COVID-19
I woke up on Friday, February 14th and read in the morning (print) newspaper that the coronavirus 2019-cCoV had been renamed “COVID-19,” but there was never any news published or broadcast about the name change. It happened during the night, or during the previous day and the name change slipped through the cracks in the media news cycle. WTF?
As February progressed the paper surgical mask shortage in Japan grew worse. Experts say that wearing a mask is not as effective as people think, and that washing hands with soap and warm water is by far the best hygiene measure. But the masks make people feel better, more confident, like they are proactively doing something. Masks disappeared from store shelves - convenience stores, drug stores and dollar stores - and haven’t returned yet. The shortage grew so bad that thieves began robbing hospitals. I am sure that Japanese mask factories are working night and day churning out masks hand over fist, but where are they all going? First, a portion of Japanese makers’ production is outsourced to China, so we can be sure that those masks are simply no longer being imported. The Chinese are keeping them for themselves. Second, I heard that Japan exported a lot of masks and protective Hazmat suits to China to try to deal with the disease outbreak there. Third, alcohol-based hand sanitizers disappeared from store shelves. Then wet alcohol wipes. After that, hand soap began vanishing - first the liquid and foam soaps, then the old-fashioned soap bars.
Profiteers bought up masks as fast as they could and began offering them on Amazon at grossly inflated prices. Normally, a pack of three or four paper masks sells in the convenience store for just under ¥400, or about $4.50 (CND). But on Amazon some sellers were advertising the same pack of masks up to ¥99,000, or over $1,000. No kidding.
I became an expert hand-washer, almost like a doctor preparing for surgery. I always washed with soap and water whenever I re-entered the apartment from outside.
Then there is plenty of fake news to navigate. In a time of fear people are prone to believe wild, unsubstantiated ideas in the name of caution. The virus originated in a (not so) secret Chinese bio-weapons lab close to the city of Wuhan. In Japan, a suspected Chinese coronavirus patient fled a hospital before he could be tested, and his whereabouts remain unknown, etc. Rumors like that are clearly racially tinged.
My English friend Chris is a veritable wellspring of conspiracy, and in him the coronavirus health emergency is like pouring lighter fluid on the barbecue. In part it’s just his personality. But over the years I’ve come to think that a disposition towards conspiracy and arcane information are Anglo-Saxon cultural features. It’s almost impossible to talk to Chris because he doesn’t understand what statistics are, what they mean and how they are used (or, he refuses to admit and apply such knowledge), he rejects all conventional ‘knowledge’ with his constant refrain, “How do we know?” So, I explain to him how we know, but he refuses to accept the explanations - like a five-year-old driving his mother mad by asking “Why?” incessantly. It’s useless talking to him about things like verifiable evidence, or second- and third- party confirmation. He doesn’t accept public knowledge, he rejects government statistics (especially Chinese government statistics), and he vociferously believes in a government-pharmaceutical industry-medical conspiracy to keep the public ill in order to perpetually feed money into the health care industry. Chris is an evangelical vegan who advocates diet as the cure for everything. I mean Everything. It sometimes gets on my nerves.