Lockdown lifted -- sort of

New Zealand moved to "level 3" today, with a lot of shops and restaurants opening for collection/delivery only. That's good for the economy, but I'm grateful none of us have to go to work or school so our "bubble" remains the same.

The most exciting thing this week was switching from Netflix to Disney+. We'd finished Ozark, IT Crowd, Rick and Morty and Shaun the Sheep, and while I was really enjoying Community, I couldn't see myself watching five more seasons. Nobody was interested in Tiger King and we couldn't find anything else. (Two days after I cancelled Netflix, I found out more Rick and Morty episodes are coming.)

So we spent the last week watching Star Wars and Pixar films, and now are struggling to find anything else to watch. The frustrating thing is, I have a long list of films I want to see or share with the kids, and none of these are on streaming services. Classics like Always, Out of Africa, the World According to Garp, Yentl, Cannonball Run, Young Frankenstein, Flash Gordon, Arthur, Poltergeist, Dr Strangelove, the original Bad News Bears, Planes Trains and Automobiles, Xanadu, Buckaroo Bonzai, Brief Encounter, My Life as a Dog -- perfect popcorn fare for these times and instead I'm watching Incredibles 2. (How do you take 14 years to make a terrible sequel?)

That said, I know a lot of my favourite films from childhood have not aged well, and the kids are only interested in what their friends are interested in. That's just part of being a teenager. I turned on Blues Brothers the other day, one of my favourites, and in about 30 minutes they all had gone off to watch TikTok videos or something. Of course it's frustrating, but it's life. They can't possibly appreciate how precious this time is. 

Fortunately I still have one thing in my pocket: When it's homework time, I become the most popular person in the house.

Covid-19 death rate

This is fascinating, if a bit disturbing: https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-rates/

This shows case fatality rate - the number of deaths divided by the number of people who tested positive. When this started, WHO estimated it to be around 3% but it ranges from less than 1% to more than 15%, depending on country. And while you might expect poorer countries (like Algeria, at 15.56%) to have poorer health care, the other seven countries over 10% are in the EU!

• Italy and the UK are 13%. (Scotland is at 10% so the rest of the UK must be even higher.)
• The US is at 4%. (Slightly higher than the Republicans who said it would be less than the flu, at 0.1%).
• New Zealand is at 0.6%.

Of course, the death count lags the positive count (that is, some of those who have tested positive will eventually die from it) so the percentages are actually higher. We won't have an accurate count until this is all over.

Sitting in my little bubble in New Zealand, which is now on a downward trend (we've had more "recoveries" than new cases for the past 10 days) it's easy to forget the zombie apocalypse is out there. (The USA is still adding 15,000 new cases per day despite the lockdown!)

A week ago New Zealand only had 1 death but we've added 8 more this week. (6 of those were from a single rest home.)

We are now talking about coming out of lockdown, but that looks like just a slight relaxation of the rules. Restaurants and cafes can start providing takeaways but only if they can do it in a "contactless" way. Weddings and funerals can now have up to 10 participants, but no other gatherings. You can travel "regionally" though it's not clear how that's defined. You can add someone to your bubble, but otherwise all social distancing remains. Most non-essential stores remain shut, as will the borders. They said only about 500,000 Kiwis have been able to work during lockdown (lucky me!) but are hoping to double that to 1 million. (We had 2.6 million employed before the lockdown.)

Of course, what we really need is a way to tell if we've been exposed to someone who later develops the virus. If only everyone carried a small electronic device that was able to communicate with other devices, and report that information back to a central location...

Good luck out there.

Update: Two more people died today, bringing New Zealand's death rate to 0.8%.

Lockdown - day 18

It's raining and I'm writing this from the garage because one of the kids is in my old office practicing guitar. 20 minutes ago, this same child (who is 19 years old) pointed out a stain on the kitchen counter and wished me luck trying to get it out. I no longer think of the kids as disease vectors, but as badly-behaved pets. The kind who do their business on the rug and wish you luck trying to clean it up.

