Yesterday was the day of the last applause. It was a solemn moment in Times of Coronavirus. For the last three months, everyone in all regions of Spain had gone out on their balconies or doorsteps at 8:00 PM to applaud the doctors, nurses, pharmacists, law enforcement officers, grocery store workers, truck drivers, and garbage collectors who kept on working throughout the pandemic. Their work permitted all of us to carry on with our lives, sometimes in the most literal sense of the phrase.
The applause ritual continued because we wished to thank them, but also because we were afraid that the coronavirus would enter our household and carry someone off. We clapped for all of the workers, but we were also fervently clapping for ourselves, hoping that the deafening sound would frighten Covid-19 away from our own doorstep.
For a while, Mrs. Neanderthal even hung a clove of garlic on her door because she had been told that garlic was a cure for the coronavirus. When I asked her if she were expecting Dracula to come knocking, she took it down.
Now when confinement restrictions are being lifted, and life is gradually returning to the ‘new normal’, the applauses have finally ended. Not that we are no longer grateful, but lately people have stopped living on their balconies, playing music, and putting on shows there.
At 8:00 PM, there are now other priorities. The elderly are returning from their exercise shift, and people in the younger set are putting on their jogging suits and getting their bicycles to go out for an evening run.
We are even beginning to think about the possibility of perhaps going somewhere for summer vacation. We have also begun to wonder what work will be like in September when the academic year starts again. If not quite like before, the immediate future seems infinitely brighter than the immediate past.
It is nice to at last be able to get on with our lives, such as they have become. We prefer not to think about the bad old days when the morgues had run out of space, when doctors, like my son, were obliged to work 24-hour shifts, when there were not enough ventilators to go around, and when over 900 people died each day. We no longer wish to remember the coffins stacked in underground parking lots or quickie seven-minute funerals with a priest and one mourner. Those days are now behind us.
Sadly, most of us have various neighbors and friends, who have died or who have lost loved ones. Yesterday when I was waiting on the bus stop to go to the dentist, I coincided with a neighbor who is now a coronavirus widow. Her husband in his 50s died of Covid-19. His previous pathology was that he enjoyed cigars and cigarettes. She told me that if you are a smoker and catch coronavirus, you are toast.
Another of my friends is even participating in a class action suit against the government because his mother died in an elderly care facility, where few if any protective measures could be taken because of the nationwide lack of medical equipment.
All of those deaths were real and left a huge emptiness in someone’s heart. They were deaths that would not have happened without the pandemic. They were not part of a malicious conspiracy to make the government look bad.
Notwithstanding, I have a friend in the USA who still questions the seriousness of the pandemic. The other day, he posted on Facebook the number of deaths in the past decade in his state, and quite rightly pointed out that the death rate had not significantly varied. The implicit conclusion was that everyone was making a great fuss over nothing.
Although I disagree with him about his evaluation of the seriousness of the pandemic, the accuracy of his numbers is unquestionable. The coronavirus death toll in his state is only 351, which is not a sufficient number of deaths to make statistics go up. He said that he was tired of turning on the news and hearing about the number of people that had died.
I am happy that his state is doing well. It means that he is lucky to be living there, and not on other planets such as New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, or Connecticut, which are worlds away from the Midwest. He is also fortunate not to inhabit other universes such as Italy or Spain. In Spain, even now when things have improved, we still have 351 coronavirus deaths every two or three days.
If he were residing in any of these other more uncomfortable places, he would not claim that there is excessive hype about the number of deaths or that the pandemic was expressly invented to make the evening news repetitious and boring.
Like my friend in the USA, I am also tired of being informed of the number of people that have died and are still dying. I am sick to death of hearing about death. Unlike my friend, however, I have a wider vision of reality, one that reaches beyond the boundaries of one Midwestern state in the USA. That vision tells me that the fight is not over. We have only finished the first round, but there are still a few rounds to go.
For now, in Spain, we are enjoying a well-deserved rest. We are taking a breather. During this time-out, there is no longer any need to go out on our balconies and applaud. We are congratulating ourselves because for now only about 100 or so people are dying each day.
Thanks to our confinement, we managed to stop the virus from spreading, at least, temporarily. We are in the process of embracing our new freedom and exploring the delight of being able to take a walk outside again even with all of the limitations that come with gradual de-escalation.
Last night, I spoke to my oldest son. He told me that he could not talk for long because he was very busy. Besides his usual psychiatric consultations, he was obliged to attend daily meetings regarding the complex situation looming on the horizon. These meetings are long and complicated, and generally last at least few hours.
In readiness for the future, his hospital is feverishly storing medical protection equipment and planning protocols for the second wave. The only thing that they still are not sure of is when it will hit.
