March 1. The first case of COVID-19 appeared in Belgium on February 4, in Brussels. I live in Ghent, about fifty kilometres away. The pandemic begins today, however, when a bunch of Belgians return home from a skiing vacation in northern Italy. I think of Daniel Defoe, writing in 1722: “It matter’d not, from whence it come; but all agreed, [the plague] was come into Holland again.” There are now two known cases. I learn from a friend’s article in the New York Times that “quarantine” comes from the Venetian word for forty days, the period of isolation imposed on ships during times of plague. Thirty-nine days to go, I guess.
March 2. My wife and I return home from Barcelona after a blithely ignorant weekend away, built largely around seafood, cañas, and Gaudí architecture. The epicentre of the Spanish contagion is supposedly in Madrid, hundreds of kilometres away, on the other side of the Iberian mountains. Is...
Andrew Benjamin Bricker teaches literary studies at Ghent University. He wrote Libel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts, 1670–1792.
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