A Journal of the Plague Year

Wednesday 15th April 2020 – 15.30 pm Further intelligence reaches me from Central China. Hubei Province to be precise. Here, my good friend (a Chinese teacher of English) who lives just down the road from Wuhan, the one-time epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, writes to tell me the latest. It makes interesting reading. The repetititions are a response to my questions to her and the desire to get messages out before an internet connection drops out. Neither of us know when this might happen. Her responses therefore come piecemeal, in short single-message bursts. I have threaded them together to make more sense. "Now, our life is gradually returning back to normal," she writes. "Students in some provinces have gone back to school or will. But Hubei Province will be the last to allow students back to school, so we're still having classes on line. Now there are some imported cases and asymptomatic cases in China. Therefore we're still urged to wear masks in ...

Wednesday 15th April, 2020 – 11.35am As we turn from the tens of thousands of corpses that litter our land, and turn away from the knowledge that it could have been avoided, and turn still further away from Trump who says we need investment in stuff and stops support for the World Health Organisation in a desperate attempt to shuffle off the blame he should be shouldering, it's time to turn towards the exciting news for the economy. Even now, people have not caught up with this aspect of things, and God knows it's hard to focus on it while we are all busy dodging infection, getting down and agonised with Joe Wicks, and finding delivery slots in unlikely places. What effect will Coronavirus have on our wallets, our bank accounts, and on the whole country and the world's economics? It's a multipe choice, so here we go. A) None whatsoever, we will bounce back and within six months or a year we will be rolling in hithero unimagined wealth. The Trump prediction. B)...