Coro Veegnette
(Sample extract from story three times longer)
(Mon. – Thurs., March 23 – 26, 2020)
The eastern world, it is explodin’,
Violence flarin’, bullets loadin’,
You’re old enough to kill but not for votin’,
You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’?
On the RNZ News, March 23rd: “A doctor says people must remain patient with staff at medical centres.” – Very good, I hope they don’t have to be patients.
Way back in the mid-1960s – yes, I can remember and I was there! – I admired these great lines above from “Eve of Destruction”, a good song for the times. It was about the Vietnam War and now leaders in the world are announcing that we are at war with a virus, the coronavirus or Covid-19, which originated in China. The singer of the song, Barry McGuire also mentioned “the Jordan River has bodies floatin’”, “Red China” and “my blood’s so mad, feels like coagulatin’ ”, over 55 years before this virus threatened the world.
Prescient stuff there, but of course one can make parallels about anything, collect a heap of examples and statistics to scare everyone that something’s happening again, and this time it’s going to wipe us all out.
Something we’ve not heard about for a couple of weeks is climate change! So almost as if climate change wasn’t bad enough or big enough, something comes along that will destroy land, take people’s homes and cause mass migrations. We have to endure coronavirus, or CoroVee as I call it. And some people out there are explaining it by saying it’s a punishment from some god or other, probably something quirky that some folk get into, the end of the world is nigh and all that, but they really do believe that it’s karma, we’re being punished for our sins and what we’ve done to the environment. As if that kind of thinking will help!
On the 28th February, 2020 New Zealand had its first case of COVID-19, a woman returning from Iran. The second case was on the 4th of March. There had been 6000 tests by March 22nd, showing 66 positive cases.
Don’t get me wrong about this virulent virus thing, I’m a true believer, it’s serious and bad, and I applaud everything governments have done to combat CoroVee, especially our government here in New Zealand. They are clearly following best practice, taking expert advice and keeping an eye on the statistics. And look at those! There are heaps of stats out there, they’re on the News every hour, the newspapers are full of them, and you can read them by the cartload online! As of today, March 23rd, worldwide there have been over 415,000 cases – and I don’t mean boxes of wine! Of those hundreds of thousands, over 18,000 people have died. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you the ratio of deaths to cases, but it’s about one death to 23 cases, or nearly four deaths in a hundred. Call it 4%.
Therefore if you get CoroVee, you can have a fair expectation of being among the 96 survivors out of a hundred. And more happy news, more news that is happy I mean – almost 110,000 of the cases have recovered, so if you take off the deaths there you get nearly 397,000 cases. Then take off 110,000 people who have recovered and that’s 287,000 cases – not sure what’s happened to them, possibly still in recovery. Yes, OK, I just Googled and got stats around “Active Cases”, which is over 290,000 people in “mild condition”. Let’s take that to mean not feeling well, perhaps a bit like the flu we’ve all had at some time, and you get a percentage there of “Mild Conditions” against “Currently Infecteds”, a percentage of, wait for it, 96%, so you start to get some idea of the super sensational time the media are having, outstripping by far the titillating attractions of crime, fire and other natural disasters. Something of a relief!
As of March 22, there have been 75 road deaths this year in New Zealand, a decrease of 14 compared to the same period in 2019.
I can hear people saying about statistics, “Oh, you can’t believe everything, they’re just statistics, probably false anyway.” Who was it said there are three kinds of lies – lies, damned lies, then there are statistics? No, it wasn’t Richard Nixon or Charles Ponzi or President Donald, but the Tom Sawyer creator, Mark Twain. The thing some folks say about statistics is they’re often used to strengthen poor arguments. Well, I don’t think people dying all over the world is a weak statement. You see, statistics in this kind of situation are the only tangible thing we have, apart from images on the telly and pix in the papers, of course, which tend to be emotional, but stats are things of the mind, they’re cold and hard. We can check them and they provide a terrible measure of the awfulness of the number of deaths and the rampant infectiousness, just by hearing the likes of 800 deaths in Italy (that’s mainly in the north of Italy, by the way), and nearly 5000 cases in the whole of Italy. Work that one out. It comes to over 16 deaths per 100 cases. Furthermore, statistics can bring good news, giving a picture and proof of improvement, grounds for hope as we fight this CoroVee invader.
