CV19: The start

Watching the tennis at the Uni Bar

As we launched into 2020 everything seemed normal except for the veracity of the bushfires. I was eating, drinking, watching the tennis and cricket on TV and going to uni a few days a week. I eventually became aware of a virus attacking people in China. I wondered about my Chinese friends, whether they and/or their families were caught up in it.

It turned out there was an issue. I’d forgotten that someone I knew had planned a holiday to China to celebrate her recently completed PhD and was going to stay with the family of one of our Chinese friends. The family didn’t live in the epicentre of the virus, so despite having some trepidation, she boarded the plane. She discovered all of China was on lockdown, despite reports that it was only Wuhan subject to this rule. Within a couple of days she realised she needed to return to Australia but contacting Australian authorities for information was proving difficult and the more she looked at booking flights, the less there were and the more expensive they became. She eventually booked a flight at exorbitant cost and it turned out to be one of the last few commercial flights from China to Australia due to the Federal Government ban. She was advised to self-isolate for 14 days but it wasn’t compulsory. She did.

Soon after this occurred, Scott Morrison announced that Australians returning from China on repatriation flights were going to be forced into isolation at the Christmas Island Detention Centre. I was horrified. I am concerned at the xenophobia wrapped up in this decision. It stands in stark contrast to the hotels for Australians returning from elsewhere in the world during the last few weeks.

At the end of January, even though there were some cases in Australia, they were reportedly people who had flown to Australia from Wuhan, so it still felt like a Chinese problem and basically an issue not in my own personal world. However, it edged a little closer when I did my first couple of casual teaching days. For instance, there was hand sanitiser in every classroom which felt like a luxury, given there were none left on the supermarket shelves. There were also a number of students with Chinese names absent due to the government’s decree that anyone returning from China were not to attend school for 14 days. It felt like the fabric of the school community had been torn a little.

I didn’t work for the rest of February and life went on as normal. I went to the dentist and the hair salon, I travelled to Adelaide and attended a concert in Hunter Valley, I went to uni and socialised with friends regularly. Yet, there was a little cloud forming over these activities.

A cloud also formed at uni. On Facebook, one of my Chinese uni friends received a nasty message, clothed in religion, from a fellow PhD student. It basically claimed that the virus was due to their lack of belief in God. Partly due to this and partly to support our Chinese friends who couldn’t be back home to celebrate with their families, the rest of us organised a Chinese New Year lunch at the local shopping centre. It was a nice time of companionship and the food was wonderful.

My next blog post will be about the cloud becoming a storm.