Thursday, March 12, 2020 - In Chongqing, We Trust

Day 48. My heart bleeds for Italy. Just seven months ago, we waltzed through dreamy Piazza's as if we had all the time in the world, and now they are fighting an invisible war. Italian Medical Chief Roberto Stella Dies of Coronavirus at 67. RIP.

Some criticize China for moving slowly at first, but we had no idea what we were up against. What about the rest of the world who saw China lock down hundreds of millions of people in a herculean effort to contain the infectious disease? How many moved swiftly? Many said, "oh, that's China." Italy didn't worry too much until the viral bomb, as their lead doctors describe it, went off, leaving them forced to make impossible decisions. Now America and Canada can look at China and Italy, and know what's coming. Are they making the right moves? Or waiting until it's too late.

Reports from Italy's northern region paint a picture of hospitals at 200% capacity. Many patients sit in chairs with oxygen reservoirs, there are no beds available. Doesn't it sound like Wuhan in the first days? If not worse. Patients over 65 are not being assessed. Let that sink in. In the posh, northern region of Lombardy, older patients, often wealthy and powerful in life, are left to gasp for breath and die because the doctors and nurses need to focus on those that have a chance. It's battleground triage at its goriest.
Many doctors and nurses are falling ill yet keep working to treat the sick until they collapse. Only a small portion, 10%, of the hospitals dedicated to Non-COVID-19 patients are even screening health care workers. Forget about elective surgeries, strokes, and other emergencies, they are not being treated. This is what is coming and growing exponentially.

This is exponential growth. It's why a 'wait and see' approach will doom you to disaster. How did it happen in Italy? Let’s take a look. On January 31, Italy had two people infected with the virus. By February 3, it was three people. A week after that, it was 17 people. Three days later, on February 24 it was 219 people. Four days later, Feb 28, 821 cases. A week later, March 6, 3916 cases. Four days later, yesterday, it was 10, 439 cases. Today, it stands at 12,462 cases. Can you guess what that number will be next week? Where is your country in this trajectory, and how long do you have before the boom?  Experts say America is one week behind Italy. One week.

And yet people call me alarmist.

What would I do if I was PM? Stop all travel and isolate cases now. Entering a new city means a mandatory 14-day quarantine. Curtail all tourism and mass gatherings. Life is more important than money. Trudeau, Canada's charismatic healthy young prime minister, said he didn't want to make a knee-jerk reaction and ban travel or cancel gatherings. Today he and his wife Sophie have self-isolated. Word's just in: Sophie Trudeau has COVID-19. By tomorrow we might know if Trudeau himself is sick and expect his knee to jerk after all. A knee jerk is a perfectly normal reaction to getting knocked onto your knees.
All Ontario schools are to remain closed for an extra two weeks after March break. Still, the buffoonish Ontario Premier Doug Ford, yes, the less competent brother of the famous crack-smoking Mayor of Toronto, encouraged people to go out and have a fun March break.

I wonder if, as his father did, Trudeau will have the guts to declare martial law and war measures to enforce an immediate travel ban on non-essential travel, close all gathering, and encourage people to stay home and work together as one to flatten the curve of infection. He'd get my respect back if he could say, "just watch me."

Instead, he's hiding away (self-isolation) as Canada goes into full panic mode and a national emergency. Who's at the wheel? When the media tries to stop us from preparing for so long, the dam breaks, and people will go ballistic. It's moving very fast.

Each person has a duty now to be responsible for the whole of us. This necessary action is the civic duty of all citizens and vital to allowing time for the hospitals to try to cope. This virus can leave critical cases in the ICU for 3 weeks or more, so those who get valuable beds will not be easily cured and recovered.

Some people in the west, sick of the limp wristed and glacially slow leadership, have started a movement called #Stayhome, and the website staythef*ckhome dot com, to teach people about the importance halting the exponential growth to save as many lives as possible. If we look back to the death rate of the 1918 flu pandemic in cities with different social distancing measures, we can see that St. Louis managed to spread things over the better part of the fall into winter, while Philadelphia spiked in October 1918. The seizure in the medical system led to people dying in their homes, in the streets, and it was gruesome.

What can you do? Work from home, dial back your expenses, fill your pantries, and stay home.

Xiaolin is getting ready to visit her parents. We are both exhausted.

My video is done, ready for release. I scrubbed every lurching camera angle from my phone into a 35 minute documentary of my life in Chongqing, essentially a fortified city-state that has taken extreme proactive measures such as self-quarantining everyone who enters for 14 days and monitoring their health, doing temperature checks at all public areas and residential compounds and active testing and contact tracing.

I use my band, the Root Sellers' music catalog, to keep the energy up, but Youtube immediately blocks it. I am working with my friends, label owners, to get the video whitelisted. In the meantime, I feel raw, exhausted, and shaky.

I haven't slept well because I cannot rest until I do everything I can to share my message; for the first time in 25 years in the music business, this is a mixtape with the power to save lives. "Last night a DJ saved my life" has finally come true.

I'm up until past 5 AM, yesterday? This morning? Days are blurring as I fight with Youtube's legal AI, with the desperation of a weak fool who believes his drop in the bucket of good information will be enough to hydrate the Western world, in knee jerk denial of the looming threat. I can't sit back and enjoy a good sleep and lunch knowing something that might inform a policymaker to take broad actions or a family to prepare for their elderly is banned on Youtube because I'm not allowed to use my own music until the legal AI god has their sacrificial lamb.

Am I delusional? Maybe, but when common sense is missing from the conversation, and the data is wrong, or outdated, anyone who's awake and paying attention can save lives if you try hard enough. I am working feverishly, but luckily I am not febrile yet.

