The moment I realized that COVID was a thing.
This was written in February 2020, as I flew home from South Africa. It was about a month before the total lockdowns started. On the one year anniversary for when I first heard about this ‘novel’ virus, I wanted to post what I was thinking about a year ago.
February 2020
The fly just landed on me again. I keep hearing it buzz and whiz by, and now, for the third time, it has landed on me and taken off before I can whack it. In most cases I would have been able to get it but my whacking ability is limited by the fact that I have an older Russian man sitting to my right, our arms basically touching, and an American woman on my left who is currently sleeping. I am sitting on a plane heading back to DC and am somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean between Amsterdam and Dulles Airport. The fly does not belong on this plane. It is an intruder, who, hopefully will not wreak havoc on the North American environment when it deplanes. I, though, am ready to be back in North America. In the past three weeks I have traveled through France, Chad (layover), Nigeria, Ethiopia (layover), South Africa, and the Netherlands. The world is currently in the coronavirus scare. For those of you living under a rock, the coronavirus, which started in China, is quickly spreading, and even more quickly spreading fear and panic.* I have never had my temperature taken as many times as I have in the past three weeks. I have never seen as many people wearing masks around airports and on airplanes. When I arrived in Abuja (Nigeria) three weeks ago, we were greeted by a crew of people, who based on a few tell-tale signs I would guess were not public health experts, wearing masks and asking us to fill out forms asking things like ‘have you had cold-like symptoms in the past two weeks?,’ and ‘have you had a fever in the past two weeks?’ We then had our temperatures taken and were ushered into the immigration line, where people from all over the world stood in front of me, and one by one gave their passport to the ungloved, immigration agent who grudgingly wore an ill-fitted mask which he didn’t even have covering his nose. He clearly was wearing this only because he was told he had to. Each passenger had their fingerprints taken on the same little machine, their grimy little fingers pressed into the same unsanitized spot as the person before them. Passenger after passenger, same fingerprint machine, same man checking passports, zero disinfecting of said machine or hands of man. The masks were the public health version of theatre. There for show but a total act.
On Air Ethiopia, every flight attendant wore a mask with their traditional Ethiopian-style uniforms. In South Africa we all had to stay on the plane while ‘health officials’ took our temperatures while on the plane, then again as we disembarked. My passport, looking a bit fuller than the average, has been examined thoroughly for any hints I have been to China recently (I have not). As someone who has worked as both a social scientist and as a public health expert, watching this as I travel has been fascinating. I’m not even traveling in Asia, I have been mostly in Africa with a few European layovers. In Europe they seem much more lax, I suppose having a screening process that targets people coming from where there is actual risk (post-writing side note- they failed).
As I have watched this unfold, it has taken me back to 2009. I was doing my dissertation research in South Africa and Corey and Cora were with me. Cora was about eleven months old when we headed back to the States after a several month stay. Along the way we made friends with Zodwa, who has made a few appearances in my essays. She lives in a village a few hours north of Pretoria and has always welcomed my family and friends when we are in the country. In 2009, on our last night after that extended stay in South Africa, we stayed with her. We slept in the guest house, a round house with two rooms and a thatch roof. The beds were a bit small and so Cora slept with me and Corey in the other room. That night it poured rain. As the rain fell harder and harder, the mosquitos came out of the thatch and decided that this was the best meal they had ever seen in their lives- a baby who was hot and kicking off covers. I spent half the night trying to cover Cora with a light scarf as I heard the buzzing all around. Cora has always reacted badly to bites, and I swear every biting insect will pass over every other living thing to attack her. By morning she was covered in bites. I would estimate she had over a hundred bites covering her tiny little body. Since it was not a malaria region, this was more of an annoyance than a health issue so we went on with life. Our plane left that evening so we packed up the car, said goodbye to our friends and headed to the airport a few hours away. As I was driving down the busy and precarious rural road towards Pretoria, where we planned on stopping to say one last goodbye to friends, I felt something jump on my foot. I looked down to see a frog leaping around on the floor. My guess is that overnight during the rain this little dude or dudette found its way into our car. By the time we made it to Pretoria, four frogs had appeared. These frogs did not belong in the car, but there they were. Like the fly in the plane now. Their lives forever changed as they hitched a ride from their home in the village to the big city.
We eventually made it to the airport and flew to Amsterdam. As we sat in Amsterdam waiting for our flight to the USA, someone came up to us and said we could not board because clearly our daughter had some sort of communicable disease. My little bitten up baby looked contagious. I think I have never felt like a worse mother, as I explained that it was not a virus meant to wipe out humanity, but just a baby covered in hundreds of mosquito bites. They eventually let us on, and luckily there was no global health crisis that the Bishop family started. Cora’s bites healed. No one got salmonella from the frogs. No new intruders on the plane — amphibian, insect or viral.
I hope with this new outbreak, one that I have not yet decided how worried to be about, the outcome is similar to our flight to Amsterdam from Johannesburg years ago, just a worry over something like mosquito bites. But I, as someone in public health, know better. I know this isn’t just bites. The Nigerian immigration officer may want to wear his mask a bit more securely and they might want to invest in some alcoholic wipes for that fingerprint machine. Asking people flying in from Paris if they have had cold symptoms in the past two weeks will not stop this virus. People travel far and wide and air travel is more accessible than ever before. Most countries I work in do not have the ability to test for novel coronavirus, and honestly, people get sick all the time with other serious illnesses like malaria, so this virus could easily take hold on the continent quietly before it is noticed. Most cases are mild, something that I think is widely underreported, and the vast majority of deaths are within the old and those with other health issues, not that that matters to them or their family. Racism against people of Asian descent, impacts on the global economy, the rise of conspiracy theories that hurt our collective ability to solve this problem all concern me as much as the virus itself. Yet, with each passing day I worry this may be less of a situation of a few (ok, a lot) of harmless mosquito bites, and more of a legit time to stop the baby from boarding the plane.
And will someone please kill that damn fly!
