Thea's Story

Corona memories

After almost 2 years, it is time to write down some memories before they get lost. Luckily, I do have good documentation of my thoughts in writing, and I do have a good memory.

The first time I heard of the coronavirus was on an ordinary Friday morning in mid-late January 2020. I was at the station, waiting for a train to go to my chiropractor and I realized there were these yellow-white warning posters. I read the poster, which said «Coronavirus. Travelers who come from China are asked to contact the Institute of Public Health». I thought: Why do they even bother hanging up a poster in a little Oslo-suburb train station about some coronavirus that’s going around in China?» Anyway, people who travel to and from China would be well acquainted with what is their traveling business – why make a poster in «my» local little train station? «Well, well, another sign of super globalization... », I thought. And then: «Probably again one of these panic viruses like the swine flu 2009».

I have never followed the mainstream news. I grew up without TV, and my media online consumption has been almost exclusively purely work-related (that has changed now). I also don’t consume any newspapers. Had I, I would have been aware of the coronavirus panic that the media apparently was spreading since January 2020. The coronavirus panic was totally off my radar until that Friday morning I was waiting for the train. In late January, it happened I was visiting a Chinese friend, a woman I had met only some weeks before and visited her for the first time back then. We ate supper together and I met her husband whom my friend introduced to me: «He also is a scientist. He works with zoology and breeding.» And so I asked him directly: «So what is your take on the coronavirus in China?» He, but also his wife, were uncomfortable. He said: «Well, it seems very serious. We have received a package with tea and stuff we were sent from China, but we don’t dare opening the package.» I was a bit disappointed. Their behavior seemed so irrational to me that I just stopped the conversation there and politely changed the topic.

The weeks during February 2020 I had gotten used to the poster at my local train station. The coronavirus in China was nothing I was interested to follow up. I remember I talked to a good friend, a chemist, at some point in late February, maybe early March. We talked about life and everything, and eventually also about the coronavirus. I said: «You know, I don’t read the news and follow all what’s going on – but do you perhaps know what it is all about with this coronavirus?» She said that she had heard it is a virus that due to the ACE-2 receptor was dangerous for humans, but that nobody really knows anything (Note: Today I know the Ace-2 receptor is actually not expressed in the lungs, and hardly any RNA template and no functional protein is found in the human airways – see Tipnis et al 2000 and Hikmet et al. 2020). My friend was like me and didn’t bother; it seemed too diffuse and too far away.

Until the week of 9 march 2020, I lived my life completely drawn into my weekly routines. I was completely unprepared of what would happen since I didn’t read the news, not at all, and I was busy with my own life and worries. It was only the day before the lockdown was announced, 11 March, that I was taken out of my bubble. I came home and met my flatmate in the kitchen where he told me quite worried that Denmark had closed schools and that Norway probably is going to do the same. My flatmate apparently had followed hour-by-hour the news and told me very emotionally about it. It appeared completely surreal to me. I said «Well, let’s see what happens. I cannot imagine they gonna do this here». That day, I think was the last time I had a somewhat rational discussion with him. I think we agreed that closing schools was an overreaction. But still until the next day (12 March 2020), I just went on with my business as usual. Only when I came home again, my flatmate presented me with the news; that there was a press conference and that Norway would do like Denmark: close the schools. That evening I looked up the news and watched the press conference. Yes, from on the next day, 13 March, Norway would go into «lockdown».

I felt like in the wrong movie. Intuitively, I thought: «This is 9/11 – it is exactly the same! - but now we are all victims of the shock strategy». This made me worry. Cynically, I told myself: «So be it. Let them play pandemic. But hopefully really just for 2 weeks! People will realize that it’s a complete overreaction.» Discussing with my flatmate in the kitchen, I argued: «If there was such a thing as a deadly virus, mankind wouldn’t have survived.» And I said: «No government has the right to take responsibility for each and every individual and close down a whole country!». And he replied: «But people can’t take responsibility for themselves, it is needed that they are being told what is right to do in this situation now». I was perplexed. What a statement! I strongly disagreed and said that I think every single living individual has an innate ability to take care and act responsibly for itself. If that wasn’t the case, we wouldn’t have survived as humans. He argued with the tiger-story: «If there is a tiger coming towards you, you don’t wait until he is directly in front of you. You take a gun and better shoot him.» Uhhh. That was the start of a very difficult time in my apartment.

