Isolation Is a Privilege by Yori Kamphuis

Sun, Apr 5, 2020

Read in 4 minutes

Amsterdam Hub alumnus, The Netherlands

Isolation, day 3 of week 4. The days pass uneventfully. Seem strung together. No need to travel to work. Still not going out to stores. Most people close to me stay home too. It’s hard to differentiate between the days. For months, my wife and I were getting worried about corona. Yet only a part of that has been spent in isolation. What a privilege that is.

My wife and I started discussing corona’s impact beyond the obvious one on public healthcare in January. She reached out to several people with the question whether they thought it was possible corona could turn into a financial crisis. She was spot on. We had saved some money to pay off part of our mortgage. “Let’s not. If the corona virus is spreading, we might be happier with a buffer than with a lower mortgage.”

The coronavirus and CoVid-19 were in the news. But it wasn’t as dominating as it is now. Yet I read up on it and followed it. It was early March that much of the whole picture of how it could turn into a very nasty situation played out in my mind. I lost hours of sleep. And early during that month, several people suggested I’d stop reading the news that much, because it seemed to be all I could think of – and not everybody understood my intense worry of that time. They were right. I needed to relax as well.

We went into an ‘intelligent lockdown’ in The Netherlands. Meaning everybody was urged to think and assess whether it’d be absolutely necessary to go out. If not, the firm advice is to stay at home. Except for people in vital industries. It’s rather confronting to hear that what I do isn’t vital for our country or economy. Neither is the job of many other people. It’s so clear that we rely on our emergency workers, health care personnel, garbage collectors, our food supply chain and all these other people who are deemed vital. So-called social distancing was also enacted. The same worries that hit me earlier, I now saw in others. The number of messages about bad nights of sleep skyrocketed.

Yet what I’ve seen isn’t social distancing. So many people have shown their most social sides. From doing groceries for people like me, who are in a risk category, to delivering goods for the food banks, to sending out cards and gifts. Businesses and people started to buy flowers and giving them away – to show support to both lonely people and florists. I think physical distancing is a better term for it. Because suddenly, we seem to realize that we can’t do without others. My wife and I will spend that saved money on services over the coming year rather than paying down our mortgage. That’s the more social thing to do. Because it won’t be over just yet.

Despite social distancing and like almost everybody else, people around us were affected. Both fit and frail, young and old. Corona doesn’t discriminate, they say. But in so many ways, it does. I’m privileged to be able to work from home. As my friend David said: we still have a job. We have water and soap. We have money for groceries. And they can get delivered, minimizing infection risk. Frankly, for me, it’s rather easy to stay in isolation.

During those past weeks, our government has been frantically trying to make more IC beds available. The healthcare workers who did the actual job succeeded. Today, the news reached us that we had the smallest number of hospital admissions in two weeks’ time. The number of extra people on the ICs shrunk significantly. That gives hope. It suggests our government listens to science. It suggests we might be able to prevent those horrible scenes from Italy and Spain from happening in The Netherlands. But it’s only frail hope – as everything suggests that many countries will be unable to contain it.