The Healing

Seeing the immediate and fairly extraordinary response to Boris’s call for NHS volunteers has cheered me. 

After the thrill of London 2012 I’ve had to watch, from afar, as profound and largely unprecedented social and political rifts opened up across British society, aggravated by two referendums. 

It is somewhat ironic that the virus could now play a significant role in the healing, yet the underlying cultural raw material of re-unification may be remarkably similar to that which tore us apart. 

Spitfires may not, for example, be a symbol that speaks of coming back together with them Germans, but the national mythology they sit within very definitely speaks of solidarity in extreme adversity, so I see the possibility that the faux-nostalgic mindset that has fed division since the referendums, might now help restore cohesiveness.

Generations of Brits have quietly hankered for a meaningful challenge as great as the one faced by those that went through the world wars.  

Baboseándonos

Salary/Salario: We get these words from Salarium, the Latin for a Roman soldier’s salt allowance.

After all, people need to kill babosas as well as eat, don’t they?

Boom and bust

It’s intriguing how key members of the populist right like Bannon want to maintain the squeeze on covid-19, while the small state conservatives and libertarians, plus Trump (hotels, resorts, casinos) want to let go as soon as poss. 

Libertarians in particular have developed an unusually visible concern for the very poor and members of the informal economy. I suppose they dread the spectacle of (undeniably necessary) state handouts.

But here’s the thing, the relative difference between just getting by and not is dwarfed by the gulf between boom and bust...and the accompanying sensation of it. 

Both in the US, and here in Central America, the pressure to ignore the scientific advice will come strongest from those who feel their power and privilege waning. And they will couch their selfishness in the language of ersatz empathy. 

Testing, testing

Guatemala has a lab test. 

Test 'kits' as such are said to retail for around $3000. The CDC is aiming to release (a potentially less accurate) one soon for $40.

Germany is testing live people, so Germany is detecting more asymptomatic spreaders, and thus has an apparently lower overall mortality rate.

Italy is conducting post-mortem tests and thus finding that more people have died from covid-19 complications than they might otherwise have been aware of. Hence in part their notably higher death rate.

The key thing about testing is that it allows one to acquire an understanding of how widespread the infection may have already spread in the general population, and hence how important it is to maintain the lockdown.

Otherwise it's just guesswork.

30 days more...

#Silverlining: the pigeon problem really does seem to be resolving itself. 

Local Disruptions

I've been writing about the potential for unusually disruptive effects of the pandemic on our local economy. This is an example that presented itself to me this morning. 

A gringo refugee export service, run by a clothing company, not one of the (presumably) idle travel agencies. 

I wonder why they have chosen the El Carmen exit. If I were keen to leave right now I'd prefer to enter Chiapas via La Mesilla for the simple reason that Tuxtla has additional flight options and is closer to bigger cities like Mérida. 

Hats off to Jake of Pappy's BBQ. In the space of a week he has gutsily overhauled his business model to confront the new situation. 

If he'd been pitching it in the Dragons' Den last week and then come back seven days later all the basics like costs, revenue, prices and profit would have been updated. 

In the same period some of his competitors haven't even bothered to refresh their menus. 

There's much more to this than new packaging. There's clearly some novel accounting, marketing and thinking behind it, which could save the firm from the need to join all the lemmings currently filling the streets with disorientated motos. 

And it has a multi-faceted potential for imperishability lacking in some of those short-termist, headless chicken deliveries. 

No guarantee of success and all sorts of pandemic-driven risk factors remain, but he’s given himself as good a shot as anyone. 

This Uber Eats rider appeared to have collected an old crone and was quite widely spotted (and commented upon) around the area. 

The legacy of an epidemic

So, if US politcians are now pondering a sacrifice of the old in the interests of the young and the economy, they ought not to forget that it’s the boomers that have most of the capital and that they could change their wills to leave it all to animal shelters.

The UN General secretary António Guterres has tweeted asking combatants all around the world to lay down their arms and come together to fight the pandemic. 

