The past few months have
been challenging for news organizations
like ours. With lockdowns in
place, old-fashioned shoe-leather
reporting has become all but
impossible. Stuttering video links
have replaced conference meetings, and
Slack messages are the
nearest facsimile we have to the snatched
conversations in
corridors that so often generate story ideas.
It has also been personally wearing. The international nature
of the news
business means that many of us have become
accustomed to living lives
across borders. A serial migrant,
I have family in Europe, North America
and Southeast Asia.
Affordable air travel and the luxury of a European
passport
have meant that those distances had shrunk in
the imagination.
As flights were cancelled and borders closed,
the distances yawned open
again.
At the Nikkei Asian Review, we have been trying to understand
what this
all means. A third of the world's population is
locked down. Whole
economies are shuttered. Borders
that have been open for generations are
now closed,
disrupting supply chains, trade, investment and tourism
--
the very foundations of globalization.
A few days after we decided to suspend our scheduled stories
and throw
our resources into this four-part series on the
Covid-19 pandemic, I went
into my own self-quarantine,
after finding out that I'd been in close
contact with someone
who had later been hospitalized with COVID-19.
That meant that while reporting the first part of our series,
of goods and people, I was shut in, thousands of
kilometers
from my family, trying to navigate the same complex and
frightening fractures that we were trying to explain.
What I found, on long
video calls with people across
the region who were similarly confined,
was an
unexpected and reassuring solidarity. People needed
to talk at
that moment, even if it was to a reporter.
In the second piece we charted the
from the hospitals where doctors and nurses
are having to experiment in the middle of an unfolding
catastrophe, to the researchers building
global networks
and using cutting edge computing to identify drugs.
This
brought us close to a story that was taking on
heartbreaking dimensions
-- tens of thousands dead,
more than a million infected. One minute
we
were speaking to doctors making impossible
decisions in the midst of a
crisis; the next we were
on the phone to our own family members on
isolation wards.
We explored how this crisis has revealed the gaps
in
international institutions, and how it has been exploited
by
nationalists and demagogues with a zero-sum game view
of world affairs.
With the world in need of leadership, few
countries have answered the
call. As former Australian
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told writer James
Crabtree:
"In 2008 we built a machine to manage a crisis just like
this one.
But, so far, no one has stepped up to drive that machine."
Finally, we ended as we started: in lockdown. The fourth
entry in our
series looks at how life across Asia has changed
in the weeks and months
of enforced or voluntary isolation.
In India, millions of migrant workers
have been stranded;
in Jakarta and Singapore, middle class workers are
struggling to adapt;
in Japan and Vietnam, lives lived close to
the edge
have been pushed over it.
The crisis is far from over. Here in Tokyo, many people are
worried that
cases could surge and that the frontline could
come to us. We have taken
huge steps in just a few weeks
to make profound changes to how we work.
We can only hope
it will be enough. As one doctor, overwhelmed and
exhausted,
told me two weeks ago: "You think you're ready, right up
to
effort to keep vital and timely information easily accessible to
everyone we have made our coronavirus latest blog free
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