Some people have acted on my warnings in the last few weeks and thanked me profoundly for the heads up. A few tell me they wish bitterly they'd listened to me 21 days ago. In a bizarre twist of fate, I've gotten several bites from publishers that want to see my blog turned into a book or a movie. Usually, I'd be thrilled, but today I am stoic. I won't revel in the chaos, but I can lean into it. For those of you still coming up, pay attention: the obstacle is the way.

Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson have tested positive for COVID-19.
A friend working in Vancouver on a film set is now quarantined after an actor from Riverdale has been confirmed positive, and shooting has stopped.

The World Health Organization has declared that dogs do no carry the virus. WHO let the dogs out.

Xiaolin is threatening to leave without me, and I'm still trying to get Baidu cloud to work so I can send this to iChongqing, and using Vimeo, Veoh, and Daily motion to try to get a western bounce online. Nothing is working. My connection and the transfers keep failing or timing out.

I drink a pot of strong black coffee, but the fog and persistent headache are real and throbbing.

Lin says she can leave without me and stay overnight if I need to stay home to work, but I want to see the baby and family. It's been almost two months. Parents are getting old, and the baby is growing up. Plus, let's get real, unless I tell Xiaolin not to come back, any risk she takes will become my risk by tomorrow anyway. For mental health reasons alone, I do not want to be isolated and paranoid, all alone in China, so this is a necessary risk, and we just have to be as safe as we can be. In Chongqing, we trust.

As we leave home, the guard hands us a paper, without gloves on, to show we have the right to be outside. A reusable paper, those other hands have touched. It's no safer than paper money, capable of holding thousands of bacteria molecules, or in this case, the virus.

In Chongqing, we trust, as our guard is lowered.

Out of the taxi, I can enter the compound because an AI has verified I'm coded green: uninfected, and I have the app to prove it. We get to the family house for the first time in 50 days, baby Ethan's father's mother, Heima, comes to pick us up. She's not even wearing a mask, and I'm shocked.

She sprays me down outside the door, six pumps with a handheld alcohol spray drizzled over my body. I'm 'disinfected.' In Chongqing, we trust. This is the disinfection her son gets every day after work? Ok, not so low risk. But it's my family.

The NBA season is canceled, Hockey to follow.

America finally bans all flights from Europe, wait, no, Trump was wrong, just some of them, sometimes. President Trump has a plan to cut 700,000 people off of food stamps April 1, just as the nation braces for a global pandemic when many will lose their jobs and already live paycheck to paycheck.

Once I put away the paranoia and enjoy the family time, they're adorable, my Chinese family. I love them.

Ethan is feeding me slices of orange from his hands, and that's love, from both of us. In Chongqing, we trust. Eventually, I get the video up on Vimeo, it's crunchy but it's there.

What if COVID-19 was a way for us to embrace robot workers and AI because we realize it's safer than human workers?

We have a lovely dinner until Heima, Ethan's father's mother puts some pork on my plate with her chopsticks. The gesture is friendly, but I'm a vegetarian who doesn't want other people's mouths to touch my food. Xiaolin thankfully eats it off my bowl for me, and I hope we're ok. In Chongqing, we trust.

I do trust the precautions are sufficient, and the infections are low. However, I am vigilant because there are holes in even the most stringent precautions, like the permits we recycle that aren't disinfected. If there's another outbreak, I don't want to get caught up in it.

Lin's little sister starts sneezing. She's about three meters away, that's inside the zone. She's sneezing right into the air. I hope it's just pepper because if she caught it at a mahjong game, we're all getting it right now in real-time. I hold my breath and go scrub my hands for a minute or two. Jeffy Spaghetti.

Tonight I need to sleep or something is going to break, my head is throbbing so bad.

Ethan is cruising in this pimped out little truck, driving around the living room, bopping as the radio plays, and the hydraulics bump and grind. He drives over and actually knocks me off my kneeling position. I play along, but he looks alarmed as his bumper rolls over my shoulder, so I push it back and laugh, give him a bow, and get back to work on the couch to write.

The family chases Ethan around the room for an hour, and I call my mom and chat. She's well, grandma is well. Her church has stopped shaking hands, but her bridge group is a high risk, but necessary for her mental health. We all manage risks.

Having a family is great, but it's also a lot of people eating together, breathing, coughing, sneezing, and kissing each other. Put a pin in today, if I'm fine in 14 more days, I'll breathe another sigh of relief. I'm sure I'm fine, and better taking these risks than if I stayed home paranoid and by myself for the next year, but, mental health and family life has its own risk.

People are reacting very differently to the current crisis, and those who mocked me a month ago are now often quite afraid. It's harvest time, and we're gonna find out who's wheat and who's chaff. Stay home, stay safe, and adapt or die.

Xiaolin cuts my hair, in the living room. It looks nice and fresh. They say I look 10 years younger.

Hey Kai, you look great, what's your secret?
Standing desk, global pandemic.

We brought fresh banana bread and a bag of sprouts I grew to her parents and they were happy, and it was delicious.

I watch my video again before bed. The mixtape is tight. Root Sellers' apocalyptic bass music was ahead of its time, but it's aging well. I feel satisfied that I've done what I can do today.

We go home around 10 PM. Pick up a couple of packages and break out my touch screen stylus like an old pro.

Go home, decontaminate and watch a couple of movies, have some wine, beer, and a cuddle. It feels fantastic to relax for once. I've done everything I could do today and this week to spread my news. I did what I can to inform and help those in positions of policymaking and individuals, so I feel some sense of peace.
Finally, against all odds, I enjoy a restful sleep.