When the pandemic broke in Wuhan, China, I never thought it was going to reach us here in Trinidad and Tobago. Boy was I ignorant and uninformed! Reality struck when cases began popping up in the United States and then Trinidad. My workplace immediately placed us on a staggered work schedule followed by six months of full remote working, as the full, all nation 'Lock Down' was announced. My children and I spent those months with my grandmom, a sick aunt, and no internet, just cable TV.
My granny loves local TV and one of the very first movies we looked at was Contagion with Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow, released in 2011. It is amazing how this show captured all the emotions I was feeling: disbelief that something so simple (the initial cause for the outbreak, shown in the movie) can cause such an epidemic, the eagerness for more information, the desperation for items such as sanitizers, Lysol and some people toilet paper. A constant need to sanitize everything, from door handles to the ceiling and everything in between. The anxiety, so much so that I did not want my teenagers to go into our yard (paranoid much!).
In the show, they eventually found a cure but that is just the movie. In reality, while the search is still on to find the ideal treatment, life must go on - with a difference. We now have to do as Jack Welsh says, "Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be".
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