A Lack of Complaints

It’s been a strange few days. The lockdown in Georgia has gotten a lot more serious, and in general, I think people are beginning to understand why it’s happening. And with understanding comes more compliance.

First there was a lady in the village of Marneuli who was diagnosed with covid. She had apparently been quite the busybody, going to the celebrations of the annual Azeri New Year (Marneuli is mostly ethnically Azeri), Novruz Bayram, then running off for the anniversary feast of a deceased friend. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, there was news of a Jehovah’s Witness in Zugdidi who had caught the virus. He refused to tell the government who he had been with (I guess for fear of ratting out his fellow Witnesses). On top of that, like any good JW, he was handing out flyers to who knows how many people, each one of those flyers having been handled by his unwashed hands…

Amidst all this, there was the ongoing controversy with the Church. Though many churches did willingly follow some social distancing measures, for the most part they were crowded and pressed inside the chapels (having to make room for the masses of media cameras and crew didn’t help). The Church also made it clear that they would continue using their single spoon during the Eucharist, saying that the Body of Christ was enough to purify the spoon. Other Orthodox Churches throughout the world have since switched to disposable spoons or said you can bring your own, but the Georgians have been very adamant about not following the recommendations of the health officials that seem to have taken charge of the country. Instead of understanding these recommendations for safety, they’ve tried to turn it into a war against the Church. A strange and bizarre time to take on the victim complex, unless they’re actually and literally wanting to become victims…

The thing is though, it would have been possible to get the health message across without it becoming confrontational. Instantly the media picked up on it, and atheists were at the front bashing organized religion and so on, which immediately made the religious posture into an overzealous defensive stance. There are Orthodox sects that don't even use spoons, so spoons are clearly not necessary. But they could have dropped that point and just highlighted the distancing measures – people can get sick by simply breathing the same air, or coughing next to each other. Many Orthodox faithful have already died in Italy in this regard, no spoon sharing required. This is what prompted the Russian Patriarch Kirill to tell people to stay and pray at home (a day later, the Georgian Patriarch announced the same... curious timing that).

Trinity Church (Sameba), main cathedral of Georgian Orthodoxy

When people deal with each other, they approach others with their own set of givens and understandings, often not trying to understand where the other person is coming from. At this point, it's not about winning an argument, it's about saving lives. We have to step back from our own posturing and confrontation in order to get through to the other side. If it means for an atheist to cease his argument, "Your silly spoons won't help, there is no God, you will die!" then obviously that's not going to help either. A religious person would rather die in their commitment to their faith, than to allow an atheist to win on the grounds of there not being a god. And of course, atheists can't understand that either...

Dealing with an entrenched religious organization and a growing realization that Georgian citizens were not going to be able to keep to social distancing on their own, the government decided to declare a State of Emergency. They set up checkpoints outside the major cities, and made a rule that you can’t be in public with more than three people (including in cars, including the driver). Some areas have even ingeniously thrown in the mask rule, to be followed while in a car, because it will obviously help you in filtering out all the recycled air of the people you live with.

Life during coronatime

The rules are understandably strict. No going out for any reason but grocery shopping and visiting the pharmacy or to work at a set of approved locations. No gatherings of more than three people. Supermarkets can only allow a set number of people in. The supermarket next door only lets in 10 people at a time, and they have a regime of sanitation for each incoming person. Some alcohol squirts, some plastic gloves and so on. The supermarket stays pretty well-stocked for now. Unlike in my American motherland, we have access to toilet paper, foodstuffs, and so on. The first immediate rush was for oats and beans – items with long shelf lives – but those have since been restocked. This indicates to me that Georgians will be around much longer than Americans, dirty asses aside.

Georgians are kind of used to these emergencies though. And they have a culture of stocking up for food for six months anyway, as everyone has their farm-grandma who goes nuts bottling, pickling, and/or jamming all the leftovers of each season. This constant stock of some 6 months means that in times of emergency like this, hoarding really isn't necessary. Always ready!

You better believe these two are stocked up already!

Free time?

Scrolling through Facebook has made me somewhat jealous. I see all these people going on about boredom and free time and getting the time now to hone skills that they didn’t have time for before.

I’m blessed enough to have a job where I work from home, but damn, I kind of want some forced vacation.

Actually, this whole ordeal has made me cancel a lot of downtime plans. First my parents were going to come to visit their newborn grandbaby – they were able to cancel, thank goodness, not because of the generosity of the airlines but because the Georgian government had closed the border, forcing their airline to cancel the flight and give a refund.

