Everyone okay?

[Peter Korsten]

Op 18-3-2020 om 14:37 schreef Jay Vaughan:
> How’s things looking in your neighbourhood, folks?
>
> Here in Vienna, its a beautiful spring day.  Nothing COVID-19-related happening in my immediate neck of the woods.  Vienna sure is quiet, though.

We're the 5th most densely populated country in the world, or 8th if you 
include Macau, Hong Kong and Gibraltar. So we run a very serious risk. 
We've gone from the first case to 73 in about two weeks, with no 
fatalities yet, but one person with bad pneumonia in ITU.

The government has shut schools, bars, restaurants. Everybody is 
encouraged to work from home if they can. So I've been doing just that, 
something which I don't like, but it's unavoidable. Both my wife and I 
have an elevated risk if/when we get infected (she diabetes, me airways).

As for social distancing: we haven't seen my wife's parents for at least 
a fortnight, and their retirement home is closed, so I cannot set up 
Skype either – not that I would have put them at risk to begin with.

There are still cars, but far fewer. We have a serious traffic problem 
here, because not only are we densely populated, we also have a very 
high rate of car ownership. So pollution has gone down a whopping 70% 
over the past four weeks.

Meanwhile, I'm worried about my family in the Netherlands. The Dutch 
waited too long with imposing strong measures, and the situation is 
nearly out of control, as in like Italy out of control, in the province 
bordering the one where my parents live. It's slightly better in their 
province, but they're both 81, and although fit, still at risk.

Oh, and my 27 year old nephew had a touch-and-go two nights ago, for the 
second time in a decade. This time it was a ruptured (!) appendix, with 
which he waited for 4.5 hours at A&E while they were carting in people 
to be intubated. And the worst is yet to come in the Netherlands. But if 
anything happened, I couldn't go there, because they closed the airport 
in Malta.

To finish it off, they're becoming a bit funny at work. One of our two 
major software products (we do more than that, but still) we're trying 
to sell to airlines (and, in my opinion, should be completely scrapped 
and rewritten). So I'm polishing off my CV, and probably I'd better 
stock up on some antidepressants, just in case.

Yes, they are particular times.

- Peter