Just before the International Toy Fair in Nürnberg at the end of January 2020, there was a foreboding that the new virus discovered in Wuhan not so long before, would bring about change. And the world would change. This is my first pandemic and Europe is the hot spot at this moment. I can't get the first pages of Albert Camus' La Peste out of my head.

“After the fourth day the rats started to emerge in groups to die. They came up from basements and cubby-holes, cellars and drains, in long swaying lines; they staggered in the light, collapsed and died, right next to people.”

— Albert Camus, The Plague

People are dying and SARS-CoV-2 is not contained. We are in the delay phase, which means we are buying time by slowing down the spread of the virus. In Europe we screwed up the containment phase by not taking the threat serious enough.

Around this time I would have booked an airplane ticket for my first holiday of 2020. I wanted to visit Vietnam. Or maybe the United States, or India. It is now irresponsible to fly. I can still go to work and do my groceries shopping, other than that I pretty much have confined myself in my house. If the outbreak lasts months rather than weeks I will have to rethink my holiday and drive to a remote place in Europa for a few weeks of hiking. It will be a lonely holiday. Not looking forward to it.

The chart below shows why it is so important to close everything down and practice social distancing before things get out of hand. Complacency is deadly.

Source: Tomas Pueyo analysis over chart from the Journal of the American Medical Association, based on raw case data from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention

July 2020

This map show the travel recommendations by the Dutch government. The orange countries can only be visited when travel is necessary, although you get to decide yourself if your trip is necessary. Local quarantines might be in place. Since I decided not to travel by air this year, I’m stuck with the yellow countries for this year’s holiday. Luckily the Alps are accessible this summer.

I used to be able to travel 24.859 miles to be here.