I was up in the middle of the night, and was not alone it seems. Others wrote of 'collective insomnia'. The enveloping silence did seem rather loud, and there also was a bit of a tremor. This set me wondering what would happen should a more geographically-limited and sizeable catastrophe occur somewhere right now (fire, quake, tsunami etc.). 

Just as we appear to have the capacity to come together as a global community, we are actually entering a phase where our ability to respond as such beyond the pandemic is reaching null. 

500 people were arrested on day one of the curfew in Guatemala for ignoring it. There were scenes reminiscent of a Bruce Lee film occurring in Dueñas as cops took on the recusants. Who knew the PMT could do kung fu? 

Hands up, you’re surrounded

One of the most cognitively dissonant aspects of my Instagram feed right now is the way in which life appears to be carrying on more or less as normal just to the north of us in Mexico. Open borders, busy restaurants, packed beaches. 

For the brave stands taken by Presidents Giammattei of Guatemala and Bukele of El Salvador contrast starkly with the blasé approach adopted by AMLO, accompanied by some fairly reprehensible bollocks on the matter of Mexican exceptionalism. 

In the medium term, perhaps the greatest challenge facing our little part of the so-called northern triangle is the way that covid-19 is already raging relatively out of control to our south (Panama, Costa Rica) and how the rate of infection is ramping up noticeably in Mexico beneath its leader’s insouciance. 

Collateral Damage

Both my father and my grandmother died from hospital-acquired pneumonia, aged 89.

The current global statistics covering coronavirus mortality are almost certainly incorporating many more cases such as theirs, but in Guatemala I suspect that we are going to see numerous instances of people dying from treatable chronic diseases, ostensibly un-related to covid-19, simply because the more limited healthcare system here is no longer able to function as it should.

Simultaneously, large numbers of people with so-called underlying conditions are going to end up with pneumonia because their conditions worsen under lockdown and they are dispatched to overcrowded hospitals.

This is a society that anyway appears to treat the over 65s as if they are living on borrowed time.

Flamethrowers and mobile hairdressers

Angry alcaldes have become a thing in Italy. 

Our region now has its own ejemplar: Lic. Betancourt of Ciudad Vieja who, unlike Victor Hugo, understands that #quedateencasa need not apply to him. 

Finally someone who gets the difference between closing time and curfew time. 

Time and money to burn

This morning we were tempted to order breakfast in bed from one of Antigua’s leading hotels. 

This is actually a thing. And it is SO wrong. 

At one point yesterday morning pretty much the only vehicles on the streets around us were motorbikes delivering impulse nibbles. Some sported backpacks, others were trying to ride the bike whilst holding heavy plastic bags with one hand. 

As the alcaldes of other townships have resorted to sealing (soldering in fact) potential quarantine violators inside their own homes, Antigua’s own Mayor gave an address from his sofa (said to be in Cayalá) that lasted less than half a minute. He looked sheepish. 

There’s no doubt he’s been sipping from the poison chalice and that he can expect little gratification now from a four year term that began with so much expectation. 

There have been some token gestures, such as the new rubbish collection protocols. But if these workers are now forbidden from entering and engaging in up close personal contact with homeowners, what of all the couriers?

A friend in Ohio reports how his local vets are now operating: "Credit card only, call in the parking lot and they hand the meds over on a tray through your car window." 

Here there is a general imprecision still in the measures and the language being used to implement them which will tend to foster pandemic pandemonium. 

Businesses that were from the outset set up to serve international visitors are turning inward and seeking out local consumers in order to survive and this is going to impact the lives of those who were already just about getting by in servicing the local market. 

Historically the most lasting impact of plagues has been a set of changes in the balance of power at many levels of society.

As I noted yesterday, Antigua may soon recover, but it won’t be the same place. 

If the current free-for-all persists unmoderated, then it is inevitable that the comparatively weak will be eased aside by the politically and economically stronger. 

Just here in our village I can see how our local shops and panaderías in particular are struggling against new competitors prepared to operate at a loss like Silicon Valley start-ups. 

