CAT TRAINING IN THE YEAR OF CORONAVIRUS
By: Francesco Rizzuto Author
Tags: Perspective, Cats, Spain, Society, Covid 19

CAT TRAINING IN THE YEAR OF CORONAVIRUS

To comfort Mona Lisa, we place a plastic tray of sand inside the toilet bowl then invite her onboard with the promise of “treat…treat..treat.”

Just yesterday, New York Magazine published a very enlightening article. You can read the full text here: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/moderna-covid-19-vaccine-design.html

What’s shocking about the New York Magazine article is the assertion that Moderna had a vaccine against COVID-19 ready to roll out in January 2020, almost 2 months before any country went into lockdown.

Moderna’s design was completed by January 13 and the vaccine ready go before we’d even heard the term ‘COVID-19.’ It’s the same product that the European Union has lately placed orders for in the tens of millions of doses.

Since March 2020, we’ve been quarantined here in Seville in southern Spain. It started with a dusk to dawn curfew, then for the next three months we rarely left the house. School lessons, as well as the classes my wife teaches, went online. Our15-year-old daughter didn’t venture outside for five straight weeks, a feat of heroism that merits at least a Congressional Medal of Honor for any teenager.

The first wave as bad. During the lockdown, police detained people on the streets, demanding a printed raison d’être for any visit outside, and levying fines. There was limited inter-city travel. Borders were closed. We were practically under house arrest.

How did we eat? Well, in the first weeks there was hardly anything on market shelves anyway because folks began hoarding at the first whiff of trouble. Spaniards are a lot more practiced at this game than we expats. The so-called Spanish Flu (1918–19) was followed by a nasty civil war (1936–39) that is still within living memory, not to mention a half century of totalitarian dictatorship that followed. They already knew about shortages and stocking up. We were clueless and unprepared, on a serious learning curve.

One thing the country never lacked, however, was toilet paper. Europeans favour the bidet, and every home has at least one. Toilet paper was practically the only item left to sell in shops, so naturally we scooped up enough for the next five years; and only the best, ‘non-skid’ variety at that.

One evening, some weeks ago, our daughter started coughing, followed by nasal congestion, stomach-ache and nausea, sending the family into a tailspin. I didn’t sleep the entire night and first thing next morning we rushed her in a taxi to the nearest Emergency Room. The ER overflowed with patients coughing, sneezing and vomiting, and not exactly reassuring. By then, the national daily death toll had peaked at around 900 per day then plateaued at that level, so the government in its infinite wisdom decided to relax restrictions and allow people out, advising everyone to wear a mask. Here’s the result:

After relaxing restrictions, the Covid-19 death rate has soared in a second wave of infections.

At the Emergency Room they did a COVID-19 test that, thankfully, proved negative. What it taught us, however, is that children can be the weakest link in a family’s defences, and that wearing a mask and hand washing aren’t enough. Teenagers are constantly passing their smartphones around, pushing and shoving and bumping heads, sharing snack foods and drinks, not to mention what teen couples everywhere are inclined do. This time, she’d caught another strain of influenza, but it could just as easily have been COVID-19. Since schools reopened in September, our weakest link has become even weaker.

Compounding matters is the fact that both my wife and I are over 50, the cut-off age where hospitals will not — indeed, by law cannot — provide us with ventilators should we fall victim and need one. That’s because National Coronavirus Programme directors decided to reserve the country’s limited supply of lifesaving equipment for younger people and let seniors take their chances for survival. Imagine a lifeguard at the beach or your local swimming pool shouting through his bullhorn to a drowning senior: “Sorry, Gramps. Life preservers are for younger folks. Enjoy your last swim…”

There are no monoclonal antibodies or other miracle drugs for us either. In less than a half year, COVID-19 has cleaned out the country’s nursing homes and reduced its senior population quite effectively and sending those business into bankruptcy for lack of both clients and staff. Nonetheless, consider all the money the government is saving on pensions and social services and you get a picture of how public policy is shaped.

In my article ‘What I learned from CV-19’ ( https://francesco-rizzuto.medium.com/what-i-learned-from-cv-19-ac718fd656c7), I describe my own experience in a hospital emergency room during the pandemic. If you come down with COVID-19 and you’re over 50, then authorities advise you to stay at home and expire quietly. Failing that, you might win a bed in the corridor of an overburdened hospital, but next stop is not the ICU. It’s the refrigerated truck waiting patiently at the loading dock in the back lane with its motor idling. Worse, nobody is allowed at your side. You get to say goodbye to loved ones via Whatsapp. Then off to a mass grave. I’m not exaggerating here. It really is that grim.