Another thing they do is finish a toilet roll and refuse to replace it; usually they just balance the new roll on top of the empty roll. Yelling at them hasn't helped so I started a new game: Whenever I find an empty roll, I remove all the other rolls out of the bathroom. Is it fair to the next person? Not at all. Will they learn from this? Probably not, mostly because my wife thinks I'm being silly and replaces the rolls.

Matzah pizza was good the first three days but now I'm a bit over it. I haven't tried to make a grilled cheese sandwich with matzah, but I'm close. Yesterday our homestay student was looking for something to eat and asked me, "When can we eat bread again?" I felt so bad; I had no idea she'd stopped eating bread! Even our kids generally eat bread during pesach (although for some reason they don't seem to be this year).

The eldest child won't eat bread because all of the commercial gluten-free bread contains some dairy or eggs and she's militantly vegan, unless it's chocolate, in which case she will set aside all of her morals. I know she feels bad about this because if anyone points it out to her she will scream at them at the top of her lungs. That's a sure sign of a guilty conscience.

There's not a whole lot to report about, not surprisingly. Yesterday I cleaned out the worm farm, which was as disgusting as you can imagine. You're supposed to put some eggshells in the worm farm -- the calcium keeps the pH stable -- even though the worms don't digest them. Well, we've put so many eggshells in the bin that the compost was about 30% soil and 70% eggshells. I put it on the flowerbeds; I'm curious to see what will happen.

The day before that, I cleaned up the pile of tree branches that I'd sawn off four months ago. When I was finished, I pulled out the leafblower that's been sitting unused in the garage for over five years, and which I'd listed for sale just before the lockdown. I'm glad I used it - there was a broken piece that my wife was able to fix - and then I cleaned the driveway until you could eat off it. The next day I came out and yelled at the leaves that had fallen on my immaculate driveway.

When the car battery died at WOMAD -- and we had to wait an hour for AA to jumpstart it -- I decided I should start carrying around the battery jumper I'd bought in the UK just before moving to New Zealand. Of course by the time I got home I promptly forgot about that. When we went to the hospital on Wednesday, though, the battery hesitated, although it eventually started. When we got home, I pulled the jumpstarter out and plugged it in, but the next day it was still flat. The directions (written on the front of the charger) said to charge it every 3 months and never leave a lead-acid battery dead for a prolonged period. It wasn't clear if five years was "prolonged."

However, my wife had a trickle charger that was designed for cars that were rarely used, so I hooked it up to the jumpstarter and the next day it was fully charged! I was quite pleased with myself and it's now in the back of the car. Someone remind me to charge it again in three months...

Next on my to do list is taking down the hut I started four years ago to teach my son woodworking, but he was never interested so it was never finished. I may try to re-use the wood and make a raised garden bed. I also have to sort out my son's bed, my daughter's light, my wife's bike (which, admittedly, I broke), install a timer on the towel rail, organise old photos and file my US tax returns.

Lockdown day 156 - shopping

Yesterday was Pesach, the Jewish festival of Passover. It's normally a joyous affair with friends and family; this one was just with four sullen teenagers. (Our homestay student wasn't sullen, just very, very confused.)

During the week of Pesach, the most important thing is to only eat unleavened bread - that is, bread that hasn't risen. Normally we buy matzah from a Jewish-owned deli nearby. A shipment is sent from Israel to New Zealand once a year, and it's always late, so we usually end up buying the matzah from the previous year. 

This year we couldn't go to the shop so we ordered online. The shipment arrived two days before Pesach and the courier dropped them on our doorstep only a few hours before Pesach began. We were looking forward to "fresh" matzah this year, but it turns out it tastes exactly the same as one-year-old matzah. That's a bit worrying.

Meanwhile, my wife had to go to the hospital that morning for some more tests, but this time they wouldn't let me accompany her. Instead I sat in the car and did some work until my laptop died, then out of boredom I went to the grocery store. 

All the grocery stores had long queues and the only way to avoid them was to buy online, for either delivery or collection. However, you could only book a week in advance and the slots sold out as quickly as they released them. A week ago I'd placed an order but the earliest slot was Thursday, the day after Pesach, and I knew there were going to be a lot of last-minute items required for the seder (dinner).

