Day 40: Quarantena

It was in Venice where they thought of holding the ship's crews onboard for forty days so they would not bring the Black Death to the city (I think others had used the method before, but not for the forty days that it's named after).

Forty days already. Who would have thought we would be inside this long? Who could have said, at the beginning of March that we would be locked in for this long? It feels like a little anniversary (not annual, I know). There are things to celebrate and things to lament. We are all in this together, we repeat to ourselves as we hear the medical officers telling us. It's for the common good.

Day by day, we discover new and more horrifying things about how the virus works, how it can kill young people without preexisting conditions, how it can fill with liquid the lungs of the vulnerable, how it can disable our society.

Tessa asked me, in all seriousness, whether the world was going to end. "No," I replied, "but with a little bit of luck, capitalism might finally crack, and people will recognize, once more the importance of science and research." I hope I'm right, but I know the rich are resilient and impossible to satisfy, so I wonder whether it is more a wish than a real prediction of what might happen.

10:15 pm

Canada cases 44,526

Deaths 2386

Recoveries 15,479

World cases 2,790,986

World deaths 195,920

World recoveries 781,382