Coronavirus Diary: DON'T LET THE COVID-19 BEAST INVADE YOUR MIND

DON’T LET THE COVID-19 BEAST INVADE YOUR MIND

- Gamini Akmeemana

Like so many bad things, COVID-19 or Novel Coronavirus came across as something abstract, unreal, something which can’t happen to you. Though its death rate made one think of the Medieval Plague, and three months after we heard of the first Coronavirus patient in this country, it all somehow seemed so far away last week, when the curfew was announced.

When that happened, I decided to write a Coronavirus diary for my FaceBook page. We were no longer working. The paper had shut down temporarily and we were home, not knowing when we could return to work. I had no assignment to cover the epidemic.

But there is something in you which rebels against the idea of being confined, mentally, spatially, turning your own house into a prison; you rebel too, against the idea of being just a cog in a massive engine which suddenly shuts down in the middle of nowhere.

People working in certain sectors all over the world, from health workers, garbage collectors, street sweepers, delivery and transport workers, police, the military, and other essential services were taking massive risks simply by going to work. I have no idea if the media is classified as an essential service, but it is. Listening to radio was a huge source of comfort and information, and online news was a source of strength even if newspapers were shut down in many countries.

I felt bound by conscience to keep a text plus visual diary of daily events as well as my own emotions throughout this ordeal, hence this Coronavirus diary. I prefer to call it that rather than the now official term of COVID-19, which sounds clinical and dry. (Novel) Coronavirus is more colourful, bringing to mind an image of something nasty with fangs and tentacles, straight out of a science fiction movie.