El Andalous - Coronavirus

El Andalous Beach - Flooded

While the world is in turmoil over COVID-19, my life is going on pretty much as usual.

At BestWay (local supermarket in Sahl Hasheesh), the people serving are wearing plastic gloves and the delivery people wear masks. In El Andalous, housekeeping were wearing masks, but they seem to have stopped that now. Maybe they’ll start again as I saw one person in reception wearing one, but he laughed when he saw me looking at him, so perhaps he was just mucking about. That kind of sums up the atmosphere. There’s no sense of panic whatsoever, which is hugely refreshing, in my opinion. They’ve put sterilizing handwash in the toilets in El Andalous.

The airport is being thoroughly cleaned (regularly, one would hope) and passengers are undergoing a health check as they enter the country. The threat is more from tourists than anything else. Other than that, it’s pretty much the same as usual here. There’s no panic buying (although there was a huge queue at etisalat, which is where I get my phone and internet, but that’s fairly usual), people aren’t generally wearing masks, the atmosphere is relaxed. And it’s not as if there are masses of people in Sahl Hasheesh anyway. I’d probably find it quite hard to get within 1m of someone.

It actually feels a bit bizarre when I see all the news about panic buying, establishments closing, flights being cancelled, borders being closed, people asked to stay at home, businesses going down the pan, stockmarket spiraling down, etc. It seems like a world away, as if I’m just watching some kind of horror film. I’m only saying that it seems surreal when you’re looking at it from the outside; I’m not being blasé.

I have been wondering why they don’t just tell everyone who is feeling okay to go in the sauna every day for 30 minutes as a precautionary measure. I looked it up and apparently there’s not enough evidence that the sauna would have the desired effect (as in not enough studies; not that the evidence is controversial), but theoretically it should help as long as it isn’t in your lungs. It’s surely better than lockdown for 14 days just to see if you develop anything and cheaper. I guess the 14-day quarantine must be the better proven strategy.

Here, the bigger news has been the weather. It’s been fairly hot for the time of year (so hopefully that’s also killing the virus), but we had sandstorms, rain, high winds and electricity cuts. The wind is always really dramatic through the palm trees; their branches wave about like cheerleaders’ pom poms. The sea came up really high and covered one of the piers. The water – not sure if it was rain or sea or a bit of both – went past the beach area and onto the grass just before the beach. The sand, of course, just dumped itself all over my furniture. I cleaned, but by the time I had someone over in the afternoon, she was already able to draw me a diagram on the accumulated sand on the table. There were a couple of power cuts in the evening, but after I’d eaten, so it wasn’t too bad (just a bit eerie, with the wind). In Sahl Hasheesh, we got off lightly compared with Cairo. And compared with all the floods in the UK. So, I guess I’m saying that compared with the rest of the world, my big news and woes are miniscule.

Today, the storms seem to have gone. It was a beautiful day by the beach, the water was calm, and I got too hot reading as I lay in the sun, so that was me rid of any virus, I reckon, even if the two Brits I welcomed with a hug were carrying it. I am feeling blessed!