It’s interesting to now see the coronavirus outbreak unfold beyond China. As former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd recently wrote in the Guardian, China’s January and February is now Australia’s March and April. I feel this holds for most of the rest of the world too.
It seems the ongoing crisis is bringing out the worst in a lot of Australians. I didn’t see panic buying and empty shelves in supermarkets to anything like the extent that I’ve seen them to be in Melbourne - not just in the media, but also from photographs sent to me by my mother over on the Mornington Peninsula. Protective masks and hand sanitiser were in very short supply all across China immediately after Wuhan was cut off in mid-January and meat would sell out early for maybe a month after that, but that was about it, at least in the former French Concession, where I live in Shanghai. I’ve been viewing Australia’s shopping hysteria with great embarrassment from over here. I also feel that the current Australian government is the most inept we have seen in a long time. It’s not like they didn’t have due warning on the impending crisis. Australia’s health system is world class and not just for the wealthy like it is in the U.S, but no health system in the world could cope with everyone catching the virus at once.
However, all the signs seem to indicate that China has the outbreak under control. Few new cases are being reported and things are kind of returning to ‘normal’ - parks open to the public, longer opening hours for bars and restaurants and so on. As for my own professional life though, it’s currently pretty fucked. This is normally one of my busiest times for commercial and editorial photography work. However, there’s no work now, there hasn’t been for weeks and work that I was anticipating is starting to vanish into thin air. I have needed this seasonal, rich vein of work to set me up for the coming months in previous years so I’m starting to feel that the crisis is one of mental health as much as physical health. It takes some effort not to look ahead and only see bleakness. Still, to give an example of how these kinds of crisis can also bring out the good in people, I let my landlord know that the coming months are going to be hard for me. He offered to reduce my rent by around 40% for the next quarter. What a great guy.
But I digress… To give an idea of how seriously people take precautions against the coronavirus here, take a look at the first photo below. This was shot last Friday on the only camera I happened to have with me, an Olympus mju II point and shoot film camera. It seems the fellow on the ground tried to enter a building without a face mask as was demanded by the building’s security. So they tackled him to the ground. Pretty much all shops and commercial buildings require that entry is dependent on wearing a mask. Even though it’s arguable how effective it is to wear masks when one isn’t in close proximity with infected people in enclosed spaces, almost everyone wears one outdoors. Sometimes I don’t wear one when I walk out the door, but I’ll always have one with me in case I need to enter a building.
I feel that people wear masks to signify that they aren’t taking the situation lightly. To not wear one can be taken as recklessness that could endanger others. I wonder if people in Australia will universally start wearing masks and adhere to such strict controls on their personal freedom. At least masks do stop people from touching most parts of their face, which is one of the main ways to transmit the virus. Its kind of incredible to see people wearing protective masks while driving around by themselves in private cars, but on the other hand it’s not surprising that there are few new cases in China when people adhere to such a rigid herd mentality,
Anyway, here are a few photos of daily life in Shanghai lately under the coronavirus.
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