Speaking of which, Uber proposes to operate right up to the moment the curfew alarm sounds. Though I guess if you order one just before 4pm, you're going to have to show the driver your spare room. 

Caught in the middle of this power struggle are those whose economic power is time-limited. They are almost certainly operating at a loss right now, but don't have a pack of optimistic shareholders ready to chuck them a load of cash to burn whenever they need it. 

And fairly soon people are going to realise that this is not a short term thing. Trump may be dangling the possibility of an ah fuckit approach in 15 days, but the UK government has asked for emergency powers in law for two whole years (with a review in six months). 

Soon the novelty of breakfast in bed will wear off as the community as a whole starts to tighten its belt. And the croissants will be getting staler. 

El lugar de los hechos...

My Corona

And to think, only a month ago we thought pigeons were a problem...

Cookies to go...

Come to Guatemala (sometime soon) to study selfishness, both rational and irrational. 

Yet there is also selflessness of the sort that will ultimately deny the likes of Gloria Álvarez a serious tilt at the presidency. 

This Cambrian explosion of motorcycle couriers we are witnessing in Antigua right now might be characterised as a rebaño of rational egotists, but surely not all the voluntary bomberos, nurses, doctors and so on who are working around the clock to prevent a real catastrophe here fit the category. 

Even Giammattei, clearly exhausted, is acting out of the sort of altruism and public-spiritedness that Ayn Randites cannot explain away. 

The President was right to devolve final responsibility of implementing his measures to the alcaldes and right now Victor Hugo needs to GET A GRIP. 

There is nowhere in Guatemala with the same per capita level of different food options and this undoubtedly presents a special challenge. 

What's the point of staying indoors if you are going to start receiving half a dozen different deliveries a day? 

Even the churro parlours are offering home delivery now FFS. 

Our Mayor needs to dictate what is essential food and what isn't. Everyone else gets to offer collection/takeaway-only, which is the default position in London for example. 

And the existing high volume food deliverers should surely have been given first dibs at this new 'opportunity', being allowed to reach capacity before a limited number of additional restaurants serving stuff of actual nutritional value were permitted to join in. 

Con los calzones a media asta...

Reset the clock, whispers my inner Bond villain. 

It's hard not to empathise with those little fishies suddenly rediscovering the canal waters of Venice. 

Yet, however much my wife and I would like Antigua to go back to being the nice quiet place where we met 31 years ago (and we really would), not even a calamity like the novel coronavirus is capable of such a rollback. 

There’s no doubt that a more eerie form of quietness will be with us for a while. International travel is set for one of those U-shaped recoveries and many businesses in town won’t make it out of the trough of the curve. 

During his online ‘Keeping Antigua Alive’ presentation last week, Blake Thurgood of Pappy’s BBQ noted that even before the current crisis, he and other SME-owners in the city had calculated that a generalised 50% drop in income could knock out around 80% of local businesses, a scenario that must surely now be in play. The look in his eyes as he spoke told me it was so. 

However, that doesn’t mean that all these businesses will vanish and we’ll be transported back to the land of milk and honey. (Moscas y Miel to be exact.) The more likely outcome is that they are resurrected on the far side of the coronavirus canyon, under new, more solvent ownership. Possibly even bigger a-holes to boot.

The likes of Pappy’s and Sobremesa are run by hard-working hybrid families that have gone out of their way to connect with the local community, and although in truth I am yet to visit either of them, they are precisely the sort that I would like to see pull through. 

But too many others have treated Antigua like a bolo lying on the pavement with banknotes sticking out of his back pocket. 

Front end and back end, Antigua has allowed itself to over-commercialise across the board. An the prostitution of the city starts with the local landlords. We’ve been wondering how many of these will now jump in to pick up the pieces and try to run the consumer-facing operations themselves. 

Saying all this does not however make me a paid-up member of the conservative tendency in this city. Just before Semana Santa was called off there was a rising clamour against the commercial initiatives that Victor Hugo and his crew had prepared for Lent: the sale of TV rights, the printing of t-shirts, the advertising banners on lamp-posts etc. 

