Out of Eden Walk: Walking through COVID

Paul Salopek: Yeah. So I was, as you mentioned, walking through the rainforests of northern Myanmar. It was very hot. It was steamy. It was partly through wilderness. So, I was looking forward to reaching an urban center to take a week or two-week-long break, as I often do on this project. I managed to reach the old imperial city of Mandalay in northern Myanmar. And that’s when I first start getting the news coming across the wires, as it were, that there’s some new exotic virus breaking out all over the world. 

Well, probably, like almost everybody else, on my phone. So, scrolling the news and, you know, it was mysterious. And I was in a country that I’d never been in before. Moreover, I was in kind of a remote part of the country. 

Yeah. So, this is what’s so amazing. I’m in northern Myanmar, a city of 1.2 million. I’ve booked a room in a guest house. News comes out about COVID, everybody leaves. I’m the only person left in a four-story guest house with the staff. The guy managing this guesthouse was a great guy. His name was Aung Ko Ko. A young guy in his late 20s. He had no public health experience, but he was very public-spirited. So, he started organizing himself, his friends and his staff to do emergency work in this city of 1.2 million.

So, Aung Ko Ko came to me saying, “Paul, do you know anything?” I was just a foreigner, you know, walking through his city. He said, “Do you know anything about setting up food banks?” Because in a country as poor as Myanmar, the virus, of course, could kill you. Nobody knew how deadly it was. But hunger — if you’re immobilized, lose your job and go into lockdown — will get you first. So, he was Googling how to set up food banks, how to prepare hand sanitizer.

In rich countries in the global North, people were talking about not enough respirators to go around. In northern Myanmar, it was “we don’t even have hand sanitizer.” So, the local chemistry students at the university were concocting homemade hand sanitizer to give to the people. There were businessmen talking to each other, saying, “How do we identify [people at risk on the streets], migrant workers, homeless people,” and delivering food on motor scooters. It was this very dark, scary time, but also really inspiring how this community mobilized to defend itself against an unknown virus.

Well, it was, despite all my history as a conflict reporter, unique because it was a civil war erupting before my eyes that was happening on top of a global pandemic. And so, everybody’s concerns about dying and from COVID quickly evaporated about being shot on the streets. And so, it was this double whammy for the poor people of Burma. I think their kind of innocence, as it were, in dealing with both a military crackdown [and] expecting the world to come to rescue them in the middle of a pandemic was a double heartbreak. It was truly, truly hard to see.

It was COVID-19. As you know, China had among the strictest lockdown quarantine rules of any country in the world. Of course, when I entered China from Myanmar, I had to go into quarantine myself. That was a whole adventure because I had not the capacity to leave the hotel and kind of get all the apps necessary to participate in commerce in China. So, I had friends calling the hotel from other countries, saying, “Can you buy this guy a cup of tea?” And so, when I got out of the quarantine, I was still stuck in the city of Shanghai for months, waiting for western China to get this magic moment when there were no quarantines, regional local quarantines, so I could start walking through the country. It took months.

I finally did get COVID, when most other Chinese did. It’s when the government abruptly lifted all its restrictions in late 2022 and early 2023. I was walking through the province of Shaanxi. My walking partner was lagging behind. I could tell she wasn’t feeling well. Guess what? It was COVID. And then, a few days later, I had COVID, too.

So, we didn’t know what to do, because just a few days earlier, according to Chinese government regulations, we had to immediately go into COVID quarantine, government-regulated, kind of, holding areas. But they were no longer in existence. Everybody in China was kind of scratching their heads, saying, “What do we do?” We checked into a hotel that normally we would not be able to do. The clerks were very generous, very human. They said, “Just go into your rooms and lock yourselves into your rooms.” So, I spent nine days in a hotel room on my back. I got a pretty serious attack of the symptoms. 

Well, you know, the biggest one [is] those 7 million poor souls who are no longer with us. In addition, there are millions of people who are suffering through long-COVID, whose extended symptoms are still just being explored. But the biggest thing, Marco, even above that, I think, is the fact that the way different countries handled this pandemic somehow broke the public trust, both in really severe, strict conditions, say in China, and in ones that were looser, say, in the United States. So, if another pandemic comes, I fear that people will no longer listen to sensible medical advice, and it’s going to be worse than ever.