Ashleigh Young: around the world with Covid-19 - the possibilities and the reality

A man looks out of his balcony in Paris, France. Photo / Getty Images

In Sicily and Rome and Naples, people confined to their apartments are standing on their balconies singing folk songs and playing ukuleles and accordions. I go through all the clips I can find of these singalongs. What a lovely thing it is. Then there is a short clip in which a woman is playing a recorder cheerily on her balcony when an aggrieved-looking old man comes up behind her and whacks the instrument out of her hands. Suddenly the reality of it seems stark.

Not many of us would be able to cope if confined to a small apartment in which someone was playing the recorder night and day. Maybe we'd be okay with the singing for a while but before long it would devolve into yells across empty streets: "For the love of God, shut up. It's 6am." And a lot of people seem to feel the same way. Online, the life cycle of joy is brief and merciless: grumpiness always wins. I see tweets like this, from @BCDreyer: "Sure, let's all sing out our windows, that'll be fun. You want me howling 'The Ladies Who Lunch' into the night air, fine. EV'RYBODY DIIIIIES!" But who knows what we'd really be like?

There are accounts of life inside the hospitals where it is the worst – where there aren't enough ventilators or ICU rooms or even masks; where, as in wartime, decisions on who to help are based on how robust a person is, how young or old, frail or healthy. The accounts almost give you the feeling of danger up close – and at the same time it seems unimaginable. But the usual story is that when we perceive a crisis as being far away from us - and ourselves as untouchable - the more likely we are to already be part of it. Before my parents leave for a trip to London, my dad says that his big duffel coat will protect him. I mean, it's a good coat but it's not force-field good.

A fitness instructor in Seville is standing on a rooftop, leading the residents of an apartment complex through a workout. I receive emails from the fitness app I subscribe to, listing the workouts I can do at home should I need to self-isolate. "For those with downstairs neighbours, these workouts feature minimal jumping." The need for physical activity is starting to feel like a vestigial quirk, like wisdom teeth or male nipples. Just there, persisting, reminding us that despite everything we're still animals, really.

For a short time, people get excited at the thought of what they might accomplish during self-isolation. Novels will be written. Languages will be learnt. All seven Millennium Problems will be solved. New tricks taught to old dogs, groundbreaking inventions built, pies made ahead of time. Two artists have created an app called QuarantineChat, where people can sign up to receive random calls from others in quarantine. Someone threatens: "If I see another tweet about how great things were accomplished by geniuses during quarantine, I will start unfollowing ppl."

This week's "Experience" column in the Guardian is the story of a woman who was kidnapped in the middle of the night when she was 15 and held at a camp in the desert with other teenagers – all of them sent there by parents "who thought they were a problem". They were kept in the desert for months. It sounds horrific, especially for a child and the woman now suffers from post-traumatic stress. Yet, she says she wouldn't change what happened. It was an opportunity to discover what she was really made of.

It made me think about New Zealand's favourite character trait, resilience. Our beloved son. It seems to me that it's usually the most privileged who talk about resilience – what it means, that we should be grateful for having it, that others need to show more of it when they're suffering. People who aren't as privileged are less interested in discovering what they're made of and more interested in just surviving – often within a system that isn't looking after them.

At Disney World in Florida, massive crowds gather to watch a spectacular fireworks show called "Happily Ever After". The crowds have the look of the interactive Covid-19 map about them.

Bill Manhire shares some lines from his poem, Warm Ocean:

Last night in the world's last city
no one much about
though here you are again turning a corner
and there are the abandoned cruise ships

It's a cliche that, in times of crisis, we turn to poetry for consolation. But Manhire's poem doesn't console. It's kind of menacing. It helps in some other way, by sharpening the edges of what we can imagine. Poetry feels about right for the moment, too – written by one person, usually in solitude and read by another person in solitude. It's practically talking to each other through baked bean cans and string.

Next week: Steve Braunias