Waiting in Memphis – even Elvis bows to coronavirus
In Memphis, a legendary Kiwi ‘flu hunter’ is among a small group of expatriates who are hunkering down. reports.
Three days after a defiant statement pronounced they’d stay open, the gates of Graceland closed yesterday. Even The King, it seems, can’t outrun coronavirus. Like everywhere else in the United States, and the entire world, it has been a wild past two weeks in Memphis, Tennessee, as the spread of Covid-19 has paralysed economies and shut down life as we recently knew it.
After initially declaring a state of emergency, Mayor Jim Strickland yesterday shut down all businesses – save supermarkets, pharmacies, hardware stores, petrol stations and a few other limited spots.
Since Tuesday, my wife has been working from home.
On the street where we live, cars fill every driveway.
A nearby railway track has trains rumbling past at twice the rate they were a fortnight back; evidence, perhaps, of the Big Machine winding up to keep America fed.
In the carpark of a nearby college football stadium, a massive drive-through testing station was being set up last week, one of seven around a city nearly twice the size of Christchurch.
With spring on the way, it’s warming up – but all interactions when walking the dog see you come no closer than three or four metres to other folks. Already, hugs and handshakes seem an antebellum luxury.
Like the slow-motion days before the hurricane hits, this is what the coronavirus pandemic in Middle America looks like right now. The truth is that no-one knows what it will look like in a couple more weeks.
As a New Zealander so far from home, that makes the width of the Pacific feel more like that of the solar system.
Although the Kiwi population here in Bluff City is small, it features a bloke from Balclutha who knows more than most about the spread of pandemics.
Legendary virologist Dr Robert Webster has been described by the World Health Organisation as ‘‘the father and mother of influenza’’ – and has been warning for more than 50 years about the frightening spread of pandemics.
To Webster, who still works at the Department of Infectious Diseases at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, the dramatic economic and social changes the coronavirus pandemic have caused in such a brief stretch come as no surprise.
‘‘The world has become complacent,’’ the 88-year-old says.
‘‘Scientists have provided better and better medicines and better and better vaccines. ‘‘[But] the public has become complacent.
‘‘There’s no such thing as the Black Death, [and] there’s no such thing as the 1918 flu, but the potential for each of those things is still in existence. It’s inevitable – nature will get us.’’
Of all the words I’ve heard lately about coronavirus, complacency seems to be the one that best sums up the initial response.
Outside the likes of South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong, governments across the world have been caught on the back foot.
Despite finding its first case on the same day, January 20, as South Korea, , US President Donald Trump initially downplayed the seriousness of coronavirus.
Two months ago, public conversation about it here was virtually nil. It was only really the collapse of the stock market, beginning late last week, that got people talking.
‘‘As soon as the Chinese put out the sequence of the virus, the South Koreans made the primers, brought in hundreds of young people and trained them on the tests – and sent them all over South Korea,’’ says Webster, whose research forms the fundamental knowledge about bird flu (H5N1).
‘‘They knew exactly what was happening and when. You are seeing what is happening in the United States – we are just not prepared. It’s very embarrassing when politicians don’t listen to scientists.’’
Of the 228 coronavirus cases in Tennessee, there have been 30 confirmed in Memphis. Two days before, that number was just four. None have died yet – a fact that will soon be rendered irrelevant.
Although footage of winding lines outside gun stores in other states does make you a little nervous, I’ve seen no signs of widespread panic in Memphis yet. Home of freight giant FedEx, it fortunately sits on a sweet spot in the Great American Supply Chain.
Yet, like anywhere else, the great economic handbrake that coronavirus has pulled on the world is going to potentially devastate small and medium-sized businesses in Memphis.
Two weeks back, I had my last call at a Memphis bar – Alex’s, a rad dive on Jackson Avenue with a leaky roof, cheap Miller High Life, and two outstanding old-school jukeboxes.
Rocky Kasaftes, who owns a business his dad started in the 1950s, told me he reckoned he’d get through, but that was before Strickland closed the city’s restaurants and bars (most now offer kerbside pickup and home delivery – expect to see this soon in New Zealand).
You have to worry about the likes of Rocky in the coming months, and the people they employ. The longer the shutdown, the more likely they’ll join the ranks of the millions it has been predicted will become unemployed soon.
Many will have to rely on the struggling American public healthcare system then, too, which has seen wide-scale dismantling since the beginning of the Trump administration.
Outside the US, Webster has been impressed by New Zealand’s decision to shut its borders and take vigorous handwashing and social distancing cues. ‘‘If you can gently poke this virus through the population without major peaks, [that] would be the goal,’’ he says.
A former hooker for the South Otago High School 1st XV, he will be riding out the pandemic in East Memphis with his Kiwi-born wife Marjorie. Given their ages, both are at high risk during the coming months. They have already instituted rigid social distancing, and have had visits from children and grandchildren cancelled for the coming stretch.
Despite the hard months ahead, Webster is confident that the worldwide scientific community, which is already engaged in a race for a vaccine, will respond to the Covid-19 challenge.
‘‘From the point of view of a scientist, it’s really a very, very interesting huge experiment that’s going on,’’ he says.
‘‘Scientists are going to watch it and hopefully control it as soon as possible. I’m optimistic that there will be antivirals, monotonal antibodies being chased like crazy at the moment by scientists.
‘‘There will be medicines produced, I would hazard to guess, within three to four months. The medicines will come first, then the vaccines will take a year, a year and a half, because the vaccines have to be given to healthy people. They have to be tested for safety.
‘‘Medicines are given to people who are in trouble and can be tested much more quickly. Let’s hope they can get that done.’’
What the world – from New Zealand to the US – will look like by then is anyone’s guess.
Mostly based in Australia and Britain, up to one in seven Kiwis will be riding out the coronavirus pandemic away from home. We’ll all find our ways of keeping that home alive in us, whatever happens.
For me in Memphis, it’ll come in the form of plenty of FaceTime calls, emails and text messages.
It’ll come in a specially saved bottle of Craggy Range merlot, two bottles of Lakeman Taupo Thunder, and a barely opened box of Bell Tea.
It will be in the smiling photos of my wha¯ nau and friends around our house, a book of Bill Hammond paintings, a lighter from the Waipapakauri Hotel, and a pumice stone from the soil under our family farm in Rangitaiki. Little taonga to get you through.
From all us Kiwis away from Aotearoa for the nasty stretch coming up, we love you and miss you heaps – and know that we’ll see your trembling hands again.
‘‘You are seeing what is happening in the United States – we are just not prepared.’’ Dr Robert Webster