COVID-19 quarantine. Origin and current situation.

Let's see where did all of this start. In order to do so, we need to situate ourselves correctly in time, before being able to speak clearly about a subject. The first case of Coronavirus, according to Spanish CNN, which in turn mentions the World Health Organization, was reported in none other than in Wuhan (China), between December 12th and 19th, 2019. At first, sick patients were admitted to hospitals and were treated and reported as cases of pneumonia, since none knew of the existence of this new virus then. Until we met him, and in what a way!

After brutally attacking China, COVID-19, which is another way of naming the Coronavirus, has spread to 29 different places, and is still spreading today. But we are going to focus on our country, Spain. The World Health Organization declared on March 11th that, given the rapid evolution of this virus both internationally and nationally, that Spain had to be quarantined. Our called ‘State of Alarm’ was declared, as a consequence of what was dictated by the WHO in search of the safety of all, on March 14th, 2020, according to Royal Decree 463/2020 published in the Official State Gazette. Today, April 14th, 2020, we ‘’celebrate’’ a month of confinement and, let’s be real, it neither affects us all the same nor does everyone think the same of the virus. In this post we are going to see how we can ’fight’ ’against confinement, yes, without leaving home.

Let's make a quick and simple summary of what is the coronavirus about, just to guide us. The Coronavirus, also called COVID-19 by
the WHO, is (so to speak) a cousin of the also deadly SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome). It is important to know that when we refer to Coronavirus, we are actually referring to a large group of common viruses in animals. Coronavirus can affect people, but generally it is usually with a mild or moderate illness in the respiratory tract (something like a cold, to be clear). However, COVID-19 has emerged as a REBEL within his Coronavirus family, and has ended up infecting more than 1.8 million people (according to rtve Spanish news), causing more than 116,000 deaths worldwide. BUT LET'S BE POSITIVE, we will get out of this, we just need to comply with the rules dictated by our Government, including the wonderful confinement.

Confinement and our psychology during it.

Okay, let's start from the beginning. If the twelfth grade psychology teacher taught us anything, it was to define the terms that we were going to deal with. Well here we go.

What is a confinement? What is it to be confined? Can't I get out of my house anymore? But not even to go to the groceries? Hey, calm down! CHILL! LET'S ALL BREATHE!

The RAE (which is the Royal Academy for the Spanish Language) tells us that confinement is the act of confining, and that confining is making someone stay within some limits. But since all this sounds very strong, let's make it simple for us all. To confine oneself is to stay at home, with our pajamas on and our hair not combed, cuter than ever. But of course, not all of us see the action of ’staying home without leaving’ in the same way… do we, party animals? These are difficult times for all, and as much as we all like the parties, the music and the drinks, it's time to stay home, until we can return to our lives. Let us also tell you that the party that we are going to throw after this quarantine... GOD BETTER BE READY! Okay, okay, let’s be serious. Let's keep going.

Some of the most frequent psychological reactions that we can see in our friends, family, neighbors and even in ourselves due to a confinement as long as the ones we are experiencing are, among others: stress, anxiety, irritability, nervousness , confusion or fear, insomnia, difficulty when it comes to concentrating (either for work or for studying and doing homework, or simply for everyday activities such as cooking, reading or sewing), depression, post-traumatic stress and sadness. We, from Philosophyium, think that the three factors that will occur the most (among others) during this quarantine will be stress, insomnia and lack of concentration.

On the one hand,  there is stress. We believe that the most vulnerable people to stress will be adolescents but also adults, especially those whose jobs are at risk. Let us explain. Teenagers will have a tendency to suffer stress, because if they were already stressed from before (thanks to our lovely and adorable [we hate her] EvAU – the exams they have to take before entering college), now they can not even go out to the street to see their friends to get rid of it and, in addition, they do not even know what will happen with their grades or with their exams, much less with your University Entrance Exam.

On the other hand, stress will be seen in adults, since they do not know what will happen to their job, they do not know if they will be unemployed or will keep their positions; they know that they are in ERTE [this is the temporary employment regulation file], but they also know that the income they receive is not exactly what they were receiving before; and it’s then when adults begin to be loaded with questions of the type ‘and what happens with the mortgage?’, ‘’and what about  the bills?’’ and so on.