All rather moot now, but one would have to be naïve to imagine that an impecunious municipality is just what we need at the heart of a rejuvenated urban space. 

Those die-hard panza verde conservatives have been their own worst enemies. They need to shut up a bit about ‘Patrimonio Cultural de la Humanidad’ and focus on proper planning. 

'Preserving' the casco antiguo whilst allowing it to become an open air mall is possibly the main reason Antigua has recently felt like a town that is slowly having the air sucked out of it. 

Casa si, calle no...

Who’s driving the boat?

Bukele just declared a 30 day national 'quarantine' in El Salvador. Sounds a little less goose-steppy than a curfew, but it's basically the same thing and we will soon probably be falling in line. 

Our own toque de queda did seem a bit quantum at first, but just after 4pm the village was inundated by PMT motorbikes and vans ostensibly enforcing it. 

Giammattei is doing it in baby steps, but the direction is clear. 

What colour will his jacket be tomorrow?

Curfew seems to have completely the opposite meaning for cats. 

Que alguién me explíque: If the only people allowed to 'circulate' are couriers delivering medicine and food, who's working back at the pharmacies and preparing the food? (A variant of the 'Who's driving the boat?' conundrum from Act 3 of Taken.) 

WTF with these dudes?

A friend tipped us off yesterday afternoon that the lockdown was about to get more serious, so I ventured out one last time in full Darth Vader to a local tienda to stock up on the things I personally can’t live without (ground coffee not bog rolls) plus pet food, and there encountered a gathering of local cops stocking up on Tabcin and Paracetamol, a sight I found as poignant as I found disturbing. 

Our village is home to most of the city’s fuzz. If anything goes down locally, they politely exclaim that we are outside their remit, but their presence has up to now been fairly reassuring. 

I still have a private number I can call for a PNC response because my oafish Australian neighbour made a death threat against me (on camera) last year. Even he must have more important matters on his mind now. 

When the police were contemplating a move from the Capitanes General we received a visit from the latterly notorious Erwin Sperisen, who was completely charming. He was investigating all fallow properties in the village and at one point we did expect to have the boys (and girls) in black as our direct neighbours. 

We took in our last delivery from Bedda yesterday. They were already planning to close. Everyone faces an uncertain future, yet I have been cheered to note how locally-owned businesses like los Urquizú have been generally quicker to perceive their social responsibility. 

When the bike arrived, both me and the courier were fully masked up and the expression on the face of one of the streetdogs that we regularly nourish (and have dubbed ‘Brayan’) - was priceless: WTF with these dudes!?!

The ex-pat dirge...

Toque de #quedateencasa

Giammattei was guiltier than ever of vagueness yesterday evening. I had to watch the address twice before I had a proper inkling about what he might have been saying. 

His speech already has more interpretations than quantum theory.

I've heard it suggested that the municipal markets should have been told to open from noon to 4pm, rather than 4am to noon, ‘because the virus doesn’t much like the heat’. 

Although common sense would seem to suggest that limiting opening hours might tend to lead to greater concentrations of people at any one time, this protestation does seem to be grounded in a bit of self-serving logic from the huevón community. 

And frankly, if someone is too huevón to make it to market in the morning, they are probably also huevón with regards to a whole set of public health protocols, so any measure that keeps them indoors is to be commended. 

Guatemala’s markets have a more crepuscular, commercial, al mayor functionality, which can more easily be observed at the break of the day. 

Essential Services

So, the commercial sector, barring essential services and agriculture, is to shut down for the rest of the month...'voluntarily'. In doing so Giammattei is making one of those Jeremy Corbyn-esque fudges that comes across as a bit Schrödinger's statesman, but he really cannot afford to go harder on the informal economy, as it has almost no slack at all. There's a degree of arse-covering involved, but I cannot really complain because only the other day I was recommending against one-size-fits-all policies, and in the context of Guatemala this is what you can do. The local alcaldes probably are the ones best placed to apply this directive.

