Alone Together, Day 4 in COVID-19 Self Isolation

Hi folks, Jay here. This is a blog post about our initial experience of self-isolation during the early days of the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak in our town of Kimberley, which is 6 miles (10 km) from the centre of the city of Nottingham in the UK.

Our situation

We’ve self-isolated ourselves for the past 4 days now inside our studio apartment which we dubbed The Cooler when we first created it, the small punishment building from Stalag Luft III, made famous by Steve McQueen bouncing a baseball in The Great Escape. We didn’t name it that way expecting we’d be locked up in here, but hey ho, perhaps we can see the future?! The building is attached to our house which is rented out to a lady who works in a care home (and is understandably very concerned about being infected), and fortunately there is no direct connection between the two. It’s roughly 6m by 4m in here, with a wet room and a small mezzanine. It’s heated with a wood burner (friends dropped off 3 bags of coal, opening the boot and stepping back while we retrieved it), backed up by an electric oil radiator, and we’ve a small fridge, combined microwave/tradition oven and a two ring, counter-top electric hob so we can cook. The hot water comes from an electric box under the sink, which heats water for the sink and our shower. We’ve brought the TV with us from the van (which is in storage a mile away). The small TV (it doesn’t need to be any bigger, were sat right next to it) is hooked-up to the Internet. On our journey across Spain and France Ju did a few shops, none of them large but we have enough food and other stuff in here to mean no-one has to shop for us for the next couple of weeks, although our fresh veg and fruit will run out in the coming days.

What I’m trying to say is: we’re in a small space here, but that’s nothing new to us and we’re very comfortable. There’s only the two of us and we have absolutely everything we need to live, other than physical contact with our friends, loved ones, the community around us and nature. Neither of us have the symptoms of COVID-19, although we’ve heard they can take up to two weeks to develop, and that we could have the virus, being able to spread it and then get over it without even realising it. We’ve only been locked in here a mere four days, which isn’t long enough to get anything but the briefest of insights into the long-term isolation our parents, and others more susceptible to the virus, will experience. For what it’s worth though, I’ve shared my current feelings about what’s happened to us below.

The Coronavirus

Most of us understand our part now, I think. Ju and I are fit and in our late 40s. We don’t have any medical issues we’re aware of. The virus might cause us serious harm, but statistically it won’t. That’s good news for us individually, but it means the virus can still use our bodies as a stepping-stone, to jump into and out of, infecting whoever we come into contact with. Sooner or later it will infect someone it inflicts real harm to, or even kills them, hence the reason all of us have our part to play in avoiding getting infected, at least initially when the number of infections and hospital admissions will spike upwards very quickly.

My parents also understand the severity of the direct threat to them very well. Mum has diabetes and Dad has COPD (lung disease) which means the virus is a significant threat to them. They’ve been in self isolation for about 10 days now, they only go out into their garden, or to retrieve shopping dropped off outside the door, nowhere else. I can’t help but feel a degree of anger at seeing photos of people gathering in pubs in London prior to their closure, or parking up close together to beauty spots, wondering whether they realise the part they are playing in endangering our loved ones.

At the time of writing the UK’s opted to ask people to ‘socially distance’, to stay away from friends and family, to stay a couple of metres away from people wherever we are and so on. Other countries have enforced much stricter measures, preventing people from even going outside unless they’re collecting food, medicine, looking after others and a few other reasons. Watching the news it appears all countries have the same dilemma. We need herd immunity in humanity, but we can’t get it too quickly as, to be blunt, too many people will die in overwhelmed medical facilities. The more we’re isolated, and the longer for, the more our society is damaged economically and mentally. It’s an impossibly difficult balancing act.

We’re at the ‘bottom of the curve’ at the moment, with numbers of people being infected in the UK and in most other countries cranking upwards. China and one or two other places have managed to halt or slow the spread of the virus, but now have their populations locked down, so herd immunity hasn’t developed. Although incredible progress is being made on developing a vaccine, we’re told it’s another 12 to 18 months away. Unless millions or even billions of us stay locked up for another year, with the world-wide economic engine stalled, then many more infections seem to be inevitable, albeit in a more controlled way.