Japan’s first case of CoroVee was on the 16th January, 2020 in a resident of Kanagawa Prefecture who had returned from Wuhan, China. Between the 11th March and the 23rd March there was a second outbreak introduced by travellers and returnees from Europe and the United States. The Japan National Institute of Infectious Diseases says that the majority of viruses spreading in Japan derive from the European type while those of the Wuhan type have been reducing.
Going back to the people now infected, over 260,000, about 5% of them are in a serious condition, that’s around 13,000, but Italy has over 3,000 of these, Spain and France over 2,000 each, so that leaves 5,000 for the remaining 192 countries affected by CoroVee – that’s not forgetting one so-called international conveyance, a cruise ship. That was the Diamond Princess in Yokohama, which is near Tokyo, Japan, a country in recovery, friends there reporting that all shops, department stores, restaurants, everything is open for business. How so?
It beats me, but some say that it’s to do with Japan’s culture of cleanliness, sort of suggesting that the rest of us are dirty, not a scientific thought nor a complimentary one. Japan’s statistics show at March 24th that there were almost 1,200 cases compared to – let’s pick France with half the population and over 22,000 cases – that’s 18 times more than Japan. Japan has 43 deaths and France 1,100, so that’s more than 25 times as many. Therefore, maybe there’s something to the cleanliness explanation, or more likely it’s because Japan is surrounded by water, or it could be their low rates of testing, meaning that there are way more cases than are being found, perhaps to keep things looking good for the Olympics, but this reason doesn’t hold good anymore now that they’ve been postponed.
Japan has the same attitude as China to people making waves, going against the grain, and would probably have hidden away any doctor blowing the whistle on a virus, same as happened to the poor “trouble-making” doctor in Wuhan, where CoroVee is said to have started. The Japanese language actually has the word, “mondaijin” for someone who causes upset by criticising the system. Further, Japan has an old population, same as Italy, so there’s a similar vulnerability, and Japanese men are heavy smokers, the same as Chinese, so Japan would be equally likely to succumb to the virus.
There are few restrictions in place, people are still shopping, still frequenting bars and restaurants, still jam-packing into trains and going to work. Actually, one of the reasons for not closing down could be that Japanese people, mostly men, have a psychological attachment to being at work, a group thing. So what could be the real reasons for Japan not needing to close up shop? There can’t be a cover-up of the number of cases because this is not North Korea, not a totalitarian regime. Japan’s doctors or other medical personnel would have to report. Could it be luck? That’s a bit of a stretch given the virulent nature of the virus. Then there’s the possibility that Japan’s culture of bowing, social restraint and cleanliness, combined with the actions already taken by the government have somehow come together to work a miracle.
I’ll be keeping a close watch on hanami, or cherry blossom partying where large groups of people eat and get merry drinking sakè under the trees in the parks. Perhaps a bullet has already been fired and there is no dodging it for Japan, just a matter of time.
To personalise this, I received a letter during this time period from my old friend, Allan who has lived and worked in Tokyo more than 35 years. He wrote this below on March 22, 2020.
It seems that the Japanese authorities are on top of things. I think the culture of cleanliness is possibly a positive factor. I don’t know about other areas of Tokyo but in Ikebukuro and our neighbourhood things seem normal. Almost all shops and restaurants are open but with reduced hours. Yesterday, on my morning walk, there was a line of about 20 people waiting for a drugstore to open. I don’t suppose they were wanting only toothpaste. Tissues and toilet paper seem to be well stocked. I’m not sure if they’ve introduced rationing. People are coming and going. There are many delivery trucks. Schoolyards are open for kids to play.