He also seemed to be saying to the 3000 or so stranded tourists: "Don’t complain that you are stuck, you can eff off to Belize and Mexico." And yet INUAT is meanwhile trying to generate some much-needed income for the hotel sector here by offering them discounted rates.

Go home and spring clean...

No matter how many times Giammattei tells us to paint our walls, tidy our bedrooms...

Social distance...now!

Blaise Pascal > The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he cannot stay quietly in his room.

Ecosystem Invaders

Our local economy is currently being held up by two kinds of workers. Those who cannot afford not to take a risk and those being paid by people hiding at home to take a risk on their behalf. 

The problem I still have with Giamattei is the inexactness of his language.  For example, when he said that citizens of Europe could no longer enter the country, who did he mean precisely? When he apparently extended the ban to my own nation, he referred to it as ‘Inglaterra’. And who exactly is Doña Chonita?

So, when he said restaurants with a take-away or pickup capability could continue to operate, I really don’t think he meant that every Tom, Dick and Harry in Antigua could immediately start trying to flog their stuff to your doorstep. 

A city that had been in danger of turning into the country’s premier open air shopping mall, could now be characterised as a giant drive-thru. In truth I haven’t been into town for over a week, but I have visions of streets that are quiet but for the rattle of scooters and their confused riders. 

Aside from the obvious health and hygiene issues thrown up by this poorly-coordinated outbreak of home delivery offerings, economic sense is also wanting. 

If I were a business owner here who had carefully developed and cultivated a delivery service over several years, I’d be resenting most of this new-fangled competition, largely because it is essentially unfair competition: hardly anybody can be doing this in a cost-effective manner, even if regulations are being waived. Some are not even restaurants by vocation. I saw an offering today for ‘healthy food to your door’ from one of the gyms. 

The once illustrious Welten has started offering chiles rellenos and paches. Surely an instance where Doña Chonita is to be preferred?

Some of the newcomers will be making new friends, others may actually be alienating people. It’s a promotional threat as well as opportunity. I have to say that the one time we used Uber Eats here it was not a huge success. For some reason the app makes use of a different mapping system to the parent and as a result I was unable to pinpoint the precise location of my house and ended up chasing a man who looked like a terrorist with a bomb on his back all around the village. The food itself arrived in poor condition and incomplete. 

Perhaps the President should place a moratorium on Tripadvisor reviews for the duration of the crisis.

The expert advice released in the UK today is that social distancing will need to continue for the duration of this lost year. It’s not natural behaviour in Guatemala, but I think it is safe to assume that in the absence of tourism, the future for a proportion of Antigua’s eateries, many of which were already in effect charging customers for the empty tables around them, is bleak. Those that were already good at delivery and those that find themselves with that combination of an adeptness for it and an offer that appeals to locals, will possibly make it through to 2021.

Right now though, the need for coordination/aggregation that I wrote of the other day is more than apparent. I’m reminded of an incident that occurred back in the mid 90s when we had recently started our company and there were about a dozen of us working out of an elegant if crotchety Queen Anne-era house in Bloomsbury. 

Someone flagged up the arrival on the scene of a novel online offering that promised to deliver small ‘impulse’ retail items directly to your desk. Around half of us decided to order a CD immediately...and separately, just to see what would happen.

Sure enough, courier after courier was soon ringing the doorbell. Needless to say, this company was gone long before the dotcom crash took out most of the rest of their like. 

Yesterday I overheard one gringo ‘entrepreneur’ asserting rather buoyantly that business was ‘bouncing along’. Rather like one of those bombs dropped by the dam-busters I suspect. 

Meanwhile, I’ve spotted a few novel ecosystem-invaders floating around my area like sharks on the prowl: not motorcycle couriers, but the vans of security companies. On the off chance perhaps that some of the stay-at-homers are casting their thoughts ahead to the social dislocation to come. 

Prepotentes

This, I hasten to note, was not me. My bodyguard is also nice, but he's a cat. 