So I got in the queue but I hadn't planned to go to the market and I didn't have the shopping list. I tried to remember what I needed but I couldn't. I tried to call my wife but she was busy getting x-rays and blood drawn. In the end I got a bunch of random stuff and left.

That afternoon, when we got home from the hospital, I checked the list and found I'd missed practically everything, so I picked up my bags and got in the queue for the supermarket across the street from us. If never seen the line so long - it snaked outside and around the corner - and it took 40 minutes to get into the shop, 5 minutes to grab what I needed and 3 minutes to walk home.

The next day was my scheduled collection, and it was with no small amount of smugness that I walked past all the people in the queue, picked up a huge trundler (trolly, shopping cart) and then walked past all the people on the way back.

Because the shops are across the street, we never take the car, but of course we often buy more than we can carry. We get around this by taking the trolly home, which is technically stealing, but we usually bring it back in a few days. 

Of course, all those people I had just walked past were now watching me steal the shopping cart.

When I got home I had another issue: Three trips to the supermarket in two days, plus the pesach leftovers, had completely filled the fridge/freezer. Thankfully my wife has a good eye for these things and she managed to fit everything in. I don't know if we'll ever be able to get anything out again.

One thing she removed from the freezer was a large tupperware container full of rotten bananas. For years I used to make banana bread regularly so I never threw away bananas. At some point I stopped making banana bread but I still kept the bananas. When they were completely brown, I would peel them and put them in the tupperware container. I now had a lot of rotten bananas in a tupperware container.

My favorite recipe called for five medium bananas, Google translated this to 1.5 cups and soon I had small, single-use plastic baggies. It was like being a drug dealer for monkeys. I hid the small bags in the back of the freezer. .

When I finished, and was looking at a fridge/freezer overflowing with food, I then placed another grocery order online. That was because the only collection slot was Wednesday, 6 days away!

Lockdown - day 12

Well, I didn't think I could post every day, and I was right. The fact is being stuck at home with four teenagers is pretty mundane, because they never leave their room except to eat bread and cornflakes. Occasionally one will forget there are other people here and start wandering around the house on a video call - and for some reason they always speak at full volume on video calls - but we usually just lead them back their rooms. Apart from that they're generally quiet all day, and then call their friends at midnight. I can't tell you how many times I've had to text them asking them to be quiet.

The number of new cases in New Zealand is falling, while the number of tests they're doing is increasing, so clearly it's going well. The government originally said "4 weeks" but won't commit to an end date. They are trying to define some objective measures to decide when we can come out of lockdown but they're in uncharted waters here, and other countries haven't exactly lead the way.

Hard to believe that on March 21, just over 2 weeks ago, NZ introduced the four "alert levels" and started us at level 2. Two days later we were at level 3, and two days after that we went to level 4.

The differences between levels 1 and 3 are pretty incremental, all around border restrictions, size of gatherings, social distancing, etc. Then, boom, level 4 shuts down nearly all businesses, schools, public venues, events, travel, etc. It's a pretty big leap. 

So if/when we do go back to level 3, I imagine people will just assume everything is OK and go back to their normal lives, and the virus will immediately begin spreading again.

The government pointed out the alert levels could be applied regionally, so in theory one area could be at level 3 - eating at restaurants - and just over an arbitrary line people could be in lockdown. That seems rather silly. It also means you can't have consistent messages or a coordinated response -- how is that working in the U.S.?

In another two weeks we may see the light at the end of the tunnel, but we have no idea what we'll find when we leave the tunnel. 

Day 7 - hospital

My wife had a pleural effusion. Of course we didn't know that yesterday - we didn't even know there was a membrane around the lungs (called the pleura) that usually contains 10ml (1/3 of an ounce) of fluid. They drained off 1.4 litres (47 ounces). There was more but they said draining more than 1.5 litres at one time could damage the lungs.

Her only symptoms were a cough and shortness of breath that had lasted more than a month. In February her GP referred her for a CT scan at the hospital, but they are always backed up and they scheduled it for end of March. 

