Visits

Thursday, April 9, 2020

Cancellation

As things stand now, the government in Bali appears to have cancelled the proposed three day Nyepi extension due to coronavirus, wherein we were all to have stayed strictly within our own homes. The cancellation has been ordered, as I understand it, because of the religious stress in the original proposal that seemed to be counterproductive, given that the point was to prevent the spread of coronavirus, not to encourage communal religious activities. Therefore, we will return to what was already in place, which is a voluntary lockdown wherein people have been 'advised' to stay home, and pretty much all entertainment sorts of businesses are closed anyway, such that there's not very much reason to go out of the house in any case, except to grocery shop or, indeed, take yourself to the hospital. Nonetheless, I found upon going to the grocery this morning, that the traffic was much heavier than it has been recently, which suggests to me that people may have taken the lifting of the Nyepi order as a lifting of all such isolation measures. Why else would so many have decided to hit the roads this morning?

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