Corona 5: Scheiße

"Corona Virus ist nicht schön!" Helga likes to say. She has been known to be correct about some or even many things, and in this particular situation, she is right again. The Corona-Krise is affecting many people in many different ways. We are (so far anyways) much better off than many people (and we are thankful for that) who have really been directly affected but it seems no one is immune from the secondary effects. Just last week the high tech offices of [LARGE MULTI-NATIONAL PEOPLE TRANSPORTATION CORPORATION MASQUERADING AS FRIENDLY PROGRESSIVE START-UP] here in Munich were hit pretty hard by said secondary effects when approximately half of the office was laid off. Our GWMD protagonist Pemulis was thankfully spared but things will certainly change -- and not necessarily for the better -- with these drastic and unfortunately quite unexpected Corona-Krise upheavals.

In other very related news, Germany has started to "gradually" reduce the social restrictions on society and as anyone with half a brain could have told you, the results are already frustratingly disappointing; from The Guardian: "Germany sees infections rise again after easing lockdown". Well duh. The problem is not necessarily with the letter of the law -- the estimated transmission rate had dropped to somewhere around 0.5 in the last weeks. Having a closed economy and keeping kids out of schools can in many cases be worse than the disease itself and a number that low warrants some changes to the blunt instrument of total lockdown. But as is almost always the case, there is what the law says, what can be and is enforced, and what people interpret as the repercussions, severity, and seriousness / necessity of laws and regulations. In this case, if you look outside in almost any city in Europe, one can very successfully apply the adage: give people an inch, and they will take a mile.

It seems that people's default understanding of rules are to the letter, rather than the spirit, of those laws. And unfortunately, the spirit of the law is generally what matters. Perhaps the regulation changes should have read something like "you may now gather in groups... if you absolutely have to". Without those last few words -- which are of course lacking -- people seem to generally take the rule as "you may now gather in groups... because there is no more danger of any kind whatsoever... why not have a BBQ? Have a big party because all the badness (TM) is over". It is nicht schön being the pessimist / realist here, but I'm fairly sure this is not some transient disruption to our lives that will end and then everything will go back to normal. Barring the fact that for many people their lives will never be the same again, for everyone we have to come to the realization that life might forever be different. It has to be.

As of yesterday all stores in Germany can open. Anyone inside the store -- customers and employees alike -- must wear a mask, but it's still kind of crazy. The transmission rate is estimated to have gone up past 1.0 again and that was really fast. Especially because you'd think that many sensible people are taking either a wait-and-see approach or at least are understanding the fact that while we can go out and do more things, it doesn't mean that we have to. I would like nothing more than a return to something resembling normality: being able to go to my office so that I could actually concentrate on work for more than 7 minutes at a time; going for a walk down the Maximilianstraße past Cartier, the State Opera, and the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten to get a really good coffee; buying a couple of groceries on the way home without worrying and spending 30 minutes wiping them down with antibacterial wipes once I get home.

The big difficulty for me, I think, is not being able to have a specific future to look forward to. There's always been a running race or a trip somewhere or a visit from a friend to point to in the near future and know that it's something that's coming and so the current pattern of getting up, working on something, figuring out dinner, cleaning up, and going to bed will at least be broken up for a little bit in a little bit of time. But it's hard to hold that hope right now because our future is anything but specific.