Of course, that was before Covid-19 and the lockdown. We expected them to call any day to postpone the scan, but they didn't. Instead, they waited until the day before the scan to call and cancel it. 

The GP was very annoyed, made a few phone calls, and the next thing we heard was that it was going to be done at a private hospital the next day. That was Tuesday morning. Tuesday afternoon the hospital rang to make an appointment for the pleural effusion the next day.

We arrived at 930am and the parking lot was completely full! We ended up parking on the street, but thankfully the parking wardens had been deemed "non-essential" so you can park all day for free. 

We went inside expecting a zoo but it was very quiet. Again, because NZ implemented lockdown much earlier than other countries, we didn't have thousands of cases - in fact, today's count was 708 infected across the whole country. The hospital had braced for a tsunami and barely got its toes wet. 

(A friend who works there later told me  the parking lot was jammed because public transit was reduced, and parking was free, so the staff had started driving in.)

My wife had to get a before and after xray, before and after blood tests, plus the actual operation, and normally this would have taken several days. Because it was so quiet, they got it all done on the same day and we were out by 4pm.

I should note that cough and shortness of breath are two symptoms of Covid-19, so last week my wife had called the NZ Healthline to see if she should get tested. They told her they wouldn't test, regardless of symptoms, unless she had been out of country. Today our prime minister announced they had increased capacity for Covid-19 testing from 1500 to 5000 tests per day and would now test anyone with symptoms, not just people who had been abroad. I think it's fantastic to have a competent leader.

I also had to laugh at all the news stories which stated that everyone in New Zealand who had Covid-19 had contracted it overseas or from someone who had been overseas. As an old boss of mine used to say, "Be careful what you measure." Of course if you only test people who have been overseas, then everyone who tests positive has been overseas!! It will be very interesting to see how that skews over the next couple of weeks. 

Well that's end of week one of the lockdown, with three more weeks to go. I've actually been grocery shopping four times in the past eight days, so I need to manage that better. (Read: Send the kids to do it.)

Lockdown - day 4

Hard to believe it's only been 4 days, although technically it's been longer -- I started working from home the day after WOMAD, because I was certain I'd caught something and was going to pass it on to my co-workers.

Hard to believe that was only two weeks ago -- we were there with 17,000 other people, packed in like sardines, when the government announced it was starting to take Covid-19 seriously. There were only 6 confirmed cases at the time, but we knew from other countries that it was going to explode. That Saturday they started restricting international travel, but of course it was already in New Zealand. The day after WOMAD, they banned gatherings of more than 500.

The week before WOMAD the government kept telling us we just needed to wash our hands more. At WOMAD, I lost count of the number of people who left the toilets without washing their hands. They walked right by the sanitation station without a second thought. It was at that point I realised we were all going to die.

So I set up my desk in the garage and told work I'd be working from home for the foreseeable future. A few days later, the company announced everyone should be working from home where possible. The schools were still operating -- the government was still trying to manage a veneer of normalcy, and said they'd only close a school if it had a confirmed case, and then they'd only shut the school for a few days to disinfect it -- but our kids' schools saw the writing on the wall and held a "learning at home" day to see how it work. The "school" part worked fine, but all the kids met up afterwards so the "social distancing" was a complete failure.

Of course we wanted to tell our kids, "Don't go, that's crazy, haven't you been watching the news?" but we also didn't want to be alarmist, so we let them go. Our homestay student's father - the GP from Seattle who was on the frontline dealing with this - gave her strict instructions to stay home and isolate herself. She went and spent the afternoon with her boyfriend. (She forgot to turn off "Find my friends" so her parents could see where she was, so that didn't end well...)

Meanwhile, my wife wasn't feeling well at all. She'd developed terrible body aches about two weeks earlier, and her GP had referred her for a CT scan. They'd scheduled it for 30 March. Some times she was fine, but other times - especially at night - she was in agony. We kept waiting for the hospital to call to cancel the CT scan, but we didn't hear from them. On Friday we thought, fantastic, she's going to get the scan and we can figure out what was wrong and start treatment. Friday afternoon they called to cancel.

