QUARANTINE

I looked around the eerily quiet airport. Rather than the usual bright and frenetic hustle and bustle of L.A. airport, a surreal and oppressive hush and stillness pervaded the scene. People were silently sitting or slowly moving around; as though they might set off alarms if they were to conduct themselves in their previously normal fashion.

Brief conversations were quiet and muffled; made more so by people trying to talk through their obligatory face masks. The harsh and incessant admonitions from the loud speakers, repeated at two-minute intervals it seemed, added a particularly tyrranical tone to the setting; more reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984 than 2020. All for the greater good of course…

It was April 2020 and I was on my way home from Ecuador, readying myself for my journey back to Australia after spending three months in South America. This would be the second last leg of my journey that had started in the south of Ecuador. From there, by road to Guayaquil; a flight from Guayaquil to Miami; a flight from Miami to Chicago; a road trip from Chicago to Madison, Wisconsin, where I stayed with friends for few nights while awaiting connecting flights; a road trip from Madison to Chicago; a flight from Chicago to Los Angeles; and next, a ‘repatriation flight’ from L.A. to Brisbane, where I would stay in quarantine for two weeks, before my final leg to Melbourne.

On that road trip to Guayaquil, there were several stops and threatening official checks along the way, which our driver skilfully negotiated, to deliver us safely to our hotel in Guayaquil. This was not exactly a good time for travel!

The usually busy hotel in Guayaquil was imbued with a torpid atmosphere, with few be-masked staff and guests within the plastic-wrapped surrounds. Like every other public space that I entered, hand sanitation flowed, plastic gloves were donned, ‘social distancing’ was imposed and food was dispensed, mostly from dispensing machines, in layers of packaging. It was the same in the Miami hotel where I stayed. I had never seen so much wrapping and packaging in my life and wondered how they disposed of all that waste. How I missed the usual noise and happy chatter of a hotel restaurant.

And nobody smiled. It seemed this was also against the rules. I had landed in an emotionally sterile world, mirroring the futile attempts to create a physically sterile world.

Interestingly, as I moved from one side of the globe to the other on my journey back to Australia, I noted that the countries that I visited appeared to be in a very precisely coordinated lockstep, not influenced by cultural or geographical differences. Not a nuance in sight. And in such a short span of time, belying the apparent dramatic unexpectedness of the ‘pandemic’. It was very obvious to me that there was a central control, clearly with some very slick prior planning, behind the scenes.

The whole exhausting process to arrive at the quarantine hotel in Brisbane (after a sleep-depriving, 15-hour flight and much waiting around prior to that) took many hours, each step being excruciatingly slow. We were treated like prisoners, or contagious lepers from another era, as we were herded from one point to another; with no explanation, courtesy, consideration or, heaven forbid, compassion.

The terse, cold, hard expressions of most of the staff and officials did not demonstrate a hint of human warmth and understanding. These were probably decent, kind people a few short months prior to this ‘global crisis’; yet, it seemed that any demeanour to suggest benevolence was strictly not allowed. This was serious stuff.

What struck me was how readily people lined up and silently followed orders, without being given any official explanation nor room for question or debate. Herd mentality in spades.

No protestations were uttered, except for one woman who I heard pleading with airport officials about serious concerns for her health if she could not have access to her usual strict diet, and other needed supports for her medical condition, while in quarantine. Her pleas appeared to fall on deaf ears. Apparently, this was not a time for the officials to demonstrate any compassion nor ooze the milk of human kindness. We were in a war after all.

It is interesting, if not downright terrifying, how people can so quickly change when taken over by group-thought and the demands of authorities and so-called experts. Even if what they are instructed to do makes no logical or scientific sense and defies all humanity.

As Stanley Milgram’s famous study of obedience in psychology demonstrated, an alarmingly high percentage of people would follow the commands of an authority figure even if those commands went against their own moral directive to not hurt people. Solomon Ashe’s classic experiment in social psychology, through less gruelling methods, demonstrated that a large percentage of study participants would, due to social pressure, give clearly illogical answers in order to go along with the group. Go along to get along.

Fellow humans were treated with suspicion as though they were dangerous germ-spewing entities. Even breathing unfiltered air, our natural connection to life itself, was considered by some to be dangerous or offensive; to the extent that they believed that covering their facial orifices, their connection with life-giving air and prana, with a useless dirty piece of cloth, was somehow protecting them and beneficial for their health. Rampant fear will have many people behave in very strange ways, bypassing normal common sense and humaneness, while flagrantly denying natural biological laws.