One thing which seems to be unclear is how many deaths above the ‘natural’ numbers the virus is causing. Across the UK, roughly 600,000 people a year die without COVID-19. These deaths are individual tragedies, but they’re generally not news-worthy. We don’t normally get headlines telling us how many tens of thousands of people died in the last month, even though those deaths certainly happened without COVID-19. If we did then we might all be better mentally prepared to handle these new statistics being thrown at us, but death’s a largely hidden, unspoken thing in our culture. Also, what no-one seems to know is how many of the COVID-19 deaths would have happened anyway, without the virus, within a short time. I wonder whether it makes any difference, we simply can’t allow our loved ones to die on purpose, of any cause.

I guess another point I should make is that my gut feeling I get when watching some news pieces is that we’ll all doomed. We’re done for. But are we, really? If I turn off the news and sit and think about it, and try and distance myself from the headlines, no, we’re not, of course we aren’t. No pandemic has wiped out humanity, and we’re scientifically in a better position than we’ve ever been in all of history. Tests, vaccines and improved treatments will all come on line. The stock market crashes being dramatically reported have (so far at least) failed to reach the low after the 2008 financial crisis (the FTSE 100 is currently at around 5190, but dropped to around 3800 in 2009). Yes, there is a long, long way to go, and a great deal of suffering and hardship is coming our way, but no, it’s not the end of the World.

What Covid-19 self-isolation feels like to me

To re-iterate, we’ve only been locked in here for 4 days. We also separated ourselves from people as best we could in the van for a few days on the drive across the continent. That’s not enough time to get anything like a good idea what long-term isolation will feel like. Isolation will impact us all differently too. Ju and I don’t have any children, we don’t need to go to work, we’re used to spending long periods of time together and to having no imposed structure on our day to day lives. Our night-clubbing days are over and staying in on a Friday night’s not the disaster it once was!

Everyone will have different levels of motivation to stay isolated too. For me personally I’m fully expecting to live through this epidemic. I know people around me will not. Once it’s over, I need to be able to say to myself that I did everything I could. For the moment that means staying locked in here to be sure we didn’t bring the virus back from Spain or France. After the initial 14 days we may well be forced into isolation anyway by a spike in UK deaths resulting in a more severe lock-down. If and when we’re allowed out, an ex-fireman in our running club is helping co-ordinate a response to support the vulnerable in our community, and we’ll see what we can do to help there, shopping, dog walking and the like. I’ll find something to do which helps.

Back to the point of this section: I had a chat session with one of my brother-in-laws yesterday and he asked how me how it was being isolated. I told him in all honesty I’d rather be locked in here with Ju than out there in the world at the moment. Yes, I do want to help once I’m 100% sure I’m not infected, but for the time being I need to be in here. I’m also fearful of the impact of seeing the ‘new world’ out there when we emerge. As we drove home we started to get a glimpse of the ‘world with the virus’, empty streets and motorways, new rules at supermarkets and empty shelves, folks in masks and gloves, interactions with people becoming psychically clinical and so on. When we arrive home things looked relatively normal, with lots of cars on the streets and people walking around seemingly unconcerned. We know that’s likely to have rapidly changed, and that the virus will had started to spread rapidly out there, and could well be among our local community by now, although we’ve still not heard of a single person we know personally getting it. Early days.

I would say I’ve had the odd small wobble though. What I mean by that is two things: first an occasional wave of mild grief has hit me, recalling what life was like just a few days ago, and which has now been taken from us all for the foreseeable future. The ability to drive our camper van where we liked, to know our parents are living their own lives safe without us, to run the mountain trails, to just head to the shops when we liked, and buy what we want. That’s about passed now. I’ve also had a weird sense of disquiet, that the world has completely ended out there, that everyone is gone. From The Cooler we have a few windows but none look out on countryside or even a road, we can’t see anyone from in here, and even though we have the TV, internet and so on, it would feel like we were suddenly completely alone in the world.

Contact with parents

My parents are locked in their home and we can’t visit them in person. When we got back from France we drove the van down their street and waved to them from inside the van, while they stood in an upstairs window. We talked on the phone. Just that small indirect contact was deeply significant for me personally, and I think it helped my folks too. Once we’re out I plan to cycle down there, do their shopping and chat with them on the phone, stood back from them, on the other side of a closed window. I’m so glad we came home instead of staying in Spain for this reason, among others.