Analyzing the situation, I could so clearly see the mechanisms at play: out of the blue there came a big shock event, just like 9/11. And everyone fell victim to it. The speed of the events and their shocking nature left no room for rational thinking and analysis. The question was: was there a tiger? It bothered me that this was the last spoken word in our kitchen argument. I went to the forest. Many hours. Of course, the situation needed analysis, but apart from all analysis, common sense seemed completely lost in all these discussions.

On Friday 13 march, we got notice by SMS that the buildings on campus would be locked from 1 pm. If we had belongings we would need, we should collect them before then. So on that Friday 13th, this was my only activity. I still wasn’t reading the news. Again at home, I ran into a discussion with my flatmate. He told me about Norwegians who had been in Austria and probably brought infections to Norway. He echoed some voices accusing the government why Norway had not applied travel restrictions already back in February. Today I know that he told me verbatim what the news was telling him.

In the weekend, 14 march, I cleaned up my desk as I knew I would need to work at home the coming 2 weeks. It turned out to be 11 weeks, as the lockdown was formally only lifted on June 1st. On that Saturday, the first lockdown weekend, I started my research. I thought: «If they lock me in at home, I hope they have at least a good reason for it!». The first thing I wanted to know was this: what was the situation in Norway? Was there something true to the rumors of diseased travelers who had come from Austria back to Norway after the winter holidays?

I consulted the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. Sure, they had some numbers. Yes, there were daily status reports. The one from 14 march was actually not the first one. These reports looked lousy, 2-4 A4 pages only, and thereof only 1-2 pages relevant for the situation here in Norway. They showed some bar graphs with numbers of «cases», daily, starting date 26 February. There were between and 2 and 12 cases (!) registered per day until 3rd March in Norway. Really? In a country with 5,4 million inhabitants?! And between 3rd March and March 14th it didn’t look exponential at all. There was a peak March-10 with some 220 «cases», but the following days, 11 March to 13 March, «cases» were declining, somewhere around 150 per day. This bar chart was supplemented with a table and graph of the age and sex distribution of the «cases». Two A4-pages with some numbers that didn’t tell me anything. As a scientist, I was looking for real information, not just these pieces of paper that did not contain any information. What was the definition of «cases»? What disease were they talking about? How is it diagnosed? How many people were actually sick? And most importantly, how many tests were performed? It seemed the most important determinant to me, who has done a lot of analytical chemistry, as the old and simple rule of all measurements is: if you test more, you find more. Any of this information was nowhere to be found in any of the daily «corona-reports».

My search continued. Due to the lockdown, I had time more than enough to do this sort of research. Like always, when exploring a topic, my search very soon went quite broad. We heard so much about Italy, so the first papers I downloaded during the first lockdown week were research papers describing the 2015 Italian influenza wave and the 2017/18 influenza wave in northern Italy. Northern Italy! This was a 2018 paper! Suddenly, the environmental scientist within me was switched on. Northern Italy... The first SETAC conference I attended as a Master student was in Milano. At this conference back then, young and hungry of knowledge, I took the chance to learn about topics also outside my own research and attended for one day a session on air pollution. There were many Italian case studies in that session on PM2.5, analytical and political challenges to tackle the air pollution problem in Northern Italy. It’s just how the creative mind works, I guess. All of a sudden, reading a paper about influenza in northern Italy in the 2017/18 season, I remembered SETAC from 10 years back! And I thought: yeah, well, maybe northern Italy today again, because the entire North is heavily industrialized, the clouds can’t make it over the Alps. «Air pollution... and pneumonia goes kind of together», I thought.