(Technically, they didn't cancel it; they referred her to a private radiologist who was taking over all "elective" scans. We have no idea how long it will be before they schedule something.)

Yesterday we did two things: Our synagogue had an online service - my wife and eldest daughter were the chazzans (cantors) and I wrote the drasha (sermon) - and we went to Moore Wilsons. M-W is a Wellington institution, the equivalent of Smart & Final (named after Jim Smart and Hildane Final) in Los Angeles, except much, much nicer. They have a fresh food store and a "warehouse-style" store that caters to restaurants but is open to the public; about twice a year we blow a paycheck on 3kg bags of nuts, dried fruits, dried beans, chocolate, tortillas, etc. This time we were after one thing: Bragg's Nutritional Yeast. There has been in short supply because, apparently, the last batch shipped to New Zealand had incorrect nutritional labelling, and it all had to be sent back. Since my wife had gone vegan this had become her seasoning of choice, and M-W was the only place that had it last time. (They didn't have it this time, but we still spent $200 somehow.)

The real reason I mention it is because since the lockdown started, the government has said you should stay local and only shop for essentials, and driving into town for nutritional yeast did not seem to fit that definition. They had given police power to stop vehicles and issue fines, so I was a bit nervous, but I assured myself it was highly unlikely there'd be any police on the roads. We weren't even out of Karori when I saw a police car behind me. And we were the only car on the road.

Thinking quickly, I realised my company had been designated an "essential business" and although I was not an "essential employee" I figured I could bluff my way through it. To bolster my story, I turned off the route to M-W and headed toward work. The police car continued on his way, oblivious to us. I made a U-turn and went to M-W. Although there was a huge queue for fresh food, the warehouse section was virtually empty, since there were no restaurants to service. We filled our cart and headed home without further incident.

We now have more than enough food to last us the month, except the only thing the kids are eating is cornflakes because they can't be bothered to cook anything. They have more time than ever before and yet won't take two minutes to make a sandwich, or boil some noodles, or eat some fruit. I don't understand this, but I am looking forward to when we run out of cornflakes to see how they handle it. That should be tomorrow...

Drasha

Adapted from "Encountering God in the Sacred Silence" by Rabbi Ben Spratt[1]

This Shabbat we begin the Book of Leviticus. The book opens with the word Vayikra, which is translated as "And [God] called." For the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, this single word summarizes the substance of all that was revealed to the Israelites on Sinai – God called to humanity. The Torah and all the subsequent writings are simply our response.[2]

There is also an orthographic oddity in this single word, Vayikra. Written in the Torah, the final letter, aleph, is half the size of the rest of the word. Last year I spoke about the Ten Commandments and how some thinkers imagined the only thing God uttered was the first letter of the Ten Commandments – the letter aleph, the letter of silence.[3]

Out of that silence, God calls out to us. Our early Sages imagined that since the dawn of time God has been calling out to every person at every moment: Abraham was simply the first person to be silent enough to notice. Moses was the first person to see the burning bush. Elijah was the first to hear the "still, small voice" on the mountaintop.[4]

Our tradition believes the universe was created with words and encourages us to fill our homes and sanctuaries with words and song. We fill our days with noise and use "white noise" to sleep. Take away our sensory distractions and we become uncomfortable. In silence we are forced to hear the things we so often drown out: The soul, the solitude, the questions of person, place and purpose.

In 1654, French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, "All of humanity's problems stem from a person's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."[5]

Vayikra, God calls out to us, in each moment of each day. Let us be still and silent enough to hear.

Shabbat shalom.

---

[1] https://reformjudaism.org/learning/torah-study/vayikra/encountering-god-sacred-silence

[2] The Letters of Martin Buber, 1925

[3] Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition

[4] I Kings 19:12

[5] Pensees, 139

Day 3: Homestay

I'm referring to our international homestay student, from Seattle. She's our third homestay student in the four years we've been in this house. She is 18 and was a senior at high school, but her mother decided to send her abroad for the last 6 months of school. Within the first week of being here, she reminded me of everything that's wrong with America.

