COVID Chronicles

by Andy Pacino

The end of the year 2019 brought with it an unprecedented catastrophe that would affect the world for the first five months of 2020. Never before had there been such a collective effort to eradicate a happening that had begun life in a small laboratory in Ma Shan Dong, the capital city of the Wu Xiao province of the Middle Kingdom. The Ebola outbreak of 2013, contained more through luck than Government design, could have seen far more devastation. However, the Happening still had more of an impact that the mass outbreaks that went before it due to the readily available and world wide coverage thanks to global media outlets and social media sites that had previously aided uprisings in Tunisia, which was the catalyst that sparked the so-called Arab Spring that destabilised the Middle East, and from where ISIS allegedly sprouted its deadly roots. These stories are inspired by the reaction to and the effects the Happening brought with it. They explore how people react in different ways in times of crises; from the political stance at the top of the Government views to those on the street – the rag-tag bunch of ordinary and not so ordinary people. They also stretch back to times when pandemics were not so widely reported but were still as deadly, if not more so, than the recent Happening. Considering the scale of world-wide lockdowns, mask wearing and glove donning preventative measures, the Wu Xiao Happening, as it came to be known, was relatively small scale.

55 pages, Paperback

Published June 12, 2020