Then, another situation that we think is gong to be inevitable (like Thanos, okay sorry, ignore this) is insomnia or changes in the sleeping schedule. On the one hand, there are those who think that it is not very healthy to have attitudes such as going to bed at five or six in the morning and getting up at two in the afternoon. In Philosophyium, we are going to defend ourselves saying that if we go to bed so late it is because some of us have a certain preference to work and study at night, and not necessarily because we are on the mobile phone (which might also happen, though). A colleague of ours tells us: ''When I get up at two or three in the afternoon, I have a coffee, I attend the English classes that I have to attend online, and from eight in the afternoon (after the applause we make in order to thank our community for all the sacrifices we’re making) I sit down to work, study and carry on with the tasks that I have pending for that day''.

Another colleague defends himself as follows: ‘’It is true that I fall asleep late and wake up late, but that is not because I am lazy or not really productive. Even if I get up at five o'clock in the afternoon, it have enough time to listen to some music while I work out; I do my homework after that and I even make dinner every once in a while. Is there "unproductive" people who spend the day on the phone? Well, yeah, maybe, I also have days when being lazy just hits me hard, but I also believe that this insomnia can occur because we aren’t waking up as early and we’re not moving our body that much. Like, we don’t walk to work or school, we don’t go to play the Sunday football game, and so on, and all this means that we don't get tired enough during the day, so we don't get sleepy when ''should''.

Are you, readers, in agreement with the opinions of our colleagues? We want to know your points of view! We will read you! Are you
of those who fall asleep early and are morning larks? Or are you more of a night owl?

Lastly, we think that lack of concentration is one of the consequences that will occur most due to confinement. What do we mean with this? Easy. Right now we don't have schedules, well more or less. What we are trying to say is that it is possible that we are continuing with our regular schedule as before: typical when we have to get up (more ore less), that just after getting up we have to wash our face, then have breakfast (even if it's five in the afternoon), what are we going to do this afternoon, do the applause, when will our call be with my friends, etc., but they are schedules that range between one hour X and one hour Y, that is, they are not as 'strict' as we normally had. When we knew before that we had to go to train at five pm, we concentrated much faster on doing a minimum of two math exercises so that we didn't have to do them later, with all the homework still there, waiting for us to come home. Now, in confinement, getting to concentrate correctly is more complicated just because we are not in a hurry to go anywhere or we don’t have a specific time for anything, and that is why those two math exercises we used to do in an hour before leaving home, now we can take two hours because we’re not in a rush, nor do we have the stress of going somewhere before a certain time.

However, we want to highlight that these are factors proposed from our opinion, and that each person will be affected by quarantine in different ways, obviously. We are not experts, but it is common sense to affirm this since not all citizens have the same psychological capacities to extract positive factors from confinement, nor are all situations different, nor do we all face it with the same courage. For example, an adolescent whose grandfather has died from COVID-19 is very likely to be more nervous, stressed, or more anxious than another whose family members are all healthy. This is why we should not make fun of or laugh at anyone, much less impose positive thinking when there are people who, naturally, will not be able to see everything in pink.

In Philosophyium we have observed that a more introverted person does not face quarantine in the same way as a more extroverted one. That is, an introverted person, who is not much likely to leave their home, or who simply enjoys staying at home most of their free time just to play on the computer or to read, or someone like one of our colleagues, for whom being calm and lonely seems therapeutic and necessary for their mental health, confinement is a gift from heaven, a blessing, glory, the eighth wonder. However, people who prefer to be on the street, or in nature, or who are more sociable and outgoing and need to go out and see their family and friends, this quarantine may be the closest thing to being in prison, hell, the worst feeling of the world. But who is right?

Well, both of them are. You see, confinement can provide us with a very good opportunity to focus on our psychological well-being, to work on calm, self-love and many other qualities that we all have inside, but it will also help us to miss others, and this does not have why be bad. Just focus on the great hug that we are going to share with our friends as soon as we are allowed to go outside. What a fantasy!

