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The New Yorker Radio Hour
Life Under Quarantine
00:19:55
Since its outbreak last year, the coronavirus COVID-19 has thrown the world into disarray. Travel to the U.S. from Europe has been suspended for thirty days; financial markets have plunged; Saudi Arabia cancelled the Hajj—the list of impacts is already infinite. In China, where the virus started, eight hundred million people are under some kind of restriction. One of them is Peter Hessler, who is currently based in Chengdu, and who has been quarantined with his family since January. New cases of the virus have been falling recently, which the Communist Party touts as a sign of its success, but Hessler has concerns about the costs of mass quarantine. “When you’re building a society, it’s not just about numbers or the death rate. Mental health is a big issue, and being free from fear is a big part of that,” he says. “And the public-health people will tell you that it’s better to have an overreaction than an underreaction, but I think there may be a point where that’s not true.” Plus:...
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Announcer
From one World Trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC studios and the New Yorker.
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David Remnick
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick and we are broadcasting from my apartment. Like everybody else, we're making adjustments. Since its outbreak last year, the Coronavirus COVID 19 has thrown the world into disarray. Travel from Europe has been restricted for 30 days at least. Financial markets have tanked. Saudi Arabia canceled the Hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage. The NBA has suspended the basketball season. And who knows what could happen to all kinds of public assemblages, theaters, the.
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Interviewer
Olympics and all the rest.
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David Remnick
And in China, where the outbreak began, nearly 800 million people have been living under some kind of restriction.
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Peter Hessler
Hello? Yeah, I can hear you fine.
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David Remnick
Given all this, we rang up our staff writer Peter Hessler on Skype. Peter has reported for years from China. He went back with his family last year to teach at Sichuan University.
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Peter Hessler
Yeah, now we're in Chengdu, which is in the southwest. It's the capital of Sichuan province. And so, yes, I mean we've been quarantined since, you know, January, late January. We have two nine year olds, we have twin daughters. They're in Chinese public school. And so the city, you know, so my kids are not in school. And you know, there's, there's, this has been more than a month. My kids have not seen another kid their age for more than a month.
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David Remnick
Now here in the States we talk about self quarantining. That's a voluntary decision to keep others safe. But in China, a quarantine is a quarantine.
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Peter Hessler
Usually in many compounds they would allow like one person out from each household every two days. Because we're sort of in a higher end thing. There was no limit. We have to have a card to go in and out, but we can go in and out as much as we want. And so I went out a lot because I would bike around and see what's going on in the city and you know, there's more people out. You know, there was a long stretch when there was absolutely nobody on the street and there wasn't much open, but convenience stores were always open, kind of like small markets were always open. People at least around here didn't have problems with food because a lot of people do stuff online anyway here. And so I've kind of tracked what my neighbors are like, the weird shit people buy during this time. Like there's some guy upstairs about like 100 inches television, you know, when you see them These guys in masks trying to bring this part. But I, you know, so I. There's a lot of stuff like that. And then also just the whole mask fetish, you know, that people. Which also serves absolutely no point at all. And if you don't have it, people get angry. You know, people yell at me because I run along them the river in the mornings. And people would scream at me that they're kind of mellowing out a little more now. But like a week or 10 days ago, they would go totally ballistic, you know.
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David Remnick
New cases of COVID 19 have fallen in China in recent days. President Xi Jinping visited Wuhan, the epicenter, as a show of confidence that the Communist Party has the virus under control. Peter says you can see right on the ground the power of Xi Jinping's government.
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Peter Hessler
There's a big sign in front of our building that actually has all the local government officials and their phone numbers and their pictures, which is a very unusual thing to have in China. Of course, I called and then they, within minutes set up an appointment, and I met the local party secretary. And so this sort of unusual. Usually open in that sense. This is a little section of, like a neighborhood of the city that has 6,000 residents. They've had one case, which is the guy in my building. But it's also just kind of an amazing. The violations of privacy. Because in many places, like my students write about, like, they will publish people's names who have it. You know, I mean, I've seen a few things, I think very misguidedly talk about this as a threat to the party. I don't feel like that at all. I mean, I think this really reinforces their strength. I think it actually makes more people have faith in them.
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David Remnick
And while the World Health Organization has praised China's efforts, these are measures that only a truly authoritarian regime can pull off, which has Peter a little concerned.
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Peter Hessler
You know, I have, like, serious, you know, reservations about this kind of situation. Like, I think it's really bad to have to shut things down in this way. You know, when you're building a society, it's not just about numbers on a death rate. To me, like, mental health is a big issue. And to me, like, being free from fear is a big part of that. I get in the elevator, and if somebody. People won't get in the elevator with me, first of all. And if they do, they turn their back to me often. And I think this is a psychological issue. I think it damages community. But all these things, it's not a body count, you know, and that's what you're up against on the other side because they'll just say, well, you know, look at how the numbers went down in the quarantine. And those are people who are still alive. You know. And the thing is there is everybody, you know, the public health people would tell you what's better, to have an overreaction under reaction. But I think there may be a point where that's not true. I think there is a more subtle way to do this, a longer term approach. You know, your quarantine and what they would call social distancing has to be more targeted to the groups that matter. You have to recognize that the disease sort of runs its course and that there's probably not going to be a silver bullet for it. And also, like, eventually it comes back. Until you either have a vaccine or until you get herd immunity, this thing still is around, like, because people have this idea that it's being defeated. You know, it's not like you do this and then it's done. It's going to come back.