While we’re locked in here too I’ve been speaking every day with my folks on the phone just to check in with one another. They don’t have a phone line at home and use a MiFi for Internet access. We’ve ordered an unlimited data SIM for them so we can start getting them up and running with Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube and so on (after some research we went for this Smarty SIM for £20 on a rolling one-month contract, which uses the Three network and we know they have a decent signal on that network – it should arrive early next week and we’ll report back how well it’s working). They already use email, Skype and so on, so aren’t starting from scratch, but it’s hard for them to suddenly start having to get to grips with all this technology and we can’t easily explain how to do things like start a new chat session. We will get there, and I’ve developed infinite patience for helping them, whatever it takes to make their lives bearable.

I have to say my parents are incredibly stoic about the situation they find themselves in, through no fault of their own they’re under house arrest and are taking it in their stride. I couldn’t be more respectful and proud of them. This is going to be a long haul but we’re in it together.

Family Illness

On Friday night I got a call from my niece telling me my sister Amanda had been rushed into hospital with chest pains. Thankfully it wasn’t life-threatening and after tests she was allowed out in the early hours of Saturday morning. Ju and I are locked in here through our own sense of ‘what’s right’, not because we’re forced by law or because we were even given any advice to do so by the authorities, either on entry to the country or through any official advice online (as we understand it,14 days self isolation was recommended initially for those coming from certain areas abroad but that did not include Spain and France at that time). I was torn between wanting to help my family and wanting to avoid potentially spreading the virus (Amanda works in a care home). These are the challenges we’ll all start to face more and more as we start to catch the virus and have to self-isolate, I think.

Exercise, day structure and purpose

A couple of years ago I started running again after a 20 year break, in a bid to introduce some post-retirement challenge into life. It works well for me, and I continue long distance running, enjoying the difficulty of the thing, the time to think and enjoy music while I run, the beauty of the world around me, the companionship with fellow runners in our running club and more. That’s on hold for the time being (we should have been running the Malaga Half Marathon this morning). We’ve only a 10m stretch of yard to exercise in so running is difficult, although one French chap’s heroically completed a full marathon running back and forth on a 7m stretch in his apartment, very impressive!

A friend has loaned us an exercise bike which is undercover in the yard (it would take up too much space inside) and I’ve built up to 90 minute sessions on it (although my backside’s not used to the seat yet!), slowly increasing to multi-hour sessions in the coming days. This sort of thing suits me personally, I can sit on a machine for hours as long as I’ve some music. I’m also looking at rigging up a tablet PC so I can watch YouTube as I cycle. We’re able to do sit ups, press ups, lunges, squats and so on, and our motivation is high to keep this going (for one thing, it kills an hour or two a day!). We have a 7.5Kg kettle bell, a 20Kg weighted vest and a yoga mat to help. Again we’re used to exercising in or by the van without much equipment. Once we’re through the first 14 days, assuming there’s no more stringent lock-down by then, we can potentially get onto nearby paths through the fields to run, we’ll see what happens next.

In terms of structuring our day, we’ve seen some folks using schedules to break up the day into hourly slots, each with a specific purpose. Mostly this has been done for kids who’re no longer able to go to school and are being taught at home, but I can see the reasoning behind having it for anyone. The two of us haven’t had an externally-imposed structure on our lives for the past few years though, since we early-retired, which felt like a curse sometimes, but I’m now very grateful for the practice it’s given us for the days ahead. We’re working on very informal structure, like not watching TV until ‘Boris o’Clock’ when he does his national daily briefing at 5pm, including a slot for exercise, writing blog posts, Ju’s doing a jigsaw a friend popped under the gate for us, is keeping her Spanish Duolingo going and has a stack of books lined up to read, I’ve pulled out our little-used ‘Spanish for Dummies’ book and will do an hour on it this afternoon. I’ve put off writing a book about financial independence for years too (actually I’ve half written it twice but wasn’t happy with it), and now I have an opportunity to take my time, to get it done properly.

Quick summary

We’re just at the start of this virus thing, but my hope is the rapid changes in life circumstances which have hit us all will slow down. Yes, there may be more stringent lock downs, and yes, many more of us will be hospitalised and sadly some will die. The unreal, earthquake-like nature of the changes to an entire world’s human life **should** settle down into a long-term rhythm though (at the moment all the radio ads sound daft, trying to tempt us on holiday abroad and the like). My goal is to get myself into a position where I stay physically and mentally healthy, where I do as much as I can to avoid helping the virus, while doing what I can to help those around me, and ensuring when we all come out the other side I can look back at this time and feel like I did the right thing. Oh, and I’ll have gotten much, much better at washing my hands…

Strength to all of you, Jay