Negative thoughts during confinement. How to fight them.

We have already commented before that what we cannot do during this quarantine is force everyone to think that we will get out of
this situation. Obviously we are going out, and we will be happier and more aware than ever, but we have to know how to put ourselves in the shoes of those who are having a hard time now. They can’t see the end of the tunnel right at this moment, so we can’t impose it. They will see it, eventually. BE PATIENT. Clearly, we are not going to sink them and put more negativity or less hope in their heads, but with giving them a smile, they are plenty.

We are going to comment now on some of the thoughts that our Philosophyium collaborators have heard the most in these almost 30 days of being home and we are going to see, from our point of view, how we can fight against them.

First negative thought: I will not make ends meet.

Typical thought of our parents and elders. With all the economic situation that the health crisis of COVID-19 has caused and continues to cause not only in Spain but worldwide, many people are at risk of losing their jobs when all this happens, that is, when we return to normal. Many also worry that, although they are receiving some money thanks to state aid such as ERTE [temporary employment regulation file], this amount is (in many cases) not even half of what they were making before and, if before the confinement people could barely eat and maintain a house at the same time, many don't dare to think about how they are going to get out of this situation when all this is over.

At Philosophyium, and look, we've "hit our coconut," [aka we have been bothering our brains on thinking about this because we have a lot of free time] but we don't know exactly how to neutralize this thought, since it's not something we can ignore or remove from our life and rethink later. Not for anything in special, but because we eat, we have to eat every day and, at the moment, the supermarket does not give anything for free. What we can do is stick to the measures that the Spanish Government is taking so that all of us are provided with all the necessary resources for basic needs. In our country, according to La Vanguardia, the measures approved so far (such as support for healthcare with 0.3% of GDP, the six-month moratorium on tax debts of SMEs and the self employed up to a maximum of €30,000, the moratorium of the payment of mortgages for low-income workers and freelancers...) represent 1.4% of GDP (which, in understandable language, is the gross domestic product, or what is the same, the goods produced in a country generally in one year), that is, 17,427 million euros. In short, the Government is allocating a large amount of money to help us all, so, although it seems not, it is possible that we can make ends meet.

Second negative thought: No, no, here it says that more people have died than the ones on TV. And in this other place says that confinement is going to take longer... And here it says that if I put a pink bandage on the fourth toe of my right foot, I cannot catch coronavirus.

Jokes aside, this second thought represents all the hoaxes and false news that you receive due to the huge amount of information to which, voluntarily, we now expose ourselves in confinement. Since we have a lot, a lot of free time, and many of us live worried about the subject more than we should be, instead of dedicating ourselves to doing productive activities, we read fifteen different
newspapers and we reviewed eight different social networks that send us information of which 75% is false.

Let's be very clear, with this we don't mean that The News Tele5, Antena3 or La Sexta (all Spanish TV programs) are lying to us, of course not. But what we do want to highlight is that, right now, many people are trying to take advantage of the situation of mental vulnerability of (especially) older people or adults who are simply psychologically weaker, to fill their heads with false information, hoaxes and surreal news about the entire confinement situation. In order to avoid this, from Philosophyium we propose the following: take away the cell phone of your elders. This means that, if they obviously want to watch their chapter of Money Heist from Netflix, well, let them go ahead. But try, as the young guardian angels as we are, to allow their mind to go elsewhere and that the word Coronavirus only comes to them when they sit down to dinner and watch the news at 20:30. Are we forbidding parents and grandparents to inform themselves? Not! Of course not! Well a little… But it’s for their own good, though, that's what our mum used to tell us when we were younger.

Third negative thought: I need to go shopping, because I have nothing left ...

We have constantly heard this thought in our homes. But it is not necessary to hear it to know that it is true and that it is happening, we just need to look out the window and look at the nearest store or supermarket that we have: the long lines that are formed both in the morning and in the afternoon are incredible. Let's think about it: is all this fuss really necessary?

