Thursday 5^th March, 2020 2200

Is there anyone left out there in the international community??

Reading a cross-section of the UK and world press, they are reporting blind panic as a precursor to the coming Armageddon! Pictures of people wearing water cooler bottles, full gas masks, boxes for Christ's sake! States of emergency being declared and services put on a war footing.

Do you know, I have been trying to educate my students regarding the futility of wearing masks and they are simply pointing out that my own countrymen are doing likewise and hoovering everything up from supermarkets. Trying to tell them my people are often idiots too just makes me appear a lone crackpot voice. People are ignoring the science and medical opinions. I despair.

I do believe the measures taken here, whilst hellishly and ruinously expensive, are beating it. New cases and deaths are tailing off whilst elsewhere they do the opposite. The ends seem to be justifying the means. I forgot my mask today when I went out and wasn't shouted at. I also saw others with bare faces. The fruit stall nearest me reopened today as well. This country will bounce back again soon and hopefully they will in fact bar entry to citizens from infected countries – as they indeed did to the Chinese. China is paying its own price without having it brought back from elsewhere.

Meanwhile, I am reliably informed by Our Man In Shanghai that Beijing and Shanghai are rolling out a new thing. It's an application for smartphones that you have to show to get back to your housing estate, into malls etc. If you've been to infected areas (they track your phone location) then depending on the degree of infection in the zone, it changes to different colours.

If they do it here then I can never leave home! I and countless others with “old man” phones that don't do applications. And that includes the grandparents of many of my students. And when the tourists do eventually return, how do they go shopping outside their hotel? Personally I think it will die with the virus, it's impracticable. Going to force everyone to buy a smartphone for 5,000¥ and enter into an internet contract? Not me, that's for sure. I already inform the school every time I am leaving the city, where I am going and which hotel. I have no problem with that in case I am hospitalised for any reason. I don't ask permission, just tell them I am going. And what's to prevent people turning their phone off so it doesn't ping the masts?

Talking of going, I have now started wondering if there will be anywhere left for me to go outside China in the summer! They might all be under lockdown!

Mind you, I am slowly going boss-eyed here. It takes me all day to mark two classes of homework so I reckon I will be working weekends for the next few weeks. I could just read and comment but stupidly I edit and highlight every error – you know, properly.

I will be heartily glad to get back to the front of a classroom......