9 years on and a brave new world

There are no police looking for quarantine violators at 6 in the morning, so I was up and out to get exercise before the sun came up. This is the fifth day of quarantine. We are in Spain. I arrived here in the last week of February and was going to return to Switzerland for a while in March to check mail, pay bills, ride my motorcycle and go to the office for a few days. We took a week of holiday to drive campers around Portugal with friends when the virus outbreak hit Italy. Portugal was safe while we were there and we watched events from far away as we had parties on the beach. Returning to Spain the situation continue to look dire in Italy, especially in Lombardia, which is only 5 kms from our home. Prudence - and my wife - told me to stay here in our house in Spain. The risks of passing through Malpensa were infection, the possibility of not being able to travel to Switzerland from Italy and also the possibility of not being able to return to my family in Spain. Although my wife and daughter changed their residences from Switzerland to Spain in September, I am still domiciled at home and pay my taxes at home. Although weeks before it actually happened, we envisioned a situation in which the countries would close their borders and since I have no right of residence in Spain, there was risk that the authorities would not let me reenter the country. 

All of February I had been in Switzerland and the US and it was important that I stayed for a while. This is day 6 of a 15 day quarantine. So far it has gone well. My work is fully remote, so for me each workday is basically normal, although there are new crisis-related legal issues to confront, along with ordinary business. If you ask me, the ordinary business will wind down to nearly nothing over the next months. The first half of the year is a wash and there is little hope for anything positive in the economy to happen. There is a lot of possibility for the society to behave differently and more consciously after this, and we will see if that happens, but for the most part people are blind and won't reflect on these events. More about that later.