Quarantine Diaries, Day 35
(Posted 20 Apr 2020, 21:09)
20:00 I was due to fly to India to meet my parents next week. Once the lockdowns began in Europe and India, the airline cancelled the flight automatically. They will issue a refund as a voucher valid for a year. I wonder if a year would be enough.
India has always been an 8-hour flight away in my mind. To think, no, to know that I can no longer visit on a whim or if my parents need me, makes me feel utterly helpless.
17:20 A typical breezy, sunny, spring day.
A typical sunny, spring day
Quarantine Diaries, Day 34
(Posted 19 Apr 2020, 23:50)
20:39 Our energy provider sends us a monthly report detailing our usage of electricity and gas. It tells us how our consumption compares to the same month last year.
In March, our electricity and gas usage went up by 17% and 36% respectively.
Electricity and Gas usage under lockdown
We’ve spent a little over half of March under lockdown. The days here are bright and the fan hasn’t come out yet. The only incremental electricity use over days before the lockdown is for charging our laptops all day. On the other hand, we are definitely cooking a whole lot more at home than we used to. The additional gas usage therefore sounds about right.
April would go even higher.
19:05 Each day we get new glimpses of what the world after the lockdown would look like. The neighbourhood branch of Coffee Company has now taped yellow rectangles on the footpath outside for you to stand in while you wait for your order. And if you didn’t order online, you could stand in the red rectangles on the other side of the building and await your turn.
Yellow rectangles for pickup
Red rectangles for ordering
Others are merely parroting government advice - stay 1.5m apart, don’t enter the shop if you have flu-like symptoms, pay using a contactless card etc. etc.
Shopping instructions during a pandemic…
I see the following problems:
Most shops, especially the boutique kind, aren’t big enough to enforce 1.5m distance when in use by more than 2 to 3 customers.
Queueing outside a shop for 15 minutes is not fun, so many would not be willing. To say nothing of the revenue lost on missed impulse purchases.
Most parts of central Amsterdam are not big enough to allow queueing beyond a certain point.
Social distancing without at least a partial lockdown isn’t practical in most parts of Amsterdam1. I feel particularly bad for small, independent stores that’ll bear the brunt of a situation entirely not of their own making.
18:30 Random sighting on today’s walk: drawings by children stuck to the windows of their house telling passersby to stay strong.
Blijf Sterk • Stay Strong
Panama and Columbia tried some interesting partial lockdown strategies but these would be unpalatable in a liberal western democracy.↩︎
Quarantine Diaries, Day 33
(Posted 18 Apr 2020, 21:49)
19:05 Centraal Station was eerily quiet. All the shops inside were closed (save for one to-go grocery store), no announcements played in the hallways and the turnstiles were empty. And with hardly anyone traveling, the row of cabs outside was down to just three.
Empty turnstiles
Taxi stand
It broke my heart.
18:45 On the way home, we stopped by at the HIV-AIDS monument. It looks like a giant abacus and signifies the direct and indirect toll of the disease over the many decades1. There was a time when being diagnosed with HIV would mean a hasty death sentence. While a vaccine is still not in sight, over the years, we have invented drugs and prophylactics that prolong life and slow its spread. Would we be forced to make a similar compromise with SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19? We’ve been living under the shadow of one pandemic for decades, would we be able to cope with two?
HIV-AIDS Monument
18:30 We walked past the row of swings next to Muziekgebouw. The municipal authorities had packed away every other swing so you could enjoy the swings while keeping your distance. The halving of public space capacity is going to be one of the many things that would change about our societies.
Swings that conform to official social-distancing specs
09:10 Both the wife and I took a day off from work to decompress. Given the size of our apartment, if one of us is working and video conferencing all day, it’s impossible for the other person to catch a quiet moment. Normally, if one of us were working from home, the other would be in their office or would go out - sit in a cafe, read a book, go to the library, take a day trip to one of the small Dutch towns. None of these activities are possible these days.
Wikipedia informs me that AIDS has killed 35 million people since 1981. I would’ve guessed a number an order of magnitude smaller.↩︎
Quarantine Diaries, Day 32
(Posted 18 Apr 2020, 13:02)
20:05 Walked past Westerpark and saw this portable electronic sign dissuading people from visiting…
Fine = €390 • Stay Inside! • 1.5M
…and keeping their distance if they must or risk a 390 € fine.
19:30 While the shortages of toilet paper, canned food, pasta and rice, all too common during the early days of the lockdown, have subsided, the shortage of flour continues to beset grocery stores in Amsterdam. Apparently the entire city has taken to baking with an almost religious fervor.
Unlike a typical family from Northern parts of India, we don’t use it to make chapatis at home1 but rather use it as for making pancakes on weekends. And even there, it’s just a member of the supporting cast holding other ingredients (mostly oatmeal) together. A packet lasts us a few weeks. We’ve been looking for one for days. Today the wife asked a grocery store employee about its availability and was guided to a bottom shelf that looked empty but had a packet lying further behind - just beyond the prying eyes of other customers. She went on all fours and fished it out. Our weekend pancake breakfast ritual can continue.
Basic wheat flour wholegrain
10:31 After using The Scream emoji 😱 in the post yesterday, I realized that the painting depicts a person touching their face with both hands. A truly scream inducing prospect these days.
The Scream
08:30 Nothing gets blood coursing through your entire body like changing the bedsheet, duvet and pillow covers. The fitted bedsheet is one of those inventions that is a great idea only if you don’t have to change it yourself.
Which is not to say we don’t crave them. Just that pita bread, tortilla and supermarket naan bread does their job just as well.↩︎
Quarantine Diaries, Day 31
22:00 Completely forgot to wash my hands after returning home. Don’t think I touched my face. Still, the horror. 😱
21:00 We now do groceries once every four days. I don’t think the capacity of our refrigerator would allow us to do it less frequently. Today’s grocery run was an exception. I had missed a few crucial things during the visit yesterday and decided to pop in after my evening walk. I’ve now begun to use the height of the stack of baskets at the entrance from which you must pick one, as a measure of how busy the store is. Three feet tall, the height this evening, means not at all. The notice to pick a basket used to be a hastily improvised thing, printed on a A4 sheet in Dutch and English and stuck to the turnstile with a sellotape. It had changed today to a more permanent thing printed on a big plastic placard in the store’s branding. This probably means that the social distancing measures are here to stay for a while.
The clerks at the checkout counters now have a large screen of transparent plastic screen in front of them to shield them from customers’ coughs and sneezes.1
The self-checkout screen still tries to sell 5€ worth of air miles using a dark pattern. Not only am I going to have no use for air miles for the foreseeable future, I hate the one extra time I am forced to touch the screen to dismiss it.
Air miles
20:30 Encountered a lovely sunset on my walk this evening.
A beautiful sunset
And apparently talking loudly can be bad for public health too.↩︎
Quarantine Diaries, Day 30
Toilet paper and hair clipper shortage will soon be joined by chalk shortage in Amstedam. Our courtyard and pavements are full of children’s chalk drawings and scribllings.
Chalk drawings