Let us remember you the first day in which the quarantine was announced... Do you remember the hubbub, the queues and the shortage of products that there was? WE ARE ALL CRAZY! LET'S ALL KEEP CALM, PLEASE! In the humor with which Philosophyium tries to make you smile while you invest your time reading us, we are going to think about how to combat this negative thought.

First, let's make things clear, even comically: NOT BY BUYING EIGHT PACKS OF TOILET PAPER we are going to get rid of contracting the virus. Not by going down to make a macro purchase in the morning and a macro purchase in the afternoon we are going to save ourselves. Also, a little coherence, we are in confinement, but it is not the end of the world. And not only that... Don't all go to the supermarket all at once! The best thing is to wait for everything to collapse and then we can go shopping by busting the windows with a bat, that is studied in the first year of Apocalypse!! It's a joke :). That is to prove that we are obviously spending 80% of our time on social media. We're sorry. But was funny.

But let's be real. All the movies in which we watch how people are breaking stores to steal food is pure and nothing more than fiction and this WILL, obviously, NOT HAPPEN in our country, as much as we like American movies from the end of the world.

Lastly, it is very important to remember that, although we do not go down today to buy the bread, tomorrow our bread will be there, waiting for us in the bakery, because the supermarkets restock every day, and no item is going to run out forever. We need to stay calm and buy essentials only when necessary.

Let's be positive. Some guidelines for dealing with confinement.

From this web page we seek to entertain, learn, share ideas but above all, help. After much thought and reading various forums of
psychologists who give us advice with different ways of coping with confinement, we have decided to also take our own point of view to help you. These are some of the guidelines that we consider essential to face our quarantine:

First, we need to have a 'healthy' environment around us where we can continue (as much as possible) with our daily activities and goals. With healthy we do not mean exclusively ‘coronavirus free’, which also, but an environment in which we are comfortable and happy, in which we can carry out activities calmly, without bad vibes. Our house, our grandmother's house or any place where we have been caught in confinement. REMINDER: do not go to your second homes, this is a lockdown and (unfortunately) it is not a vacation.

Second, don't watch television all day just to watch shows where confinement is the only issue. We have already explained it
before. Yes, being informed is wonderful, but it is not so good that we are so overloaded with information that might not be true at
all. In addition, on our television there are also other channels, not just the news.

Third, it is good to recover old customs or learn new things to keep us entertained, without the need for schedules. With this we
seek a simple form of distraction. Some activities such as sewing, knitting, learning a new way dance, playing board or table games,
etc. will keep us entertained for a longer time.

Fourth, we must generate routines that are not strict, that is, as much as we like it, WE CANNOT STAY ALL DAY IN THE BED. Although we get up at five in the afternoon, we have to get out of bed, clean up, make a coffee, sit down to read, change our pj's with comfortable but street clothes and so on. This will keep us entertained too, and it will make our mind to not just think 'I'm locked up.’’ An important detail is that if we do not follow the routines, NOTHING HAPPENS, we should not be frustrated.

Fifth, we cannot stop maintaining virtual contact with our friends, family or even colleagues at work. This action will help us to
socialize and not feel alone in addition to evading ourselves and, probably, having a good time. Applications like Zoom or Skype are
the ones that are being used the most now to make group video calls and 'have a laugh' with our friends.

Sixth, we must go out to make the (what we call) health applause, since we should not only thank all those who are taking risks for us (Spanish Armed Forces, Civil Guard, Civil Protection, UME, National and Local Police, Fire Department, Health, cleaning staff and supermarkets’ staff...), but because we can also take advantage of this to socialize since we can see our neighbors through the balconies and windows, and between one greeting and one applause, we can tell ourselves how is that new series that we have just started watching.

Seventh and final, we cannot forget to do some exercise (in Philosophyium we want to suggest trying Just Dance: try putting on the
Just Dance while you are talking on video-calls with your friends and see who is more capable of resisting laughter), eating healthy
(well kind of, because those Easter Chocolate eggs... I’m sure they were delicious!) and, if possible, respect your sleeping schedules.

Turning a problem into an opportunity: What lessons or conclusions are you drawing from this adversity?

We asked our readers. Let's check it out!

Blog written by Team Philosophyium.