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David Remnick
Peter Hessler is a staff writer living under quarantine with his family right now in Chengdu. You can read Peter's reporting from China and more@newyorker.com his recent book, which is about Egypt, is called the Buried. More in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. For most of us, the speed and intensity of the coronavirus pandemic came on as a shock, but maybe not for Lawrence Wright. Larry is a terrific journalist, the author of major books about al Qaeda and the Church of Scientology, among others, and he's been a staff writer since 1992. Larry has been imagining a virus like COVID 19, teasing out its consequences for a book that he's called the End of October. Now, this book is not journalism. The End of October is fiction, very much a thriller. But the circumstances certainly ring familiar.
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Interviewer
Larry, you're talking to me from a studio in Austin, Texas, where you've lived for a long time. And Austin is the home of south by Southwest, this huge music and film and technology festival, and was one of the first big events to be canceled. Tell me about the mood in Austin where coronavirus is concerned and what does the cancellation mean for Austin?
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Lawrence Wright
Well, it's a $350 million loss to the economy, but that's just, you know, what would have been the spending. Everybody is very worried about the effect on the service industries, the restaurants, the hotels. There's so many, you know, gig workers who are just going to be flattened by this because so much of their yearly income depends on this couple of weeks of South By. My daughter used to rent out her house for south by and maybe Formula one, and it would pay her rent for the entire year. Well, that's not going to happen. And what's shocking to me, we haven't had a single case yet in Travis county that has been discovered at least. But there's hardly any cars on the streets. I'm at the university. I only see a handful of students walking around. It's really quite striking, even in Austin.
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Interviewer
So we imagine the impact of an outbreak like COVID 19. We think a lot about the immediate health effects, the people infected, the people who will recover, the number who don't. But your novel, and I should emphasize it's a novel, not a book of science journalism. But we'll get to the research in a second. Your novel deals a lot with, with the unexpected ways that an outbreak can influence not just the public health, but culture and politics and economies. And are those second order effects of a virus more dangerous than the virus itself? How would you equate that?
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Lawrence Wright
Well, they're certainly more enduring. You know, viruses come and sweep through a population. They may return, they may not. But you know, like cholera, cities have been built designed because of cholera to have sanitation, clean water, clean air. All of that is because of cholera. Cholera is easily dealt with in the modern era, but the enduring effects of those cholera plagues is still with us.
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Interviewer
The novel's about a virus of your own imagining. It's not about COVID 19. Tell me about the virus in your book.
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Lawrence Wright
Well, I call it the Congoli flu. I chose influenza as my medium because it is still the most dangerous virus that we're faced with. And, and I pictured it starting in Indonesia in a refugee camp. Indonesia has been persecuting homosexuals. And so I imagine that there was a camp, a detention center where a number of people have hiv, AIDS and their immune systems are compromised. And in that environment, a novel infection, a flu that has never been seen before, suddenly arises and takes root in the human population and becomes transmissible. And there is an attempt to quarantine the camp. But in the novel, the hero of the book goes to visit his driver, is contaminated and infected and goes to go on pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia for the Hajj. And that's how the virus really gets ignited.
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Interviewer
What's really uncanny and again emphasizing that it's a novel is that the global political conditions are so much like what we have now. You've got United States and Russia are in conflict, Saudi Arabia and Iran are to each other's throats. The threat of climate change is everywhere. And there's a not terribly responsive president in the White House, though he doesn't go named. What happens to that world when this virus is unleashed in it? And does it bear any resemblance to what you're seeing every day now in the news?
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Lawrence Wright
Oh, David, it's so demoralizing. Honestly, I read the paper and I feel like I'm reading another chapter of my own book. And unfortunately, real life seems to have taken the form of art and outraced even some of my imagination.
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Interviewer
Well, how do you mean? What are you observing now in the reaction to this coronavirus that resembles what you might have anticipated? And how is it outstripping it?
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Lawrence Wright
Well, specifically, quarantine. You know, quarantine is not a. It's not a cure by any means. Its only goal, really, is to forestall the advance of a disease so that time can be used to develop some kind of vaccine or cure. And I imagine 3 million people in Mecca on Hajj and quarantining that, it seemed to me a real leap of imagination. It doesn't begin to compare with what China did. You know, 70 million people in Hubei province, you know, maybe 250 million people, 750 million people. I read quarantined in one way or another. And now Italy. My own imagination would have balked at such a stupendous effort. I don't know what the world's going to be like when it's finally published in mid April because this disease gallops along so much.