I am now intrigued to know which of my compatriots here is acting like a licensed bellend. 

Anyway, for anyone lacking a mask who may have read today's announcement by Pricesmart that they will not accept devoluciones of loo rolls, Lysol, rice etc. etc... 

Private Amnesties

Why is there an ice cream cart being pushed around the village by a maskless man, clearly over 65...and exhausted?

Why are so many not-so-hard-up members of the community granting themselves personal amnesties with regard to the basic protocols laid down by the authorities?

Yet further to my recent observation that residents’ meetings tend to get swamped by private obsessions, the coronavirus discussion on our local vecinos' Whatsapp group has started to focus on the clearly all-important matter of whether this is all a dastardly attack on America by the Chinese or vice versa. One guy in particular is sharing entire essays on the subject.

Whilst it surely suits us all now to consider how anything we’re doing could be bettered through (certain forms of) collaboration, we also need to consider how individually or together, we can also make a real mess of things. 

Bread supplies running low? Here's a a tip for picking in a slimmer sort of way. 

On my first trip to the USSR in '84 one of my companions survived for ten days on peanuts, chocolate and vodka. Just saying. 

Anyway, on the subject of vecinos, this did make me chuckle...

April Fool's Day

Only a fool would think things will be getting back to normal after the first of April.

We closed the day on eight detected cases of covid-19, with an additional four hundred people in quarantine. 

Should the eighth turn out to be the last for a full fortnight, Giammattei could, in theory, declare that community transmission has been successfully smothered and that some of his key restrictions on public gathering might be loosened.

The problem is that without effective testing, there is no real way of knowing and the President has made it that much harder for himself by advising people with the milder, 'gripona' symptom set to stay away from hospitals. 

In effect, the mortality rate in the over 70s is going to have to be the canary in the coal mine. 

To be absolutely sure that the virus has not been spread into the general population already, he's going to have to wait (at least) a month. Yet it's highly unlikely that the detected cases will dry up immediately. Indeed, if the woman with a high fever who walked into a hospital in Zona 13 today tests positive, we've already shifted into the next phase. 

El Salvador has had its first confirmed case and Bukele says the virus came over the border from here, also suggesting that his Guatemalan counterpart may be fighting a losing battle. 

Meanwhile, the borders will have to remain closed to foreigners almost indefinitely. I'm allowing for at least six months, which is the timeframe that countries like Australia have set for their own restrictions. One will be able to leave, but I suspect the US airlines at least, won't be flying almost empty planes out here so that ex-pats have a route home, and the land border to the north is totally dependent on the situation in Mexico. (118 cases and counting.) 

Yesterday I watched a short video presentation from Gloria Álvarez (enjoying a temporary, enforced exile in southern Australia) in which she proposed a 'libertarian' solution to the economic problem. 

She seemed happy to make the assumption that the self-isolated/socially-distanced life is essentially less expensive than the one we would otherwise be leading. 

Her thinking seems to be that employers and employees could come up with a figure representing all the things that the latter would no longer need to spend money on, like trips to sporting events, restaurants and cinemas, which would form the basis of a negotiation aiming to reduce salaries accordingly for the duration of the crisis...to mutual benefit. 

And assumption it is, because many people will in fact already be incurring additional expenses by choosing smaller, local suppliers or by getting stuff delivered, for example. 

And, it's also sort of bleeding obvious that the logic starts to crumble for the employers and employees of cinemas, restaurants, sporting franchises and so on. 

We are anyway experiencing a moment when the size of the economy as much as the size of individual salaries will be creating the sort of all-pervasive anxiety in which voluntary downsizing of any sort will hardly appear rational and reasonable in the sense that she is suggesting, for it's near impossible to predict where things are headed right now. 

All of our decision-making is clearly being hampered by this uncertainty. 

A loophole worth expanding...

Guatemala’s government may have the courage and conviction to act even more drastically than its European counterparts. What it won’t have is the budget for the follow up: stimulus packages like the £300bn announced today by the UK Chancellor.  It should also be doubted whether lenders here will be offering any payment ‘holidays’. 