Daughter Kaede stayed over last night. This morning younger daughter, Sakura, her husband and grand-daughter Hannah came for lunch. In the fine weather we all went to a small park about four blocks way. There were several adults and half a dozen kids, no special signage or cautions, everything normal. Then we went to a nearby school where Hannah enjoyed running up and down some steps. There were dozens of kids and many adults. We all had a fine time. I hope that Japan’s good fortune lasts.
Like Japan, North Korea must be pretty clean, too. It has a few borders, but I heard they have no cases of Corovirus, more likely to do with no naughty foreigners visiting. Actually, North Korea isn’t on the long list of 197 countries affected by the virus. If you think that there are 210 countries which participate in the FIFA World Cup Football competition, then there are a few lucky countries not on the list of ones invaded by CoroVee.
On March 22, Lorenzo Sanz, the ex-president of Real Madrid football club, died at the age of 76. I don’t know if it was Corovee related.
This is a sentence from one of the sources used for this “report”: “However, hotels and restaurants, cafes and bars were not fearing (sic) as well, going down 59 per cent and 44 per cent respectively.”
I am glad they had no fears!
As an aside here since I was on about the media pirhanas, it’s a great chance to learn new vocabulary for some people, even native speakers. Foreigners must be learning heaps with all the repetitions in meaningful contexts. Not that all the words get pronounced in the usual way, I mean the number of times I’ve heard the word “unprecedented”, even if they do oddly pronounce the second syllable as “pree”. It’s a good word for everyone to know. Then there’s the likes of quarantine, symptoms, fatalities, virulence, lockdown, epidemiologist, sphinkter, immunity, veganism, vaticination – don’t tell me I’ve misspelt vaccination! It’s a real word! Go and look it up! Then there’s respiratory disease – and that’s not pronounced “respitory” please! One misspeller – well, actually a “mister” – wrote that silly spelling to me recently and then argued for its form! It fair took my breath away! Apart from having “rat” in the middle, the key to it is also “spir” there, meaning breath, you need breath for spirit, or rather spirit is breath, so it’s not “spit-” there, it’s “spir-”, so we get respiratory. Give it a good Scots “r”, as they would say it in Scotland with the rhotic accent, the “r” sound a postalveolar approximant. Yeh, that’s the tapping “r” sound that Scots speakers make, commonly called a burr. The origin of the word rhotic is from the Greek alphabet, the 17th letter being “rho” – it comes after omicron and before sigma, in case you’re interested.
OK, while I’m on a roll, that’s “rroll”, not just the accent stuff. Here are a few more good words from this CoroVee reporting, if not all equally useful or even relevant: pandemic (that’s “pandaymuc” in New Zealand), virologist, uvula, surgical mask, immune-compromised, vituperation, vaccine, incubation, oxter, mucous membranes, asymptomatic, flout, vasectomy, pestilence, peripatetic, pulmonary, herd immunity (first time I heard that), hand sanitiser, flatten the curve, sneeze into your elbow, wash your hands and vegetables, trace and track that contact, and finally, vulnerable – that last word oft repeated as in “vulnerable age group”, so people can surely start to spell and pronounce it right. I just noticed quite a few “V” words in the above list, perhaps they go with “virus”. Yes, so you can get this: “very vituperative virologist’s voices versus virulent Chinese viruses”. And I learned recently a good expression from the Chinese language. During the Wuhan lockdown there was a lot of tension between local authorities and the state government, each blaming the other. This kind of refusal to take responsibility, opting to blame each other is called “throwing woks” in Chinese. So there!
And it’s an “epidaymuc” in New Zealandish.
(I’m sure you would like to read more of this well-concocted story full of information. All you have to do is go to the Fine Line Press website and look in the Menu for “Stories”.)