Travel jeopardises strangers, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. Now is the time to think of people you’ve never met
I have a job in China and left just before the coronavirus outbreak to visit my parents in the US. My wife, a Chinese citizen, wants me to return to meet her at our apartment in a major Chinese city not far from the first afflicted province of Hubei, so that we can weather the crisis together. She believes that our life shouldn’t be put on hold for weeks or months, and that our different experiences of the outbreak might be pushing us apart. I’m eager to get back to her as soon as possible but worried that my travelling will endanger us both, not to mention cause anxiety to my dad who is already struggling with serious health issues. On top of this, my government has advised strongly against travel to China and my boss has offered me a way to do my work online. How can I find a path towards making the right decision for myself, my wife and our marriage?
Did you see those huge lines at airports this week, hundreds of passengers crammed shoulder to shoulder so that customs halls around the world looked like livestock pens? Like you, I’d thought about being in those lines. I had thought that I needed to fly home to my parents and my grandparents while I still could, and that if anything happened to them while I was away I could never live with myself. Then I remembered that to pass through an airport right now is to endanger someone else’s loved one. This thing moves so fast, and tests have been so slow, that we simply do not know what each of us is carrying. Patient 31 in South Korea went to church twice and infected 1,000 people.
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