But this was only the start. There was so much more to look into. Next, I downloaded the numbers from the National Italian Office for Statistics for all-cause and influenza deaths in Italy for the last 5 years. The media (well, my flatmate) was bombarding me with numbers of Covid-deaths in Lombardy. How many inhabitants has Italy? I knew it was less than Germany’s 80 million, perhaps some 60 million. And I knew also, roughly, that the death rate in the Western civilized world is around 1% per year relative to the number of inhabitants. So that equates to 600,000 deaths per year in Italy, and so in the winter months perhaps some 60,000 deaths per month, equal to 2000 deaths per day. So that was my initial reasoning. The media was telling us about some N number of deaths – and out of 2000 deaths in the whole of Italy daily, how much percent are we talking about?

I ended up doing elaborate statistics. It turned out there had always been more deaths in the North of Italy (especially Lombardy) than in the rest of the country, also in previous years. I started looking at the demographics. Italy is special in this regard. They have a very old population. Based on the numbers from the year 2018, 22.6 % of the population is older than 64 years. In Lombardy, most people die at age 92 years. To be precise, in the year 2018 it was 92,279 total deaths in Lombardy in the age group 64+ years. So that makes 253 deaths per day on average in Lombardy in that age group, and we should not forget in winter it can be much more. For example, in January 2018 there were 11,059 deaths in Lombardy, giving an average of 369 deaths per day. Looking at the age distribution, this number must be expected to grow, as life is limited and there is very many old people in Lombardy. So, long story short, a number of roughly 400 deaths per day in Lombardy is to be expected in the winter with only the 2018 data – and since we are talking the year 2020, some number perhaps around 450-500 would be to be expected, as there is many old people who during that time from 2018 to 2020 only have gotten even older. So based on these numbers, I thought: «looks like a bad flu winter – let’s see». It seemed absurd to me that nobody was talking about population size or any other number, for example influenza deaths, one could and should have used to compare the numbers to.

Ever since I made this little exercise with the numbers for Italy, I have compiled statistics for many other countries, and especially Norway. What seemed to emerge, and cement later on, was a highly diverse picture that by no means could be explained by a virus alone. Belgium and Luxembourg, two neighboring countries, just like Portugal and Spain, or San Marino and the rest of Italy, had largely diverging death numbers (total deaths, not only Covid). This observation made me look closely into matters not just related to statistics, but more of what my background is: environmental toxicology. Such strong local differences, in my view, can only be attributed to locally diverging exposure parameters, population differences (demographics, social welfare), well, and to some degree politics. And so I got really interested in all that – and well, eventually, I started working on a project at the University Hospital of Oslo in a group of epidemiologists with whom I still discuss some of these matters today.

But life before then was tough. In spring 2020, during the first lockdown, I got quite depressed. I went to the forest almost every day and watched the nature in its awakening. A bit of healing at least. But I was broken with my trust in mankind. How could the whole world have become so insane? As time passed, and as I progressed with my analyses, reality and the created reality by media and the people around me seemed to diverge more and more from each other.

The real-life consequences were that I had to re-structure my daily life completely. Even meeting (former) friends was not possible. For the first time I experienced isolation. Friends who I contacted during the lockdown preferred an online video call over meeting for a walk nearby. I had to cancel my travel plans for Easter to visit my family in Germany – like most other people. Until Easter, I remained «imprisoned» in Oslo. But fortunately, Easter 2020 then was a turning point. I visited good friends in the countryside. It was the first time I could talk to and be with people who had resisted the media’s propaganda of fear.

It turns out my intuition in March 2020 was right. What we all witnessed was a new 9/11 – but on a global scale. It changed my life in many ways. All of a sudden, I was fully back in academia, with a job at the University Hospital – something I had thought I was done with. During the past 2 years, I have made more new friends than ever before. I met incredible people. But at the cost of loosing some friends or entering into a difficult relation with some. I got to know the local beaches and nature much better than before. But at the cost of not having seen my family – among them my newborn nephew – since summer 2020. My grandma passed away and I could not be there. Christmas, birthdays, funerals – I missed a lot of what is irreplaceable and yet makes our lives richer. Nevertheless, or because of it, I personally have grown and become even stronger.

I believe all happens for some reason. And I believe in the laws of nature, nicely depicted in the famous yin-and-yang: (1) there is always balance: balance in quantities, balance in good and evil and (2) there is always both unity and wholeness. All of us, as individual human beings, we are here to be one whole: the human family.