Danger and Safety in the Time of Coronavirus by Liz Wilson

Liz was born and educated in Scotland and has lived in Aotearoa for most of the past fifty years. She is gradually edging her way into retirement. 
 
28th April 3 new cases, No deaths

I sometimes think that I have been waiting for a global cataclysmic event all my life. I knew, as a wee girl growing up in Scotland, that life was a risky business. So coronavirus has not come as a great shock to me. 

While we are leading confined lives in COVID-19 Lockdown in our homes here in Aotearoa, I hear the voices of my Scottish forebears saying that a wee bit of isolation never hurt anyone… In comparison to their generation’s experience of two World Wars, the Spanish Flu Pandemic and a Great Depression crammed into a thirty year period, our experience of COVID -19 seems like a walk in the park. My parents, who were at university during most of World War 2, spoke of dancing, overnight fire watching at the Hunterian Museum and outrageous escapades. Of their reality: bombing, evacuation of children, conscription, menfolk away fighting, injury and death, the Clydebank Blitz and rationing: they said little.
 
The spread of coronavirus is currently under control here and we in Aotearoa seem relatively safe for now in Lockdown Level 3 — well sheltered from the danger of contracting the virus compared to most other countries in the world. I feel very safe at home cosseted in my bubble. I feel unconcerned about my lack of ambition to come off Lockdown trusting that safe decisions will be made at the correct time.
  
The way ahead, as we gradually access less restricted lives, seems a careful balance between safety and danger — the safeguarding of the health of the nation while attempting to open up the economy again.