After prayers and breakfast, I set to work on producing audio recordings of this Sunday's service and sermon for upload to ibizachurch.org. It's a real test of the quality of my attention to detail and concentration on doing fiddly things anyway. I had intended to drive up to the recycling bins just down the road from the Es Cuco supermarket and do a small grocery shop there before lunch, but I ran out of time. I felt that I earned my lunch and needed it more.
I don't really have a good source of local up to date information about which shops are open and when. It's all a bit pot luck. Also I'm not sure if there are polices road blocks checking people's purposes for being out and about, as there are all over mainland Spain, restricting unnecessary people and vehicle movement. The government is stamping down on people leaving their cities and going to hunker down in their holiday homes, trying to prevent infection spread to places with lower population density out of season. In the UK appeals have been issued to people with holiday homes in North Wales to stay put and not travel, but how far this is being heeded I have yet to hear.
I gather from my Spanish news-feed that over thirty thousand people have been caught and fined for being out and about with no good reason. Stories of multiple repeat offenders make the news too! On BBC news, one pundit commented that Spain was now in effect under martial law, and posed the rhetorical question of whether UK citizens would put up with this. Wait and see, I thought.
As of late yesterday, there were 11,302 deaths and 272,068 cases of infection world wide, according to the Worldometer website. 90,618 have recovered and 170,148 were ill, with many fighting for their lives. Spain has 20,412 cases with 1,050 deaths, compared to the UK's 3,983 infections and 177 deaths. It's no wonder Spain has taken draconian measures to curb the movement of people and social interactions. Britain is staring to do it now, but the exponential rise of infections in Spain is two weeks ahead of UK. The State of Alarm measures here, with hindsight after the crisis abates, may prove to have come too late to make a strategic difference. Likewise the as UK now ramps up its measures, it may realise an earlier start would have been a wiser decision.
Italy now has more cases and deaths than the whole of China, with 47,021 cases and a horrendous 4,032 deaths, twenty percent more cases for a population that's a fraction of China's. The bare statistic says it all - China 56 cases per million of population, Italy 778 cases per million. Italians have a reputation for being convivial and anarchic, with a long history of volatility in government, 61 of them in 75 years. It's amazing the country has modernised and developed as well as it has. Strong and coherent leadership doesn't necessarily mean dictatorship, but many Italians must now realise the fatal consequences of not having people at the helm with enough foresight and resolve to enforce naturally unpopular measures. The consequences are far-reaching for any democracy.
I walked my 10k per day around the house perimeter again this afternoon, with stops for tea and messaging. Finally, after six I made myself get in the car and take the stuff for recycling up to the depository, just two hundred metres from Es Cuco. The shop was open and stocked, which was very reassuring. Two tills were working, to minimise the need to queue for the thin stream of customers at any time. One cashier wore a mask, but not the one who served me, thought she did wear gloves.
It's funny this fear of infection/contamination. It makes you think about every action. What if the banknote given in change is infected? If I use a card, what about the keypad? Until now I resisted contactless payment, and don't even know if my card's capacity for this will work as I have never used it before. I sanitized myself obsessively when I got back to the house, regretting I'd forgotten to take my little pink bottle with me. Shopping is my only social contact. It makes me feel nervous, even though the risk here is low compared to anywhere else in Spain. It's the information you don't have that can worrying you most.
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