Sun Jan 26
We wake up before noon on our second full day of isolation. Lin's mom asks us to come over again. Lin wants to see the baby. I get a bad feeling about it and try to put it off a few hours, or until tomorrow. It would be nice, but it feels risky. Our headline update is "Chongqing New Coronavirus Update: 18 Newly Confirmed Cases Reported, Group Tours Suspended." We publish a story about Chongqing's emergency control measures. We list several foreigner-friendly hospitals. No one I know is sick yet. The government is discouraging travel, and our hopes at a nice vacation are canceled. Instead, an indefinite staycation.
Online we are discussing lots of ideas. Is it an airborne virus? Probably not, it seems. Just coughs and sneezes and touching stuff. The best thing to do is to stay away from other people. It feels like an attack on Chinese culture. It's our biggest holiday where close proximity, where eating off shared dishes with our chopsticks shows we are together, a community, a family, and every city has traditional events like dragon dance, huge parties, and lots of cultural tourism that supports low-income rural communities. Now all of this is canceled.
Later, Lin says she wants to go to the family house tomorrow. If I don't want to go, she can stay a few days and come back. I don't like the idea, not because I am afraid to be alone, but because this thing has a long incubation period. If she is sick, she could infect her parents and the baby and then me when she returns. It's probably an overreaction. I say, let us think it over. I ask a friend on WeChat. He encourages me to talk her out of it, citing rumors about asymptomatic transmission. Lin agrees to discuss it tomorrow over lunch.
It's been five days since the shopping market adventure and two to three days since the family dinner. We feel fine. That particular panic that I'm already sick starts to subside. iChongqing news said there is strict body temperature check at public transportation, airport, railway stations and buses.
I write a chapter for my new book. I stay up really late listening to YouTube videos.
Some are official news broadcasts, others are doctors and you tubers with Ph.D.'s in virology and pathology and the try to give it some context. Some of it sounds pretty bad, some of it ok. It only affects the elderly, mainly, mainly men, and those with a compromised immune system. We're not the main at-risk group, but having pneumonia when the hospitals are full is still a nightmare. Xiaolin's shoulder is still sore from those beautiful narrow cobblestoned streets of Rome, Italy, and a suitcase so packed with gifts and clothes and face creams that a wheel broke off. We've been to the hospital for an MRI recently, and her medicine to control the inflammation and settle it down will run out soon. What will we do?
Staff at Chongqing Bei (North) Railway Station takes body temperature for arriving passengers on January 24, 2020. (Photo by Hu Jie)