Life Under Quarantine

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2020

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Since its outbreak last year, the coronavirus COVID-19 has thrown the world into disarray. Travel to the U.S. from Europe has been suspended for thirty days; financial markets have plunged; Saudi Arabia cancelled the Hajj—the list of impacts is already infinite. In China, where the virus started, eight hundred million people are under some kind of restriction. One of them is Peter Hessler, who is currently based in Chengdu, and who has been quarantined with his family since January. New cases of the virus have been falling recently, which the Communist Party touts as a sign of its success, but Hessler has concerns about the costs of mass quarantine. “When you’re building a society, it’s not just about numbers or the death rate. Mental health is a big issue, and being free from fear is a big part of that,” he says. “And the public-health people will tell you that it’s better to have an overreaction than an underreaction, but I think there may be a point where that’s not true.” Plus: the staff writer Lawrence Wright recently wrote a novel—yet to be published—about a pandemic that sounds a lot like COVID-19. “The End of October” is a work of fiction and firmly in the thriller genre, but what he imagined in it turns out to be eerily close to what we are experiencing now. “I read the paper and I feel like I’m reading another chapter of my own book,” he tells David Remnick.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.5	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and we are broadcasting from my apartment.
0:16.2	Like everybody else, we're making adjustments.
0:19.5	Since its outbreak last year, the coronavirus, COVID-19,
0:23.0	has thrown the world into disarray. Travel from Europe has been restricted for 30 days,
0:28.5	at least. Financial markets have tanked. Saudi Arabia canceled the Hodge, the Islamic pilgrimage.
0:34.9	The NBA has suspended the basketball season. And who knows what could happen
0:39.2	to all kinds of public assemblages, theaters, the Olympics, and all the rest. And in China, where the
0:45.0	outbreak began, nearly 800 million people have been living under some kind of restriction.
0:50.9	Hello? Oh, yeah, I can hear you fine. Given all this, we rang up our staff writer Peter Hessler on Skype.
0:56.8	Peter is reported for years from China.
0:59.3	He went back with his family last year to teach at Sichuan University.
1:03.8	Yeah, now we're in Chengdu, which is in the southwest.
1:08.0	It's the capital of Sichuan province.
1:10.3	And so, yeah, I mean,
1:11.0	we've been quarantined since, you know, late January. We have two nine-year-olds. We have twin
1:17.0	daughters there in Chinese public school. And so the city, you know, so my kids are not in school.
1:23.8	And, you know, this has been more than a month. My kids have not seen another kid their age for more than a month.
1:29.9	Now, here in the States, we talk about self-quarantining. That's a voluntary decision to keep others safe. But in China, a quarantine is a quarantine.
1:39.3	Usually in many compounds, they would allow like one person out from each household every two days.
1:46.0	Because we're sort of in a higher-end thing. There was no limit. We have to have a card to go in and out,
1:50.3	but we can go in and out as much as we want. And so I went out a lot because I would bike around
	...

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