Restless in Rome

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/12/2021 (1579 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Two days before I left Italy, I boarded a city bus that lurched through the bustling streets of Rome until it reached my stop, somewhere along a nondescript shopping street in the heart of the city. As I walked the block to my destination, eyes glued to the maps app on my phone, a tendril of anxiety tickled my throat.

I was early for my appointment. The waiting room was tiny, and mostly empty. The only other clients were two Americans, who loudly read through the paperwork we’d all been asked to fill out. I listened to them for a while, until a nurse appeared from a narrow corridor and read out my name from a chart.

Inside the testing room, she motioned me to sit down. She seemed to be new on the job; a white-coated doctor hovered over her, purring instruction as she spun the swab first along my gums, before plunging it deep into one nasal cavity and then the other. While she packed the swab away, I thought about everything that could go wrong from this point forward.

“This is the PCR test, right? Not the antigen?”

The doctor nodded. “This is P-C-R,” he replied, spelling it out slowly, as if to a child.

As he ushered me out the door, he handed me a few photocopied sheets of paper, on which were printed arcane instructions about how to access my results online. As I hustled back to the street, I paused at the front desk to ask what was, for me, the most critical question, one more time.

“When will the results be ready?”

The woman at the desk barely glanced up from what she was typing.

“Tomorrow, signora.”

I still sought reassurance. “But for sure by tomorrow, right?”

She fixed me with a tired look, and nodded. “Yes, tomorrow.”

That night, I lay on the flat mattress of my quaint bed-and-breakfast, obsessively checking the results website, listening to the rain pound the cobblestones outside. I felt fine. (Or did I?) I stopped myself from Googling “asymptomatic positive.” I tried not to think about what would happen if the results came back that I had COVID-19.

It wouldn’t be the end of the world, I knew. (After all, I felt fine. Right? Thinking about that question too much seemed to bring up aches I hadn’t previously noticed.) But it would mean that I wouldn’t be going home anytime soon. I checked the website again, and again it returned a message in Italian, stating the results were not available.

For the most part, up until that moment, travel in the age of COVID-19 had felt only haphazardly different from before the pandemic. I’d felt the grip of some tension on the way out of Canada, as airline staff checked my proof of vaccination and the negative test result I’d taken in Winnipeg but that had passed within minutes.

In Amsterdam’s sprawling Schiphol airport, no official even spoke to me as I squeezed through the crowds, tumbling out of the terminal on a layover to savour an hour of fresh air. In Rome, a customs agent cordially waved me out the door, without looking at my COVID-19 paperwork or asking a single question.

Once loosed in Italy, life was similar to what we’ve become used to here in Manitoba. At historic sites and restaurants, staff peered at my pan-Canadian vaccination card, shrugging when its QR code didn’t scan on their European Union app, tapping their fingers on my phone as they searched the screen for what they wanted to know.

“Moderna… Moderna,” they’d read aloud, before cheerfully inviting me in.

But now, at the end of the trip, the spectre of COVID-19 manifested mostly as stress. It meant a few more things that could go wrong, and one major thing that had to go right: in the end, no matter how badly I ached to go home, it all depended on the results of that test, on microscopic happenings inside my body that I could neither know nor control.

I checked the laboratory’s website again. My test results were back early: negative. I was good to go home.

As I packed my suitcase for the long journey back, I thought about these new uncertainties around how we move through the world. Is it even right to travel right now? That question was, in truth, not one I’d wrestled with deeply; I’m vaccinated, after all. I follow the rules health authorities set down, trusting to live life within the bounds of what is allowed.

Yet for every one of those rules, a difficult balance. Our modern world is defined, in part, by its capability and reliance on moving masses of people vast distances, with a speed and ease our ancestors of just a century ago couldn’t have imagined. COVID-19 exploited that reality, and it won’t stop anytime soon. The world, though, can’t fully stop moving.

Not long after I got back to Canada, there was a reminder of the chaos the virus can still unleash. Eighteen days after I’d breezed so easily through Amsterdam’s airport, two planes arriving from South Africa were held on its tarmac for more than four hours after Dutch authorities banned travel from multiple southern African countries while they were in flight.

The 624 passengers were eventually allowed to disembark. They were detained in the airport for hours, in close quarters, many without access to food or even necessary medication, until their COVID-19 test results came back. Sixty-one tested positive, including 13 with the new omicron variant.

It’s not known where the new strain originated. All we know is scientists in South Africa were the first to identify it, thanks in part to that nation’s sophisticated viral surveillance. Many countries, Canada included, responded by rushing to close borders and tighten entry procedures, adding new testing requirements or quarantines.

It turned out that omicron had been in the Netherlands at least a week before the Schiphol chaos. One prominent epidemiologist has theorized that first impressions got the variant’s path the wrong way around: that it actually may have arisen first in Europe and been transmitted from there to Africa and other spots it’s been found.

The world we live in is defined by movement. And so, the virus moves with us, faster than we can catch it. For almost two years, we have learned to adapt to conditions that are, above all, consistently uncertain. At least we know where to invest now, to smooth the worst of the chaos: testing, vaccinations and vigilance.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca