stricter laws, but currently the "don't go out unless you need food, medicine, petrol, or to go to work, or to visit family, or to walk your dog, or [and this is quite literal] you want to spend time in nature" is hardly a real lockdown. It's not much of a quarantine if you can take a stroll through a park just because birds and doggies and whatnot.

Even so, to its great credit, the Czech government started implementing measures almost as soon as the first cases were recorded (most notably closing schools and borders), and it's been ramping them up ever since. It didn't wait until it had thousands of cases before actually lifting a finger to do something, unlike many other European nations. So I'm hopeful that there's a chance this will either nip it in the bud completely here, or at least massively slow down the infection rate before it spirals out of control.

But hopeful is not the same as optimistic. I'm not at all sure these measures really will have the desired effect, for two reasons :
1) Testing rates here have thus far been extremely low, so there are likely very many more unreported cases. Remarkably, even when there were just 200 cases, I actually happen to known four of them (who are, so far as I'm aware, fine, and I haven't seen them since January). This is perhaps why the cases are rising so rapidly in the Czech Republic - not because it's spreading with exceptional virulence, but because it's still being found.
2) Although the quarantine measures are non-negligible, as I said, they're hardly draconian yet. Many workplaces are closed, but there were also so many exceptions (like technology stores for some reason) that it would have been faster to list the places allowed to stay open.

I'm trying not to follow the story any more closely than I need to, not because I don't care, but because there's only so much I can do and making myself anxious about it won't help. I can either stay at home and be productive or stay at home and worry myself sick. I choose the former.

For that reason, I'm not going to be commenting on whether nation X or nation Y has the best corona policies. That can wait. More broadly, there are good grounds to be optimistic : in all counties where strict quarantine has been implemented, the virus is receding. This is an entirely survivable crisis and there's no reason that dealing with COVID-19 has to be the new, permanent normal.

Work-wise I have a single project to keep me occupied : recoding FRELLED in a modern version of Blender. This is a perfect work-from-home task because it requires extended and uninterrupted time to work on it - trying to switch from coding to other projects (or going to unrelated meetings) is seldom a good idea. So working from home is actually beneficial for this, and it's a task I've even been wanting to get my teeth into. And I have plenty of papers to read and other possible tasks should I feel the need to do something else for a bit.

And on the employment level, I think things are as good as can be expected. We've been told to stay home and file timesheets as normal, and have been given detailed instructions as to how to sign in remotely to do this. Some of the more popular and serious blog posts about how bad COVID-19 could become have been circulating in the official advice emails, which gives me confidence that my employer is taking this seriously.

Right now the whole thing feels surreal more than anything else. Oh, you want me to stay at home in my comfy flat for a month and work on a pet project ? Great ! The only ways I've been adversely affected are my discovering that the building recycling bin was too full of Oculus Go headset boxes to add anything, and, more annoyingly, not being able to take my usual Easter holiday. Oh, and I can't treat myself (yet) to an Oculus Quest, since no-one know when it will become available again. First world problems indeed.

How much worse will it get ? It seems unlikely to become anything unendurable. Even the Italians are singing from their balconies. Perhaps we'll eventually degenerate into a Mad Max dystopia and resort to eating cats, but for now, nothing feels unnecessary, still less harsh or draconian. At least for the time being, it's all just a bit odd.