Life in Lockdown Through The Lens of a Baby Boomer

All hell broke loose at the start of the year when the Covid-19 virus spread like wildfire all over the globe.  In February it hit close to home - the Philippines. The viral infections started in Wuhan, China last December 2019, but I only read it on social media then. 

Various posts said it was scary but I brushed it aside since it was far away.  When the dreaded virus reached Philippine shores, people began wearing masks. The scene was foreboding. 

I still didn't wear a mask because local news said that the few infections were isolated cases. But things turned deadly serious when news from around the world reported that infected people were suffering and dying by the hundreds. Here the numbers began to surge. By mid-March, the Philippine president announced a Luzon-wide enhanced community quarantine dubbed as ECQ which seemed unreal. The government sugar-coated the word - lockdown - so it would be more acceptable to the public.

By the next couple of months, the ECQ mutated, like the virus, to MECQ, GCQ, and MGCQ. What will be the next acronyms? The quarantine here became one of the longest-running lockdowns in the world.

After the president announced the lockdown, the atmosphere became tense. People working in the metropolis with familial roots in the provinces scrambled to bus stations, ports, and airports to flee back to their hometown trying to beat the lockdown deadline. City dwellers watched the exodus anxiously on television and social media as they prepared to hunker down. The megacity in the days to come would be the epicenter of infections.  Everybody started to panic including me.

My wife and I rushed to the nearest supermarket for provisions to ride out the lockdown. To our surprise, we saw long lines of masked shoppers meandering along the aisle towards the checkout counters with pushcarts brimming with groceries. It seemed everyone was panic buying.  While I walked down the aisle, I felt anxious when I passed by the antiseptic alcohol shelf and saw that it was totally empty. I tried to convince myself that this was not happening.  My anxiety was further stoked, when days later the other kind of alcohol which was intoxicating, was banned for selling. It was a sobering experience. The lockdown would have been bearable if I could freely buy beer and drank it inside my house.

Metro Manila is almost grounded to a halt. Work and schools stopped except for essential services. It looked grim. Masked policed manned checkpoints city boundaries manned in full battle gear; movement became limited. I'm a war flick fanatic and I like watching boots on screen. Now it's totally different. It's true to life.

The pandemic drama that unfolded in the Philippines was like binge-watching a Netflix movie.  It was stories about the pandemic, prison life and dystopia all rolled into one. 

I'm a self-confessed TV addict but I got distracted from watching entertaining TV shows because Facebook already supplied the daily drama; a roller coaster of emotions. You can actually jump in by clicking the emoticons to voice your sentiments. And if you're brave enough you can type your thoughts in the comment box but be prepared to be trolled. I preferred the emoticons.

Life in quarantine felt like being locked up in a minimum-security prison complete with amenities. The first week seemed like a normal long break from work. The second week was a bonus vacation. But when the third week dragged on, reality started to kick in. It's getting harder every day being cooped up in your home which seemed like forever.  I guess this was how inmates felt being locked up. 

As days drag on, I found it harder and harder to break the monotony; anxiety weighed me down. Netflix, cable tv, and YouTube became bland. The only exciting thing was real people and trolls slugging it out online adding to the virus-induced mass hysteria. Spicing up the brawl, fake news served as an intermission.

I kind of envied Millennials because they could work from home using their laptops. It was a regular eight-hour grind done at home with no strict dress code. At least they were pretty much occupied unlike the brooding baby boomer - that was me of course. Zoom was in fashion and for lunch breaks, Tik Tok served as a breather. Wish I could work online but my line of work requires me to go out and sell to people. 

You feel overwhelmed when your daily fare is news about the coronavirus and its scary stories.  You can suffer from a panic attack. The different kinds of media pushed their own breaking news about the pandemic further rattling frayed nerves that are already on edge including mine. It became scarier when infections and deaths were reported every day and it just keeps rising.  Even doctors and nurses were not spared. I salute their bravery and my sympathy goes to those who have died from the virus. But because of that, the last place on earth that I would go to is the hospital.

The fourth week of the quarantine began to take a toll on me mentally and emotionally. Though I was not alone because everyone's anxiety was rising as the future becomes bleaker. You can easily gauge it from their personal posts on Facebook. Everyone was trying their best to cope. 

When I felt I was going to be a candidate for cabin fever.  Boom! The president extended the lockdown. I needed to brace myself for another dose of confinement. And I began to entertain psychosomatic ailments. Heck, I needed to fight this or else!

Food runs became a serious business. I put on my battle gear which consisted of a face mask, quarantine pass, and a small bottle of antiseptic alcohol as a shield against the virus. The trip to the supermarket gave me a sense of temporary freedom. However, that feeling quickly disappeared as I drove out and saw a depressing dystopian landscape with stores all closed and hardly any soul outside. I don't even know what to say anymore.

After the lockdown extension, security forces became stricter and the government announced a curfew. Quarantine violators were actually arrested. It felt like we were in a state of siege. I found it confusing though as to who or what the enemy was because it became a sort of blurred.  Was it the virus, violators, or both?

It's was a good thing though that I can reach my friends of the same age through messaging apps. But all we talk about is our fear of catching the virus. And we belong to the high-risk age group. That means when one of us gets infected, we're sure to meet our maker, which made me more prayerful.

After two and a half months, the lockdown was eased a bit, and I asked myself questions like: "Is it over? Are we safe? It's hardly the case because the numbers are still rising. Moving forward, it's going to be survival of the fittest - us versus the virus that is lurking out there busy finding a host. We have no choice but to go out and jumpstart the stalled economy or else we will all go back to the stone age.

Our only hope is the miracle vaccine which is still beyond the horizon. Meanwhile, new rules were rolled out which they say is the "new normal." I'm trying my best to be brave by reciting uplifting words including borrowing the title of Aldous Huxley's novel "A Brave New World."  I included that in my ensemble of mantra, to help me to live the semblance of a normal life, under a new world order created by the coronavirus.