Tensions in the waiting room
IRISH people’s attitude to Covid-19 depends on who we were last talking to, or which expert we last heard. We are up and down like yo-yos with this thing. One minute, shure it’s going to be grand probably and it’s just like a bad flu season and we didn’t shut down the country for that, and the next minute it’s the end of the world and we are creating toilet-roll mountains in our homes and talking about the insanity of having a St Patrick’s Day parade.
No one is quite sure why people have fixated on toilet paper as the main commodity to be stockpiled. Perhaps people believe toilet paper will become the new currency when society collapses. Whatever the reason, it’s top of the list. You can easily spot people doing their coronavirus shop — pasta, rice and toilet paper.
Right now, as we worry and wait and wait for the full onslaught, Covid-19 has brought us all together. We love a collective experience in Ireland. This is not a very nice one but still, it is a common interest we all share, a great conversation starter, and we are all keen to seek out each other’s opinions on it. Because everyone has an opinion. We are all medical and handwashing experts now (‘Make sure you do the thumbs as well; a lot of people’s techniques neglect the thumbs’). And we have an insatiable appetite for actual experts, too. If you’re some kind of doctor type, but your heart is in showbiz, this really is your time.
But for all that it has brought us together right now, you feel that as this goes on it could tear us all apart. Though they are innocent victims who deserve huge sympathy for what must be a very frightening experience, there is a slight nasty sense going around that people who have Covid-19 are irresponsible to have got it, and to be passing it on to other people. Resentment is riding high in workplaces and schools. People are not happy with other people’s carry-on. And of course it is always other people, isn’t it? For some reason, none of us think we will get the virus, we are more concerned with protecting ourselves from the infected hordes.
And as we listened to an excellent Cork GP, a new voice that Ivan Yates had unearthed, telling us the granular detail of what self-isolation involves, we also had a slow dawning realisation. People can’t be trusted to do this. People are not going to wear gloves to take the used dishes and cutlery from outside the bedroom door of the quarantined party. Or wait an hour to use the bathroom after them. Indeed some people who have a nagging feeling they should self-isolate will convince themselves there’s no need, because it will seem like too high a price to pay.
On a broader note, this outbreak has caused us to reflect on the fragility of the interconnected world we take so much for granted.
You wonder if Covid-19 may get us to rethink that world in a way that terrorism or global warming didn’t. You wonder if we will all be a little less cocky about how we live our lives now.
But then, like so many things right now, we just don’t know yet.