My quarantine tips
Wow. Just wow. The tide has turned and while in China (well, outside Hubei province at least) we are slowly getting back to normal, Europe is now at the center of the pandemic and the US will get there soon. I was definitely not expecting to see so many cases and deaths in Spain, but when the north of Italy was put into lockdown I did think about a Spanish proverb that can be translated as “when you see something happening to your neighbour, start getting ready”. Unfortunately, Spain did not start getting ready and will probably surpass the current Italian figures in a couple of weeks. As of today, Spain has almost 10,000 confirmed infections (who knows what the real figure is, considering all the people that can be infected but show no symptoms and are thus not tested) and 342 deaths have been linked to coronavirus. In the Chinese province I live in, Jiangsu, we had 631 confirmed cases and 0 deaths. Jiangsu has a population of 80 million. Spain has a population of 47 million.
My home country is screwed.
A sea of red. Screenshot from coronavirus-map.com
In Spain, schools in several provinces were shut down a week or 10 days ago but, based on what friends have been telling me and what I’ve read on the news, that didn’t hint people that they were supposed to stay home. Parks were full of children playing and people from Madrid, the worst-hit city, were driving to their apartments on the beach as if this was a holiday. There was even an 88 year old man who went to hospital in Madrid and was told to quarantine at home. Instead, he decided to go to a seaside town with his wife, visiting the mall there and then he went to the emergency room of the local hospital. Finally, last Friday, the state of emergency was declared and people were confined at home on the weekend. There’s only one problem though: many people still have to work (including a lot that work in industries which I wouldn’t consider essential) and yesterday, Monday morning, the subway was extremely crowded. The virus must be super happy with this nonsense logic. Also, let’s not even mention the hoarding of toilet paper…
As per the current numbers, basically the whole world should be trying to stay home as much as possible and practise social distancing. As I have a bit of experience in being confined, as we just went through it in China, I will share what we’ve been doing here in case it can help people in other countries.
- Stay home. Contrary to what most people seem to believe, China was not on compulsory lockdown anywhere except Hubei province and a few other cities that had an explosive growth of cases at the beginning, like Wenzhou. Staying at home was only an official recommendation that everybody followed. Many places of recreation, tourist attractions, restaurants and even malls were closed, so people wouldn’t have anything to do outside anyway. The only place to go was the supermarket.
- Work from home if you can. For me this was easy as I always work from home! In my husband’s company, people were working from home for two weeks and then went back to the office. They are still wearing masks while working. In western countries, the use of face masks has not been recommended and anyway it seems they are completely sold out anyway. For people that needs to keep going to work, I would suggest keeping a safety distance of 1.5-2 meters between one person and another (hard to do that on a crowded subway, though) and, while having lunch, avoiding chatting and keeping also a distance.
- Avoid touching your face when you are not at home. This is easier said than done. I would always get an irresistible urge to scratch my eye, nose or ear when I was in the supermarket.
- When coming back home, wash your hands immediately, hang your coat on the balcony if you have one and use rubbing alcohol to wipe anything you touched when entering (the door handle, your keys, maybe even your phone).
- Be especially careful when you have to touch things that many people have touched before, like buttons on an elevator. You can use your keys or your elbow instead of your finger.
You can also read an account of my quarantine days that was published in the Nadja website. I wrote it the first week of March, before the situation in Spain exploded.
Stay strong and take this chance to do things you usually don’t have time for!
Your tips are spot on. And yes, definitely sterilize your phones! I heard that rubbing alcohol/70% alcohol does the job, so people better grab those before they’re out. And ironically, I read that 90% alcohol doesn’t necessarily mean it’s more effective. I can’t recall the reason but I’d just stick with 70%.
I think the government should help the poorer people who can’t afford to stay at home. Many of their job positions can’t be done at home either.
Great post, short and to the point!
Yes, some kind of subsidy should be given to the people that are not going to receive a salary these weeks. Heck, if we can rescue banks when they default, we can surely help people for a couple of months!!
The husband has to work at his non-essential industry. He’s locked his office door and moved all the meetings to classified teleconferencing or something.
But no one paid attention and they all went to the conference room.
China is now hooked to teleconferences and streaming. My husband’s company arranges streamings with speakers all the time, even on the weekend. Some of them so important and work-related as “how to do the tea ceremony” and “typical Suzhou dishes”. I’m not joking. Those two were on the weekend.
LOL, tea ceremony.
