CORONAVIRUS STRIKES!

No, we don't have it & no one we know has it. But our trip to Italy has become a victim of the coronavirus pandemic or epidemic or any other kind of "demic". Right now, we should have been ending our first day in Rome after an evening orientation tour, but instead I am sitting home typing this post.

After several days of our pre-travel routine, our bags were packed & downstairs by the door ready to load into the car for the 2-1/2 hour drive to San Francisco airport at 6:45 AM. With all the hoopla surrounding the coronavirus outbreak in China & the subsequent cases in northern Italy, we were following it closely. After much research, calls to Trafalgar & emails with our tour director in Italy on the tour previous to ours, we made the decision that we were going on our 13 day adventure throughout Italy! Virus be damned!

Neither of us were (or are) scared of the virus. All reports are that it is no worse than a mild cold in the majority of cases. Those who have died are almost all people with major health issues or compromised immune systems. Both Lou & I agree with Dr. Oz's statement, "You can't sacrifice life because of fear." We use caution but we won't let terrorists or health scares deter us from seeing the world. Another one of my favorite sayings is "The purpose of life is not to make it safely to the grave."

If you are a fact person there are almost 8 billion people in the world. To date there have been 88,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus worldwide (mostly in China) with 3000 deaths (mostly in China). In any given year the flu kills between 300,000 & 600,000 people worldwide! The day before our trip, in Italy there were about 1200 cases of the virus, most in northern Italy, with 26 deaths. There are 60 million people in Italy. None of that was scary enough to consider cancelling our trip. I'm sure we had a better chance of dying in a car accident on the way to the airport.

Everything was in place to leave for SFO at 7 AM on Saturday, February 29. The evening of Thursday, February 28, we learned that the U.S. state department & the CDC had changed the travel alert to all of Italy to Level 3 - No nonessential travel. This had us concerned, not because of the danger, but because of closures or cancellation of attractions & drastic changes to itineraries. And we didn't want to get stuck in quarantine somewhere. BUT, we ultimately said, "What the hell, we are still going!"

Our bags were downstairs ready to be loaded in the car when we decided to check Trafalgar's website one more time. Shit! Now the website said "all trips to Italy have been cancelled through March 31". We immediately called Trafalgar & sure enough, it was true. Our trip wasn't happening. After about 20 minutes on the phone our trip was cancelled & we were getting a full refund. There was a little relief & a lot of disappointment. I'm dealing with an airfare refund or travel insurance reimbursement for the remaining expenses tomorrow.

Yesterday was a strange day. We unpacked, stopped the mail hold, started the newspaper & basically did everything we do upon returning from every trip BUT we hadn't gone anywhere. All the preparation was for nothing. The only thing we didn't have to do was laundry.

I totally believe that the world is overreacting to this coronavirus. For crying out loud, they closed The Louvre today & I don't know if they have even had a reported case in Paris. Italy's tourism industry will suffer tremendously. This is going to spread. It is a fact of life in this age of world travel. There is so much panic surrounding it all - today there was an impassioned plea by the surgeon general to "STOP BUYING MASKS!". They don't help you from catching the virus but there are none for the health care workers who really do need them to treat patients.

Yes, our Italy trip was a casualty of all this panic. The stock market is crashing (tell me, how does selling your stock fix this???). Maybe we just need to close the entire world. I know, we can't do that & I can pretty much guarantee you that wouldn't work either. I wish I felt better about how our country & the world is handling this but I don't. It is only going to get worse I'm sure.

There is one thing that just might prevail in this coronavirus scare & every other predicament that our world faces - COMMON SENSE. If we all just exercised common sense, we wouldn't be where we are right now.