Monday night. This is our last night in Deep River, in the cozy little AirBnB cottage. We’ll set off for Quebec tomorrow. Two days ago, Quebec set up movement restrictions in 8 distant towns to keep the virus from spreading. Here is hoping nothing will change within 24 hours and we’ll be able to drive on in. I can’t imagine what the world will look like 28 days later when we drive back to Ontario – maybe back to Toronto, likely to another rental.

Quebec has more cases than Ontario, but it also has more AirBnB rentals outside major cities. Everything is a tradeoff.

These last two weeks have been almost embarrassingly good to us. Hidden indoors, learning to cook and bake, having deep conversations and playing video games and binge-watching TV while the rest of the world got stranger and stranger. This is a very middle class privilege, I know. This required savings, no kids, no pets, the ability to work from home… Few could have the same opportunity, and we’re well aware of that.

Meanwhile, in the US, covid-19 has killed more Americans than 9/11 did, and the death toll will just keep on growing. A lot of people don’t understand how exponential growth works, and this will be a rude awakening. There’s a disturbing viral video taken by a driver in New York: hospital personnel used a forklift to load bodies into a refrigerated truck. So banal and horrifying.

Russia has declared total lockdown. In addition to banning international flights, they also locked down Moscow on four-hour notice. Something is rotten, but we’re unlikely to ever find out how bad it really is there. For that matter, some folks in China are claiming the true death toll in Wuhan was over 30,000. That does sound more realistic than the death toll they provided – but once again, we’ll likely never know.

A megachurch pastor in Florida had over 1,000 people for a Sunday service. The local sheriff wants to arrest him, which is an interesting change of pace: a lot of religious folks, both in the US and worldwide, have been defiant – and accelerating the spread of the virus by doing so. Some of the clergy claim that no one ever got sick in a church; others say that the communal wine doesn’t transmit disease. So far, they’ve been doing that without any consequences – it’ll be interesting to see if that sheriff is an exception or the first of many quarantine enforcers.

Goodbye, Deep River.