Then there was this three-person rule. We were going to go to the village and stay with the wife’s family. I had to wrap up a few ends work-wise, where I needed my PC, then we were going to go. Then bam, new rules and we’re stuck here. Of course, had we a car this wouldn’t have been a problem, but since we were relying on a family member to drive us, that would bring us over the 3 person rule. I’d tell my wife to take our son and go, but then they’ve canceled all mass transit, so I’m not sure how I’d follow. At this point, I’m worrying about not taking out the newborn into some fresh air, all of this fart air in the apartment must be getting to him, I’d think.

As these are the worst of my problems so far, I can't really complain. I mean, I can, but it'd be silly, because then I'd literally be complaining that I have a job and a healthy family. And yet, I'm writing this blog. I know what it is, the whiskey supply is running low... #tbilisi #coronavirus

Birjas, Spoons, and Rebellion

The reality of the situation set down upon me perhaps two days ago. The State of Emergency had yet to be declared, but the government had already been pushing the social distancing message. Shops were closing, banks were adjusting policies, the border had been closed, newcomers were subject to forced quarantines, and so on.

I had a package waiting for me at the post office. It’s not far away, just a couple of blocks, so I put on my rain jacket and scarf. Not that the scarf would really do anything, but it was a kind of psychological protection, I guess. That and it was cold.

Leaving my apartment was nothing unusual. It’s usually devoid of life: All cold concrete, a giant slab on one side and a line of cold steel garages on the other. As I wandered down some alleys to the main street, the eerie quiet gave me a vague feeling of the Resident Evil games, waiting for some sort of zombie life to emerge, but I was a bit let down when around the corner bolted a gang of laughing kids, tagging each other and playfully wrestling. A generally pleasant thing to watch on a sunny day, a bit disturbing when the city is trying to manage the spread of a highly infectious virus.

My beautiful apartment block

Then onto the main street. The only unusual thing were the empty buses passing. Otherwise there was regular traffic. Where were these people going? Most businesses had already closed their doors, bars shut down cancelling their events, restaurants converted to delivery operations. In short, there was pretty much nothing to do, unless you were visiting friends and relatives, the exact thing you shouldn’t be doing right now.

And up the main road… mass collections of guys in black clothes on the street, hanging closely together, chain smoking, sharing drinks, getting into cars together, getting out of cars together, sloppily eating street food… what is here termed “birja”, meaning a kind of social marketplace or what have you, going on with full vigor and energy. This was the population that was about to be culled, that’s for sure. Looking from their grimy, black caked hands that have never been washed to the way they sucked down those cheap cigarettes, they seemed to be prime candidates for the upcoming death row. And by the way they seemed to take life grimly serious, never smiling even when joking, it was strange that they wouldn’t take this seriously.

I passed them and continued on my way, reflecting on Georgian society. If the coronavirus hadn’t already hit, it was going to hit Georgia hard. They have a fundamentally social society, few having any clue how to be in self-isolation, and I can’t imagine the despair that would cause one of them. In the course of one day, the common Georgian has probably kissed 20 people, shook hands with 20 more, held his close friends in his arms, kissed them, shared cups, drunk at overly public water fountains, visited no less than three households, and ridden transit in aimless circles for about 50 kilometers. And that’s on a day where a Georgian would answer, “Nothing” if you asked him what he did today. Throw hanging out in a crowded church in the mix and BAM, you’ve got 100 percent of the population infected, except for that handful of weirdo expats who have never met a Georgian and only hang out at strip clubs.

Church during quarantine, pic going around FB lately, source unknown

A state of emergency has now been called, which is great, as that gives the government more power to enforce the 10-man rule. But the Church has decided to take this as an affront to its authority, and as Georgians love any reason to rebel or show off, people are flooding into churches today. Some priests are attempting to be responsible, encouraging their parishioners to maintain some social distancing (in a church without pews, this isn’t an overly difficult thing), but the numbers of parishioners have overwhelmed most of the more practical priests, and then there are the firebrands preaching on about the end of days and others going on about magic spoons, certainly not helping the situation (it’s been a somewhat amusing month on Orthodox FB boards where people have been voraciously debating the theology of magic spoons, an argument I would have thought the Moscow Patriarch Kirill had ended when he proclaimed the spoons to, in fact, not be magic – the Goergians on the other hand maintain their stance – and the more conservative Orthodox accuse the MP of caving into Western Gayropeans and CIA infiltration, and no I’m not making any of this up).

From the boards today

It is what it is. I’ll probably take an effort to not be around any of my religious friends for at least a month though. If they could only have held out until Easter… It's not the time to be heroes. It's the time we should all act if we are sick, as we very well might be, and we don't want to spread the infection to others.

