Tag: COVID19 Posts

I was looking through some of my old posts recently, particularly with regards to COVID-19 and the first lockdown here in Spain, and realized I hadn’t done an update in a while. Strangely, it’s going on the one year anniversary from when this all started. I had friends visiting from Canada when this all began, and as each day went by more and more activities were suspended in Spain. The first inkling of trouble was that the tickets we had to a futbol match here in Valencia were ultimately cancelled. Thinking nothing of it, we decided to purchase other tickets to see Madrid play, and those too were cancelled. The final nail in the coffin, and the canary in the coalmine as it were, was the cancellation of the yearly Fallas festival here in Valencia. My friends managed to get out Europe the next day by taking a last minute […]

This morning I woke up and like most days since the quarantine started here in Spain, immediately checked the official statistics to see if the curve has started to flatten yet. Today’s update shows rough 5,500 new cases since yesterday with another 443 people having died. roughly the entire capacity of Surrey Memorial Hospital back home in the Fraser Valley. While these numbers are slightly less than the ones from the day before, I’ve learned not to get too excited with a low day on the charts since often the next day more than makes up for it. What these numbers mean, besides the obvious horridness of people dying daily, is that we still have no idea when things will get better or the quarantine will be lifted. After reading that I put my head back on the pillow and went back to sleep. Days have this weird duality here […]

On January 7th, 2020, I was on an airplane flying from Vancouver, Canada, to Spain, fully unaware of what was occurring in Asia with regards to a novel coronavirus, now known as COVID-19. Little did I know, in roughly two months we would be on lockdown here in Spain for the foreseeable future in an effort to curb the rapidly increasing countrywide death rate associated with COVID-19. Like many countries who now find themselves in a similar place, Spain mostly ignored the lessons we should have learned from Italy, and Italy largely ignored the lessons they should have learned from China. The end result for both Spain and Italy is a daily battle to prevent the collapse of the national health care system, and the continuing restriction of liberties in an effort to ‘flatten the curve’ and reduce the deaths that are occurring daily. I myself am guilty of it […]