I was well aware that all so-called ‘health directives’, almost without an exception, were anti-health and, indeed, anti-life. Mass hysteria and fear will have people jumping through all sorts of hoops in the mistaken belief that it will ‘keep them safe’. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Upon arrival in Brisbane, I was greeted by the opening arms of the quarantine officials who, in cahoots with various other government and health care authorities, would coordinate my enforced two-week quarantine stay in that city; a two week stay, during which I would become very well acquainted with the inside of the hotel room to which I was confined.

Confined, as in locked in my room, with armed police needing to unlock the door to let me out.

Small sacrifice to guard the health and wellbeing of fellow citizens, some would say. Do the right thing and all that. However, I knew enough about biology and immunology (in addition to good old common sense) to know that the enforced quarantine, and other extreme measures imposed, would do very little to stave off the spread of the alleged virus; and pose their own threats to health to boot.

I was fortunate. My hotel room had a small balcony. If I sat in the corner of the small balcony (for which I was immensely grateful to have!), for a certain time in the morning, I could get half an hour of winter-weak sun on my skin while I breathed in air fresher than that of the stuffy hotel room interior. Hallelujah! I would look down on the people moving about the paved walkways far below, envying their relative freedom of movement, though ‘lockdowns’ put limitations on everyone.

Food gave me some small relief from the tedium of quarantine life. I made friends with the local take-away café. I never saw the people who worked there and they never saw me, yet we talked for a few minutes each day. They got to know the daily orders that I needed in order to supplement the scant food that came courtesy of quarantine. They were my link to some normality; some light, warm chatter, amidst this surreal, dystopian nightmare. I looked forward daily to our brief chats and eagerly awaited the brown paper bag packages that contained the welcome delights, such as my double-shot almond lattes (because the coffee machine in the room did not work) and guilty-pleasure snacks to boost my dopamine and break the boredom of my confinement and the monotonous daily rations.

As movement was so limited, one had to get very creative with trying to exercise. Used to exercising regularly, doing none for two weeks was just not an option for me. We were allowed out to the concrete courtyard below for brief periods of walking within that small area. That 10 minutes (20 if we were really lucky and pending the mood of the guards) went by far too quickly. The burley guards would escort us back to our rooms, one person at a time, unlocking and then locking the elevator and hotel room doors as we went. I wondered, who was attending to the real criminals, so many law enforcement and army personnel seemed to be in our facility. I would hate to think what would happen if there was a fire.

Few of us were let out to exercise at any one time, and we always appeared to be outnumbered by enforcement personnel. We inmates, when ‘socially distancing’ passing each other while walking our circuits in the courtyard, would shamefully cast our eyes down, like guilty prisoners averting direct gaze with each other so as to hide our unmentionable crimes.

The ever-present armed guards (police and army personnel) set the tone for my confinement. What exactly were they expecting this grandmother to do? Launch hand grenades? Do a runner into an unfamiliar city with no money, cards, phone or luggage?

Guilty until proven innocent, yet with no crime other than being the potential harbinger of a questionable virus. Human rights did not get a look-in.

I received a call the night before I was to be released – someone in the hotel had testing positive for Covid. Surprise, surprise! Who would have thought that anyone would test ‘positive’ on an inappropriate test that was never designed for diagnostic purposes and that was rife with false positives. The nice lady from Queensland Health called me to explain, and suggested that I, like everyone else in quarantine, be tested. “No thank you!” I was well with no symptoms and knew far too much about that dodgy test to comply. I graciously declined and then sweated out the next 24 hours wondering if the officials would generously extend my stay. Thankfully they did not.

Time came to leave the room that I had got to know so well over my two-week stay. After what seemed like hours of sitting with my packed luggage, a policeman duly unlocked my hotel room and escorted me down to reception on the ground floor. Just in case I did a runner. While at the reception desk, waiting to be discharged, he casually turned to me and asked – “Any symptoms?” “Nope!” I replied. “Okay. Off you go then.” And that was that.

Just like that, my quarantine, courtesy of the Australian government, was over and faded into the background as I entered my next COVID adventure.

Dr Catherine Fyans is a retired medical practitioner, trauma therapist, mind-body consultant and the author of ‘The Wounding of Health Care: From Fragmentation to Integration’