The World Has Shrunk! by Gabriel Popham

I remember being spooked quite early on, back when the epidemic first started in mid-January. Every few days I'd deliver a kind of half-joking emergency bulletin to my colleagues, who would smile at me awkwardly, clearly wondering what the big deal was. I think the reason why I clocked this from the start is because a few years ago I downloaded Plague Inc. onto my phone, a videogame which simulates the spread of a pandemic, and which the CDC has described as a tool to teach the public about outbreaks and disease transmission. You, the virus, have one objective: to exterminate humankind by any means possible. As you spread across all continents of the globe, you find yourself having to mutate and become airborne or waterborne, or develop frightening new symptoms in order to overcome the quarantines and restrictions imposed by the AI human population. The diseases in the app were invariably awful, the stuff of horror movies, but the main point of the game was to show why pandemics are such a big deal, because (as we're finding out right now) it really doesn't take a lot to bring the world to its knees; one tiny virus will do it.

If the aim of the videogame was to raise awareness about why pandemics can be so terrifying, it definitely worked for me. The Wuhan virus clearly had all the credentials needed to be The One, THE pandemic that epidemiologists have been warning about for years. Seeing the exponential growth of the disease and the frenzied (and in hindsight, remarkably diligent) first response from the world's leaders made it feel all the more real. China locked down Wuhan and the Hubei province, the WHO started delivering daily bulletins, and foreign nationals were airlifted out of the region in a matter of days. Remember when the first repatriation flights from Wuhan came to the UK and everyone was put into quarantine in some hotel in Yorkshire? It might feel like a lifetime ago, but it's only been 6 weeks.

I thought it felt real at the time, but it was still too distant to have any impact on me. It didn't *really* hit me until the virus first came to Italy, about a month ago. Being half-Italian, I'm obviously more attentive to the news over there than others might be, but in this case I felt especially implicated because most of my family on my mother's side actually lives in a town that is only 25 km away from Codogno, one of the early hotspots for the outbreak in Italy. So when I started seeing the names of these small, random towns in Lombardy come up on BBC News - Casalpusterlengo being a long-time favourite of mine - I went through a really weird couple of days, like some kind of intense cognitive dissonance: I knew this was happening, and I was affected by it personally because I knew it was happening literally where my family lives - and yet, because it was happening over there, still even then it felt distant, in the same way that family feels distant if you're living in a different country.

But now nothing is distant anymore. As the epidemic turned into a pandemic, and as country after country stepped up its emergency response to the outbreak (invariably too late, at least in the West), the virus ended up being not only over there, but also here, and everywhere else all at the same time, and nobody can seem to find anything else to talk about! We no longer have the option of acting (as we normally do in these cases) as if this is a thing that is going on over there, because over there is over here as well - in a very real sense, it feels like the world has just shrunk.

And it's not just the physical world that has shrunk: something weird is happening to our sense of time, like it's just slowed down all of a sudden, or like we're just covering way more ground in the space of a day than we ever used to. Never mind trying to remember what happened a month ago, even looking back at what happened just the weekend before last takes an incredible amount of effort. As it happens, I was in Wales that weekend celebrating my brother's 40th birthday, but it might as well have been 6 months ago for all I can tell. Every day stretches out and is filled to the seams with the latest news about what the world is like now; I'm starting to think that the way in which we perceive reality just can't keep up with this rhythm - we're going through such a relentlessly fast-changing situation, and yet everything just feels like an endless now, where each single now just feels weirder than the one that came before.

And now here we are. In the UK at least, this is the first week of official (if still vague), prolonged and widespread social distancing. In a sense, even though the world itself has shrunk and we find out that we were all in the same boat after all, our best bet for making it through this crisis is to somehow try to outshrink the world and reduce our social lives to the bare minimum: before long, all that will be left of our social circles will be the few people that, by chance or by intention, we happen to see in our shrunken daily lives. If it weren't for the internet we might end up thinking that there's nothing else outside our world, but thankfully what we're seeing instead is more people reaching out to each other, taking the time to catch up because for once time is not something we're running out of. Before long, this will be over and life will go back to something like normality, the hours and the days flying by before we even notice. But what if it doesn't? What if this is the new normal? Not the virus, but the effect of the virus on our sense of time and space. Maybe our sense of time will never recover, maybe the heightened awareness to the fact that every moment is different from the one that came before will stay with us. Maybe that wouldn't even be such a bad thing, especially if it means that we don't forget that the world is actually a much smaller place than we thought.