Dont get me wrong, she's perfectly lovely, but she walks around all day with earpods and can't put her phone down for a second, not even at the dinner tabke. (We've learned to text her when dinner is ready, because she doesn't hear us call.) Her room is a pigsty, and even though we don't allow food in the bedrooms, we keep finding empty chip bags and candy wrappers. Her parents sent her with $500 spending money for the six months and she went through that in less than two months, mostly on coffee and bubble tea.

But what's really annoying is her parents. You can almost hear the helicopter blades. She's 18, and presumably they sent her to New Zealand to learn independence, but they still treat her like she's 12. They send us emails suggesting we take away her phone at night! We smile and nod and ignore them.

When Covid-19 started making the news, I didn't realise Seattle was one of the first cities hit, and while I knew her father was a doctor, I didn't realise he was responsible for part of the response. (We even saw him interviewed on the Seattle news the other day.) When Seattle shut down their schools two weeks ago, we commented about how lucky she was to be here and still attending to school. 

A few days later, the AFS - which enables American students to study all over the world - decided to recall everyone. It made sense as an organisation, but in cases like ours they were moving kids from low-risk areas to high-risk areas! That said, we knew New Zealand was headed in the same direction and it was only a matter of time before we'd be in the same situation, so we spoke with her parents last Friday and agreed she should go home. 

On Monday we heard from our homestay student that her parents had decided to leave her with us! She said they were going to call us, but they never did. It was bizarre. 

The next day, New Zealand announced the lockdown, schools were closed and we were in exactly the same situation as Seattle, only with an extra child. 

So now we have a 19-year-old who desperately doesn't want to live at home, an 18-year-old who is 12,000 miles from home (and couldn't get back if she wanted), a 17-year-old who is incredibly moody and a 15-year-old who wants nothing more than to go skateboarding, but (I kid you not) he broke his skateboard the day before the lockdown! (Amazingly, he ordered a new one online and they shipped it before the government clarified that couriers could only ship "essential supplies.") 

Day 2: How to run a lockdown

When the NZ government announced the lockdown, they used the term "essential services" a lot, and assumed everyone knew what they meant.

It turns out, a lot of business owners - especially those faced with the prospect of no income for a month - think they are providing essential services, and have no problem sending low-wage employees to work, undermining the whole purpose of the lockdown.

The Warehouse - New Zealand's equivalent of Kmart - announced to their stockholders they were an essential service and would stay open. The government had to announce they weren't, and they wouldn't. 

Butchers across New Zealand not only assumed they were essential, but they stocked up on meat in expectation of higher demand, before the government told them they weren't essential, and that meat is now going to waste. 

My favourite story is Celebration Box, a stupid company that will send an expensive box of cheap chocolate to someone. They've been in the news repeatedly over their appalling customer service, including delivering Valentine's day gifts up to a week late! It was discovered today they were still operating, albeit they'd replaced their "donut box" with a "fruit box." (It's $30 for 17 pieces of fruit.) 

(You can read more about them at 

http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/114322872/commerce-commission-finds-celebration-box-may-have-breached-the-fair-trading-act) 

Chemists (phamacies) and grocery stores are essential and we're fortunate to have both in the little mall across the street. My wife and I went in the side entrance to find both had queues, because they were only letting in a few people at a time, so she got in the queue for the chemist and I got in the queue for the grocery store. What I didn't realise until later was that the queue for the grocery store extended out the main door and around the block, but because they were trying to space everyone apart, what I thought was the end of queue was actually the middle. Oops. 

What was interesting was my response to the situation. Two days ago, the risk of catching Covid-19 was about the same, but we were all packed into the grocery store and everything felt normal. Today, with only about twenty people in the entire shop, it felt very scary. I was suddenly aware when people violated the two-metre "social distancing" rule. I assumed everything was contaminated, and didn't want to touch anything. I wished I'd grabbed a face mask from the civil defense box; even though I know they're not effective, I wanted one anyway. 

I was happy to get out of the shop and get home to my "bubble."