In Spain, ventilators are reserved for patients under 50-y.o. Madrid’s convention centre has been converted to a hospital and its soccer stadium is now a morgue. Refrigerated trucks move corpses to a mass burial site.

In November, 325 persons died of COVID-19 here in Seville, the highest monthly death toll since the pandemic began. A friend of ours felt ill on November 24 and died next day. Still, the government refuses to reinstate full lockdown in the midst of a more virulent second wave, citing the negative economic impact of the first wave restrictions as an excuse to keep hotels, restaurants, bars, and schools open. Somehow, China, Korea, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand and other places have managed to become COVID-19 free and their people are now enjoying a normal life, but those countries didn’t follow the poor example of Italy, Spain, UK and the USA.

My wife is the only breadwinner in our family, unless we include the fifty-one cents I earned last week on Medium. The private school where she teaches announced that they’re cutting teachers’ salaries to compensate for a decrease in enrollment and lost revenue caused by the pandemic. That’s exactly what many employers are doing now, using the pandemic as an excuse to grow their bottom line at the expense of employees, while raking in millions in government subsidies. We should be thankful for having a job in these difficult times, they insist, as a very un-Merry Christmas Season approaches. The first thing one notices is that nobody is wishing anyone “Feliz Navidad.”.

So, we keep telling ourselves that things can always be worse.

During the siege of Seville in July 1936, early in the Spanish Civil War, Fascist mercenaries recruited in Morocco marched down our street randomly tossing hand grenades into the windows of homes which may account for the destruction and rebuilding of our own house in 1940.

There is also evidence that our house sits on the site of earlier dwellings dating back some 3,000 years to the Tartessians and Phoenicians. No need to go back that far. In 536 AD, bubonic plague wiped out half the population of Europe, likely including the inhabitants of whatever dwelling was on this very site.

And there are diseases even more deadly than COVID-19. Half the earth’s population for all of recorded history perished of malaria. In the year 2000 alone, there were 839,000 deaths from malaria worldwide, dropping to 228 million cases and 405,000 deaths by 2018. That’s still a really big number.

That brings us back to the New York Magazine article.

The Moderna vaccine was proven effective and safe even before most people even knew there was a pandemic happening. Pfizer- BioNTech, Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca designed their vaccines almost as fast. That’s because drug companies had already been developing basic platforms predicated on the SARS model, and all they needed to do was tweak them a little bit to get a vaccine for COVID-19. The basic clinical trials were already completed.

The government assures us that by Q4 of 2021 we’ll all be vaccinated, and life can return to normal. Next December, right? That’s twelve months from now.

Their plan is to first vaccinate the royal family and other alphas, although old King Juan Carlos de Borbon has already absconded to Saudi Arabia to dodge corruption charges, leaving palace aids to argue whether his legal wife or Corinna Zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, his elephant hunting pal and alleged mistress, should be first in line for the shot. Then they’ll vaccinate politicians, front-line healthcare and essential services workers, and nursing home residents, most of whom are already beneath the sod. Then young people because they are the country’s future. Then the rest of us; the ones who don’t merit ventilators.

We’re not placing any bets on the vaccine. We each wear 2 masks (no, not front and back), wash and shower several times daily, and stay away from people. We monitor the daily, weekly, and monthly fatality rates like comparing football scores. Because the football stadium is closed.

We look for new and unconventional ways to cope; still, there are limits. Being a teacher, my wife taught our lovely calico cat to use the toilet. There’s no need to clean her kitty litter box after Mona Lisa does her business. It’s a lot less work and more sanitary too, but that happened some 8 years ago. By now, even the cat has become neurotic. She senses that something is amiss and has lately begun pooping on the floor instead. To comfort her, we place a plastic tray of sand inside the toilet bowl then invite her onboard with the promise of “treat…treat..treat.” Regressing. Like the rest of us.

Lying in bed last night and staring up at the ceiling, my wife lamented that our sex life is about as inspiring as luring Mona Lisa back to her kitty box, an unanticipated and largely unwelcome analogy, if you ask me. But then, you didn’t ask.