A WOMAN in West Mall (before the lockdown) saw two women to whom she occasionally nodded in the church car park walking towards her. Ahead of the Trinidad governmental curve, justifiably nervous about the Corona virus, she crossed to walk in front of shop entrances on the other side. She nodded at the other women across the bench separating the hallways as they passed one another; but the women turned away, noses in the air. One of them turned to her companion, and, pointing with her mouth across the bench to the woman who’d shunned them, said, “She social, eh?”

IF I WERE to start self-isolating against the spread of Covid-19, as requested by every firetrucking government in the world… How would anyone tell? I’ve been more or less completely self-isolating, without any official prompting, since July, 1988, the last time I actually went to an office every day. (Not counting seven or eight months in 1993 immediately after my father died, when I ran the shop in Guyana, like any good West Indian Potogee, and a few months temping as a typist in London in 1990, to try to make ends meet, though they determinedly remained strangers.)

NO Trinidadian was surprised that one of Canada’s first Covid-19 patients passed through Trinidad & Tobago; the wonder is that we haven’t yet been detected as the epicentre of the spread of the pandemic to the entire Western hemisphere. Every country on our side of the world could probably prevent contagion by simply quarantining every passenger on every flight from Trinidad, no questions asked.

THE CORONA/COVID-19 virus, the most serious modern threat to world health and the global economy, smashes into us just when the biggest jokers in history are holding the highest political offices in the USA, UK, India and Australia. These Four Horsemen of the Viral Apocalyspe will turn what might have remained an epidemic into a certain pandemic.