What COVID-19 said to Narcissus
This was written in the fall of 2021.
“…our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists; they disbelieved in pestilences”- The Plague by Albert Camus
In April 2020, I read Albert Camus’ The Plague as a part of a book club. The coronavirus pandemic was just beginning in Russia, and we had chosen this text the week before as an apropos addition to our reading list. The assignment was to just read the first section but I feverishly read the whole thing, hoping to inoculate myself to any kind of hysteria or misguided moral judgment as the first wave took off in earnest.
I hadn’t ever lived through such an event: HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and the like had been in the headlines but were never especially close. I smugly thought to myself that having perspective was more important than anything else over the next few weeks (ha!) with few expectations that this would change much of anything.
That same month, Julio Vincent Gambuto published an essay about how the world could look after the COVID-19 pandemic passed. It took hard evidence about how the world looked during the pandemic to argue against the 5-day commute, pointless meetings, private automobiles and other and persistently irrational but seemingly immutable features of modern life.
While reading the essay, I was even a tad bit hopeful. Surely those pictures of blue skies in smog-free Los Angeles and birds singing in the early St. Petersburg morning could inspire change: a new a better world was possible — and it was here!
It’s November 2021 now and in St. Petersburg, Russia, it looks like my initial naive prediction was, unfortunately, correct. In fact, things have gotten worse since the bug hasn’t dissipated but any hope of changing how we live and work has.
Unlike in Camus’ Oran, people in Russia’s Second City haven’t actually come out of any severe, psychologically traumatizing lockdown lasting several months. There were a few weeks of restrictions in 2020, but now, everything basically runs as it did before.
Only with the Delta variant. And Delta plus. And so on.
We’re under a mini-lockdown for the next week, but many of my friends (including those employed by the state) report that they have been told to go to their offices as per usual.
I received two doses of the Sputnik V (“v” for “victory” not “five”) vaccine in the summer and have maintained a moderate level of isolation over the past year plus. I do, however, venture into the city centre two to three times a week for work. When I am face-to-face with others, I am almost always the only one wearing a mask. When we first went back into the office, we observed some semblance of physical distancing, ventilation and mask requirements, but that all flew out of the window pretty quickly.
Today as temperatures drop, people are back to complaining about how cold it is and want windows closed. In a crowded classroom with over a dozen unmasked teenagers, I was laughed at for saying that it was unsafe to keep the windows and door closed even though this was a textbook case of a superspreader event. Officially, mask regulations have never lapsed, but among those who insist on in-person instruction, an extremely tiny minority has behaved responsibly since the pandemic began.
You see, what’s most disappointing about how Gambuto’s vision for the future isn’t that it didn’t play out. No, it’s that people seem positively, actively committed to the way things were: to mindless driving, spending, and making sure to behave as if those around them either didn’t exist or didn’t matter. You can see this on the Metro, which should be a relatively safe environment despite the close quarters in which commuters are packed. Assuming that people are wearing masks and don’t talk, there is little to no risk of infection.
What do St. Petersburgers do, though? Not only do they dispense with their masks (which are required when they enter the Metro station) but also talk loudly on their phones or with their neighbors. It’s gross public behavior, plague or no plague, but it’s insult to very real injury when done now. When their eyes aren’t focused on Candy Crush, commuters studiously avoid looking at anyone else on the train, seemingly willing other people to disappear if they aren’t seen.
Gambuto writes:
The greatest misconception among us, which causes deep and painful social and political tension every day in this country, is that we somehow don’t care about each other. White people don’t care about the problems of black America. Men don’t care about women’s rights. Cops don’t care about the communities they serve. Humans don’t care about the environment. These couldn’t be further from the truth. We do care. We just don’t have the time to do anything about it.
Petersburgers don’t care.
For the last 6 years I have heard, almost verbatim, from dozens of individuals “We have other things to worry about” whenever a class discussion touched on topics concerning the environment or minority rights, including women’s. Given the opportunity to show solidarity with one another, to take actions in support of the broader public’s health, people of all ages and income levels have chosen to do exactly the opposite of what all credible health experts have recommended.
The daily coronavirus body count is often officially over 1,000 a day. That’s with over a year’s experience with this bug, vaccines, and comparative cases on how to best prevent sickness. The Russian government is unwilling or unable to do much about it while the anti-vaccination paranoia of a selfish, myopic, and frankly, idiotic population encourages the novel coronavirus into a healthy maturity.
The fact is that pap about personal responsibility and “living in a society” are really all that’s needed to sustain a functioning economy with a falling mortality rate, but it’s the people who are guilty in perpetuating this crisis.
President Putin sounded desperate when he said “It’s strange that well-educated people, people with advanced degrees, don’t want to get vaccinated….I call upon you to go out and get vaccinated. It’s a question of your life and the lives of the people close to you.”
At the start of this weeklong lockdown, two interesting reports came up. On October 26 The Moscow Times reported that authorities in Crimea “said they plan to purchase mobile refrigerators to store bodies…as COVID-19 deaths continue to rise.” Meanwhile, over “110,000 holidaymakers have arrived in Sochi and nearby resorts” surely exacerbating an already dire situation on the Black Sea.
“What we learn in a time of pestilence — that there are more things to admire in men than to despise” The Plague
It’s obvious that without making telecommuting the norm, providing economic support to people in presently unsafe/unsustainable industries, and strict regulations for vaccination and mask use, coronavirus will continue to freely infect, mutate, and persist in Russia. All of the tools to cope with this situation are available, but from an incompetent government to an irresponsible public, they have been left untouched.
During the Nazi siege of Leningrad, approximately 800,000 people perished over nearly three years of constant bombardment and starvation that saw people resort to eating boots, dirt, and pets, and other human beings, facts documented in the city’s Blockade Museum.
I’ve visited three times, and the second time I happened to meet a survivor of the siege. A wizened old woman, she animatedly told of the meager bread rations she had to survive on for the full week and other deprivations I didn’t fully comprehend (my Russian skills then, as now, were wanting). Here was someone who’d lived through just about unimaginable horrors and was there to tell a couple of American students about it.
What will this generation’s “war story” be if the pandemic passes? Harrowing photos of long holidays taken domestically because the horror of closed borders kept them off of more desirable beaches Italian beaches?
All that seemed flawed in this city before — congestion, pollution, a rat race leading nowhere — was apparently what these people wanted all along. What they lack in imagination they also lack in empathy, and, as authorities warn, in oxygen and respirators.
