Educating Elizabeth on the coronavirus is proving difficult. She believes it has been brought to Zimbabwe by the Chinese and so the obvious solution is to send them all packing. I try to tell her that it is useless as once the virus is here, it will spread on its own. I make up a bottle of disinfectant for cleaning the counters and tell her how she must wash her hands when she arrives for work and wash her hands when she gets home, but it doesn't look as though my words are going far. In many ways I feel that Elizabeth's rather haphazard cleaning routine may actually save our lives in the long run as we have probably built up a bullet proof immunity to most diseases as a result.
As expected, late in the evening, the government does a u-turn and a message, purporting to be from Manangagwa, is dinging from phone to phone at a rate of knots: school will end nine days earlier than planned on Tuesday, 24 March. There is some doubt as to whether it is true or not and really the message should come through the Ministry of Education but, like most things, in Zimbabwe, it doesn't follow the usual path.
There is a second coronavirus victim: a well known journalist who has just returned from New York. He has been admitted into Wilkins Hospital in Harare. God alone knows what the conditions there are like.
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