#tbilisi #coronavirus

The Necessity of the Unnecessary

I was going to start trickling in general daddy blogs, with the theme of raising a child in a strange, faraway land. Then the coronavirus struck and now it feels a bit odd if I venture too far off that topic. So how about trickling in daddy blogs about raising a child in a faraway land during the plague?

I’ll admit, I wasn’t that worried about the virus at first. It was in distant China and they seemed to be doing quick quarantine measures. They built that hospital in a few days and seemed like they were reacting much better than during SARS-1. Panic was already building up on social media though, with people asking why China was moving so quickly. But hadn’t it simply been because they had learned their lesson?

Then more and more people around Tbilisi were wearing masks.

This was strange to me. Clearly a sign of panic. Many Georgians love any excuse to don those cheap, paper masks, which according to many don’t actually do anything (unless of course, somebody’s limb just got lobbed off, blood is spraying everywhere, and you want to do something to keep it from flying into your mouth – sick people need them more, so that their sneezes and coughs don’t spray everywhere). During winter, you can visibly see how easily the water vapor passes through… the same goes with respiratory droplets – except big fat ones that might fly in if somebody directly sneezes in your direction, and how often does that really happen?

Anyways, people had started wearing masks.

And there weren't any sick people in Georgia yet. Not one.

People were already in a panic. Was it the media? I don’t know. I don’t watch TV. I read news on the Internet, which means I filter a lot. I tend not to click on clickbait articles by habit. But panic must come from somewhere, so I did start keeping my eye on the news about the novel coronavirus – mostly from WHO updates – but it still didn’t seem something to panic about. It only was really serious with old and obese people and smokers, right? With everyone else, it seemed to be about as serious as the flu, with some outliers here and there.

But then it was proving to be more and more infectious, hitting country after country. Soon Georgia started tallying some numbers. People were flying back from China and Italy, bringing their unwelcome friend with them. But the government was quick to handle them, quarantining people, closing the borders, taking all measures that they could in reason do so early (and indeed, even today Georgia has one of the lowest rates of infection globally). But there were reports of Georgians taking medicines to lower their temperature so they could pass through the border controls, Georgians running out on self-quarantines, even one story (possibly fake) of Georgians overpowering a quarantine bus, crashing it, and running off into the wild.

For some time, Georgia had only “imported” cases, and cases connected to those known imports. But now cases are creeping in, proof of community spread, most likely from those people I just mentioned, the ones that cheated the checks, fell off the radar, and started infecting everyone they came around.

As the tally built, it became less about the healthy people. 1% of 100 might be one person, but one percent of 1,000… of 100,000… of 1,000,000? Now we’re starting to talk about a lot of people who don’t really need to die at the moment.

Sadly, there’s no way we can even save them all. As long as there’s no vaccine, the tactic is to spread the curve. Because the virus is so infectious and it spreads so fast, it’s prone to overload hospitals. That means a few things happen:

1. Not enough respirators for everyone

2. Not enough beds for everyone

3. People who are sick but with minor symptoms get released – and spread the virus

4. People who are not yet recovered, but recovered enough, get released – and might spread the virus

5. Doctors, nurses, and staff are all on overtime and with everyone buying up all the good masks (that you can’t get in Tbilisi anyway), they don’t have access to adequate protection either, so they get sick

All these mean that the rate of death goes from 1-3% to onwards up to 50% among some populations even (just look at Italy… if that doesn’t make you the least bit frightened or sad, you’re a sociopath). The idea behind spreading the curve isn’t to really contain the virus, but to slow it down so the health care system can handle it, the people who need care can get it, those who can survive will survive, the people who are sick don’t spread it further, and most of all, our healthcare workers aren’t worked to death and can still manage to put in the hours.

(By the way, if you want to keep track of the numbers, here is a good site).

And again, maybe it’s not about you. Maybe you’re healthy. I’m healthy, my wife is healthy, my son is 5 months old and healthy (and the virus doesn’t really seem to effect babies anyway). Of course, I am a little worried about my son, but that’s not my real concern.

My parents are old. My wife’s parents are old. Their parents are old. Now, my parents aren’t coming to Georgia (more on that in the next blog). But what about my wife’s parents? Is it safe to visit them? How do I know my allergies aren’t really the virus, and that if we visited, it could be their death sentence, or the death sentence of their parents? That’s what we have to think about.

Sure, social isolation sucks. And maybe for ourselves it seems unnecessary, because I’m not saving myself. But for others what may seem unnecessary has become necessary. The bell doesn’t toll for thee today, my friends. The bell tolls for your parents, for your grandparents, and for all your smoker friends.

#tbilisi #rantsandraves #georgia #coronavirus