I’ve rubbing everything with cleaning alcohol and following your procedures (not coats on balcony which I’ll start doing) when I get back from the shops! Even taking the rubbish out! I’m so asking myself if I should do the same with food packaging! I’m hoping the lockdown is for a month tops. I don’t see it as ending after 15 days. When it gets warmer it’s going to be harder to make people stay at home. I’m happy for now Spain isn’t issuing permission slips to leave the house like France and Italy. I’m more worried about the police stopping me and not believing that my reason out is to buy food! Crazy no? When the storm has passed it’s going to be a big mess to sort out and clear up. I’m happy where you are it’s slowly getting back to normal. It gives lockdown countries hope. Take care XO
I haven’t been sterilizing food packaging. Removing it and washing your hands later should be enough, I think. I didn’t want to waste rubbing alcohol at the beginning because it was hard to find!
Yep, no way this is only going to last 15 days, I’m sorry. It sucks. Stay strong! And the police will believe you when you show them your reusable bags, haha!
I’m hoping they will! Please Officer! Look reusable bags! I think we have to wear latex gloved handling fruit and veg in the supermarket. I haven’t been yet so I can’t report.
I’m for sure being careful with the rubbing alcohol I have. I managed to get 2 bottles on last week when they had a lot in stock. Tuesday I had to get more hand sanitizer. Almost double the price and no longer on the shelf at the corner shop. Behind the counter!
Wow I’m so impressed that everyone followed rules in China to self-quarantine, even without it being mandatory! I think in the USA the government will have to do what Italy did: ask the police to keep people off the streets. I went on a (solo) walk around my neighborhood today and I saw people having picnics on lawns!!
Some states in the USA haven’t even shut bars or restaurants. I heard people (even the elderly!) are partying it up in Florida. So ridiculous!! I guess us westerners don’t want to follow law and order eh? haha.
These are such awesome tips and really great insight. I’m glad things are on the upswing in Suzhou!
I think people did the quarantine in China because they were scared of getting infected. In western countries, or at least Spain, until two weeks ago the news was saying that this was similar to a flu (after the initial reporting of zombie apocalypse in China). I took screenshots of an interview with a doctor who said Spain’s hospitals were well prepared in case of virus. Hehe. Now he says “we were over confident”. No shit, Sherlock.
Maybe it’s true that this virus was created on purpose to eliminate pensioners, hahaha.
What do you think of the idea of letting the virus run its natural course without doing anything to stop the spread? The Netherlands has adopted this strategy and the goal is to achieve “herd immunity” for the population. The old and the frail that die along the way will just be collateral damage. The UK was going to go down this path too but then it backtracked after public outcry.
https://www.theage.com.au/world/europe/dutch-embrace-herd-immunity-as-dire-death-warning-prompts-uk-to-change-course-20200317-p54arv.html
It sounds like a not too smart idea. Let’s see if they don’t have to change plans when their hospitals and medical staff start being overwhelmed…
Yes, I can’t understand the stupidity of all countries assuming that the coronavirus would not impact them, after the first few cases showed up. Everyone should have known that viruses spread exponentially, not linear. Thus a few cases leads to a massive increase in a few weeks. China majorly fucked up in the first 6 weeks by ignoring person to person transmission, having large new year celebrations (with 40,000 people attending a banquet in Wuhan, so they could get a record attendance, while they knew, or should have known, that there was person to person transmission) and having people travel all over (5 million people leaving Hubei for Spring Holiday), but then yes after this, China did good control measures, and stopped the virus spread. I still do not understand why virtually everyone else, except South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan, made exactly the same mistake in their first 6 weeks. My only conclusion is that the majority of most top politicians worldwide are idiots.
I read that because those countries suffered and remembered the SARS epidemic, they were ready to act asap. Western countries had no idea what was coming, they thought their health systems could deal with it. At least Spain.
Also, if governments tried to implement drastic measures with only a few cases, I think most people in western countries would have continued with their normal lives anyway. Up until last Thursday, my friend’s teenage students were saying that they didn’t care about the virus and they were going out to a club that night…
Yes, I understand this, but public health professionals/epidemiologists certainly predicted this exponential increase without any control and government officials should have consulted them immediately. Measures would not need to be as drastic as in China, but simple measurements like screening for fever at airports and larger event and isolating fever cases, could have drastically slowed the spread down. That should have been relatively easy to implement. China did not do this for the first six weeks and other countries neither did this. Hence China, and now other countries, are implementing much more drastic efforts to much greater cost.
I agree. However, in Spain at least, the doctor who is in charge of the epidemic was saying, until two weeks ago, that this was just like the flu and that Spanish hospitals were more than ready to deal with it…
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