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Interviewer
This isn't the first novel about an apocalyptic pandemic. Some in the past have had a pretty familiar form. There's a stable world. The virus throws that world into chaos, and then some brave souls defeat the virus and things go back to normal. That's not what happens in your book.
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Lawrence Wright
No.
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Interviewer
Do those other novels get pandemics wrong somehow?
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Lawrence Wright
Well, you know, there are enduring consequences of any great pandemic, and they've changed the future course of human life. You know, smallpox, plague. You know, those great pandemics of the past are tremendous scars on history. They affected the outcome of wars, affected the mortality of humanity for years to come. We tend to think after the 20th century, where there were so many triumphs of medicine, and we thought we had put the great plagues of the past to rest, accepting perhaps influenza. But then along came sars, along came mers, these other viruses that posed tremendous threats. Fortunately, we have been able to contain them somewhat but they are incredibly dangerous.
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Interviewer
Now, as you watch what's happening now, and obviously we're in early stages, how do you evaluate the American reaction to the pandemic on a government level?
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Lawrence Wright
Oh, God. Let's go back to, you know, when President Trump first came into office and fired the global pandemic team, including Admiral Timothy Weiner, who had handled the malaria outbreak in Africa and is credited with saving 6 million lives and then cutting the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention so that they were no longer able to monitor the health in most countries in the world. We were handicapped going out of the gate. You know, America is not a country like China that will easily lock up cities and partition states. You know, that's, you know, the trust is going to be that people will take care of themselves, but that's not really going to happen. I think that people will isolate themselves. There is social distancing. I think a lot of Americans are taking this very responsibly. But still, there's not going to be an absolute wall up the way that there is in China.
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Interviewer
In a sense, what you're suggesting is that there is an innate advantage to an authoritarian state like China's over a democratic fluid state like the United States in this kind of situation.
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Lawrence Wright
Here's what I think about China in that, you know, it's an authoritarian country. It does not like to have any criticism. It hides any kinds of interior problems it might have. As we saw at the beginning of this outbreak, where that young doctor made an outcry and he was suppressed. And of course, he eventually died. Of COVID 19. Previously, SARS had broken out in China and China hid that. When World Health Organization authorities went to China to examine the situation, there were reports that the authorities had placed SARS patients in taxis and had them ride around until the HU officials were gone. That is the downside of an authoritarian government. The other side of it is a government that is as authoritarian and brutal as the Chinese government can enforce a quarantine that I don't think any other country in the world would be able to attempt.
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Interviewer
What was your first thought when you heard about this outbreak in China late last year? Did you immediately think we could end up where we are today? Did you expect a different outcome somehow?
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Lawrence Wright
David, Good evidence is I didn't unload my stocks. I didn't take any of the precautions that a person, given all the knowledge that I had, should have done. Like so many people, I kept thinking, ah, this isn't going to affect me. It won't reach my home, but I've been unnerved by it. I think it's going to be a real challenge to our democracy and it's going to inflict a whole lot of grief on the world in one way or another.
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Interviewer
When you say there's a threat to our democracy with COVID 19, what do you mean?
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Lawrence Wright
You know, let's start with just the difficulty of having politics in a place where people can't assemble. You know, what's going to happen with the conventions? How about voting? How are we going to manage those kinds of things? This is not a good time to be going out to mass rallies.
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Interviewer
Larry, what concerns do you have for publishing a novel into the teeth of this?
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Lawrence Wright
Are you worried? Well, you're worried how people are going to react to it.
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Interviewer
You're worried because what, or do you think it can provide information that's useful in a way that's maybe more easily.
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David Remnick
Or transmitted than a CDC announcement on television?
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Lawrence Wright
I think it'll make it understandable to people in a way that they couldn't. Maybe in another way. You know, there should be at least some hope from this novel in that there are these really ingenious, courageous people that are involved in fighting it. I went to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda and talked to immunologists at Pfizer, and I went to Fort Detrick where a lot of the biowarfare research had been done. And I was so struck by the ingenuity and the courage of people who work in public health, and that's why the book is dedicated to them. People actually go into those situations and confront these very cunning ways that nature has of sickening and killing us. That really impresses me and I have a lot of confidence in them.
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Interviewer
Larry Wright, thank you so much.
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Lawrence Wright
It's my pleasure, David, and best of.
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Interviewer
Health to your family and everyone you know.
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Lawrence Wright
And same to you and yours.
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David Remnick
Lawrence Wright has been a staff writer since 1992.
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Interviewer
His book the End of October, Just to be Clear, is a work of fiction. It's due to be published this spring. I'm David Remnick and that's our show for today.
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David Remnick
You can find much more of the.
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Interviewer
New Yorker Radio Hour by subscribing to our podcast.
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David Remnick
Thanks for joining us.
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Interviewer
Be well and see you next time.
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Announcer
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Botin Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, Callalea, David Krasnow, Gofenne Mputubwele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses and Steven Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Meng Fei Chen and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Tsurina Endowment Fund.