If there were tumbleweeds in Greenland, they would have been blowing down the street today. Instead, the snow blew low along the frozen ground and twisted around snow heaps at the roadside. On my way to the supermarket, I passed one person, arm over her forehead, body pressed into the wind.
The supermarket was almost empty. The few customers kept their distance, turning into separate isles as they approached one another. Some wore face masks. But otherwise, little seemed amiss. Shelves were still largely stocked. Granted, there were few bottles of hand soap left, but still there were some, and plenty of toilet paper. At the checkout, we stood in a sparse queue, each on our allocated space, pre-marked with floor stickers two metres apart. When I reached the front of the queue, the cashier spoke to me through the makeshift plastic screen that now hung from the ceiling between us, passing my items under it with gloved hands.
Later in the day, I met with colleagues via an online meeting app, sitting at my kitchen table. Aside from a few technical issues, it was work as usual. Around this, I managed a morning of home schooling, helping my son negotiate a range of online tasks and a fairly chaotic online class with his maths teacher and his classmates, all at their respective homes. The chaos was probably only slightly more than it would have been had they been all together in the actual classroom.
This is our new routine for the next three weeks or so, maybe more, while the city is locked down to contain corona virus in Greenland. Last week the first case was detected. Then another. Now there are five (though two have recovered). It might not seem like much, but in a country with a population of only fifty six thousand, Greenland has about the same proportion of cases per head of population as Australia, or Canada – more than China – but more densely confined when you consider that all of those cases are in Nuuk, with a population of only seventeen thousand.
Our lives – work, school, family – are shrunk into the confining walls of home. The lives of Nuuk residents are shrunk into the confines of the city, with no flights in or out until at least April 8. And the lives of Greenlanders are the same, with the borders closed to all passenger flights until April 3, for now.
We’re locked in and we’re locked out.
