The Quarantine Begins…

This past week everything took a back seat to the pandemic. That’s a weird sentence to write. I remember hearing about the 1918 Spanish Flu, and watching that Downton Abbey season where Matthew’s fiance died tragically. And as someone who is passionately into history, of course I’ve studied all the various plagues like the sweating sickness, which came on and killed in a matter of hours sometimes.

But watching all of this happen in real time is so surreal. Last week the newspaper reported that there was a case of coronavirus in our town. Our daughter has always had respiratory issues since she was small, and got croup all the time. So we were worried about sending her to school.

When I’m not sure what to do in a certain situation, I often frame it in the sense of risk/reward. If you were on the Titanic, and you got in a lifeboat when they first began to launch them (already an hour after the impact) you probably went in thinking that there was no way the ship was actually going to sink. A lot of people supposedly didn’t get on the lifeboats early on because they thought it was a drill, and there was no way the ship would sink anyway.

So you get on the boat, feeling a bit silly. You’re cold, and wondering what you’re doing on a boat in the freezing north Atlantic when you could be warm and snug in bed. Your friends might have even said you were a bit mad for going on the lifeboat. But you shrugged it off.

Let’s say the ship doesn’t sink. What have you lost? A night of warmth in bed. Feeling a bit silly in the morning when you come back to ship and your well-rested friends tease you a bit. You’ll be quite cold. Those are all the things that you’re sacrificing for getting on the boat. And if you don’t get on the lifeboat, and the ship doesn’t sink, you can feel quite smug that you slept through the whole crazy event while your friend was freezing on a lifeboat in the water.

But let’s say the boat does sink. If you got on the lifeboat you’re going to live. If you didn’t, you won’t. Easy peasy. One person gave up a night of warmth in bed to be safe. The other gave up their life for a night of warmth in bed.

That’s how I often look at things when I’m not sure what to do. So the risk of sending the Little One to school is that she could carry it home, and then we all get sick, or infect others. If we keep her home, we have a week of homeschooling where we will go through the things she’s learning at school, play outside, and just have a quiet and peaceful time here on our finca (which is a weird Spanish word I can’t quite translate exactly, but essentially means a home out in the countryside with a fair amount of land, perhaps farmed a bit, and generally with a pool).

Risk/reward. On one hand, we keep her home, and she misses out on a week of school. She’s six, it won’t hurt that much. On the other, we send her, and she potentially catches it, and we all get sick, or make others sick. She might wind up missing even more school, and we’re all miserable for a month.

We decided to keep her home.

I think her teacher thought we were a bit mad when I went in on Monday to get her notebooks. But by Thursday night, all the schools in Spain were being closed like dominoes. First Madrid, the Basque Country, Catalonia, and the rest.

So now we’re on actual quarantine, as opposed to our self-imposed quarantine.

The grocery stores are insane, as they are in the rest of the world, I’m sure. Hubby went yesterday to do the big shop so we won’t have to go out again for several weeks. When he arrived about an hour after Mercadona opened, the lot was 90% full. The entire paper goods section was just empty shelves. No toilet paper, no paper towels, no nothing.

The way the store is situated, you generally hit the meat cases towards the end of the shop the way he was going through it. But he kept noticing others with lots of meat in their carts, so he went over and grabbed all the chicken and turkey that was on our list first, then resumed his normal shop. By the time he got back to the meat cases, about 15 minutes later, the only things left were gross pork cubes. Our freezer, fridge, and pantry are all packed. The entire adventure yesterday, between writing the list, doing the shopping, getting the fridge cleaned out and ready to receive all the food, and then putting it away. By 1pm I had logged 6,500 steps on my fitbit just from that work.

But now we’re in, and we won’t have to leave for several weeks. The papers keep telling us to shop as normal to avoid panic buying, but then in the same article they tell us to just stay home, so honestly, I’m happy with having done our giant shop, and now just staying put.

The weather has been amazing – sunny and warm, and just perfect late-spring weather. But there’s rain in the forecast next week, so ask me again how happy I am then, and the answer might be different. For now, we’re content.