By Jordan Elgrably
Every night at 8 pm, we all go out on our balconies to clap, shout, scream, whistle and beat on noisemakers to show our appreciation for the nurses, doctors and other hospital personnel who are working overtime to fight back against the virus. Our passion for these brave caretakers is authentic, because almost everyone knows someone affected by COVID-19, or knows they may soon find themselves in the emergency room.
Fleeing the noise, traffic and high prices of Southern California, my writer wife and I arrived in the south of France in 2017, along with our young son. We were economic refugees, looking for a better and somehow less complicated life. Now I know “the south of France” sounds swank, but we live in Montpellier, where the cost of living is about half what it is in Los Angeles. We also came here as willy-nilly political refugees, narrowly escaping the advent of Trump. In fact we arrived in Montpellier with our dog Sophie Marceau and bulging suitcases precisely a week before the orange menace’s inauguration.
I would love to go on about the many pros and fewer cons of our fair city, but here we are, marking two weeks in home confinement, doing our part to reduce the COVID-19 curve. You’ll have to forgive us, this is our first pandemic and we’re not very good at it. While we homeschool our son, I telecommute to work as a high tech writer, and venture out now and then for food and medicine. We’ve noticed just how quiet it has become, as almost all traffic has ceased, and the skies are clean and clear. In fact it’s so quiet these days that I find I miss the sound of helicopters landing at the hospital pad across the road—have I mentioned that we happen to live a few hundred meters from the two largest hospitals in Montpellier, LaPeyronie and Arnaud de Villeneuve? And that Montpellier is a university town with thousands of medical students who work for the CHU—le Centre Hospitalier Universitaire?
Wednesday, March 25th was one of the worst days in recent memory. El País reported that 738 people died on this day in Spain from the coronavirus, the highest daily death toll in Europe. My heart aches for the families of those who have lost someone.
You would expect life as we know it to come to an absolute standstill since French president Emmanuel Macron ordered the country shut down on March 16th, but the trams continue to run, even though they are almost always empty, ghostlike, carrying but a handful of passengers, most of whom are veiled or wear hospital masks. There’s almost no one in the street. I have ridden my bike to go shopping at the big Carrefour supermarket two kilometers from our flat, but each time there is a long line snaking around the building and I give up, riding my Trek down the road to the nearby Casino, where the line is shorter but it nonetheless takes half an hour to get in the door.
Insatiably, I consume news about France (mediapart, lemonde, midilibre) and the USA on social media and from the New York Times, Washington Post, the L.A. Times, the Hill, Politico and Jacobin; and I watch for news of Italy and Spain out of concern for our neighbors. I can’t believe it when I learn that Trump wants to reopen the country in time for Easter—doesn’t he know that we won’t be in the clear for months? And that the influenza virus that hit the world 100 years ago endured for three years and killed as many as 50 million people?
In 2015 Bill Gates gave a TED talk in which he declared that the world was less likely to endure the loss of millions of people due to a nuclear catastrophe than to an influenza contagion…
America’s selected president (I have a major beef with the Electoral College) appears prepared to accept the political blowback that could result from the death of a million Americans, as long as the economy restarts. He’s a repugnant narcissist, a corrupt cretin who belongs in prison, along with his smarmy, cunning children—especially his son-in-law Jared Kushner. They all think they’ve won this unprecedented opportunity to enrich themselves, instead of understanding that their patriarch was elected to be a public servant—yet of course, everything with Trump is about Trump.
On Friday, the 27th of March, the coronavirus killed nearly 1,000 people in Italy, the highest daily death toll this year. No one doubts the numbers will continue to rise.
My question is, why hasn’t the president gotten sick from COVID-19, when people in his entourage have contracted the virus? Is he the devil incarnate (I’m not even joking)? If one good thing comes out of this pandemic, it will be that Trump’s incompetence in beating back the contagion will cause him to be voted out in November.
Around Montpellier, in our region of Occitanie, they are beginning to set prisoners free. Some have nowhere to go, but most will find their way.
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