Antigua has some unique issues even within the context of the country around it. There’s a double squeeze, from the local ‘state of emergency’, but also from the condition of the rest of the world,  which has effectively turned off the tourism tap. 

This is a town with a population  of around 30K with something like 250+ (fairly substantial) businesses serving food and drink. For at least two weeks, only those with takeaway or home delivery options are going to remain open. 

Next door President Bukele has had an interesting and possibly helpful idea. He’s contracting some of El Salvador’s idle kitchens to prepare meals for the needy. In the US some restaurants have started to do something similar off their own bat, but my sense is that here, some sort of collaboration between the public and private sectors may work best. 

Giammattei left open the loophole of ‘servicio a domicilio’ and a range of local food operations, such as Joe's Grill and Hugo’s Ceviches, have spontaneously developed this capability. 

Yet many restaurants won’t be able to do this cost effectively on their own. This is where ready-made aggregators like Uber Eats may come in handy. 

The thought I had today was that the Mayor could work either alone or with a firm like Uber to set up a home delivery network, where participating restaurants would be open for 2 or 3 days a week, allowing a greater number to potentially do so in an economically-viable manner. (A handful on Mondays, another group Tuesdays and so on.) 

At present only a small proportion of Antigua’s restaurants will remain open. A system like this would spread the somewhat limited opportunity that the Guatemalan state has left open. 

Of course, you may imagine that the current situation will only last a couple of weeks and that none of this would be worth the trouble, or indeed that any sort of decisive decision-taking is undermined by uncertainty right now. 

There are other potential hiccups. 

A given proportion of restaurants in Antigua don't really cater to the slightly conservative palates of panza verdes and in all honesty, some of these are probably going to have to remain closed for most of the remainder of 2020. When the process of recovery gets under way, the Antigueños I know are likely to focus on patronising businesses they understand to be local, lo suyo. 

And eventually, the pandemic will tend to interrupt food supplies, such as those prawns so vital to Hugo's. In which case, the state might even start asking itself why Antigua needs so many food outlets with significant levels of duplication. 

One-sized

Whilst Guatemalans often appear incapable of complying with even the most simple instructions, and anyone who thinks that 'solidarity' is somehow innate here has never seen how people sweep up the dust and rubbish outside their homes, they do — somewhat fortuitously — appear to have elected just the President they needed for this dire situation. 

Can anyone imagine what would have happened if Jimmy was still in charge?

On the other hand here, as almost everywhere else, we face the trouble that one-size-fits-all approaches are bound to cause, compounded by both populist policy-makers and disjointed application. 

Both the UK and California think the virtual imprisonment of the over-70s is a workable plan. (And El Salvador has shaved an additional ten years off the measure.)

In California they are planning to close all the restaurants. A friend in Ohio says this policy is already being enforced in his hometown, yet he and others have older relatives who'd set fire to their homes if they tried to cook. 

I live in a triangular space in our village lined by a cluster of large properties owned by the proprietors of restaurants (two of which at least are well known and highly regarded) who all — bizarrely — appear to order fast food pretty much the whole time. 

Indeed, directly opposite, there's a Chapin chef of some repute who proudly promotes this ever-so-slightly obscene dish (beef wrapped in gold leaf) on social media and yet, even before the pandemic, did not appear at all averse to a sad bastard Saturday night take-away. 

I just watched a Campero bike driving around in circles (actually triangles) before locating its target and already both the driver and the packaging appeared to be covered in extra protective layers. 

How long will this last? They already seem to sense their status as vectors. 

Lebanese statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb famously cautioned that one should 'never cross a river that is on average four feet deep'. 

There are perhaps some related pieces of advice. Never trust a government that only knows how to cross the shallow parts, but also one that tries to tell you the entire river is frighteningly deep. 

Populists look at large groups and see only outliers (Mexicans are all murderers and rapists...) or averages. 

The current situation requires political action that encompasses both the big picture and the detail.