🇱🇦 In Laos, signs of relief

Hello friends!

A bit of a personal one from our friend in Laos today, who takes a look at the opening-up of Laos as it continues its streak of zero new cases. Laos has had some advantages here and now finds itself in stark contrast with many countries in the west, including our correspondent’s home.

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I also had a nice chat with the always brilliant Jeff Hutton for his podcast, On the Level. Here’s the Spotify link and you can subscribe on your app of choice.

See you next week!

Erin Cook

Laos gets moving again (c/o Sasha Popovic on Flickr)

It rained all night on Saturday, which must have dampened the moods of all those planning their first post-COVID ragers. But on Sunday, the skies cleared, and every kid in town roared out into the streets on their motorbikes. They crowded around cafe tables and made eyes at each other. They flaunted their freshest summer outfits: oversized Nirvana tees, bell-bottoms and crop tops, ‘90s Reeboks. They ordered drinks and toasted the end of the plague.

Nothing was going to stop this party. This was the first weekend since the national lockdown order was eased on May 18. With two months of repressed energy inside them, the youth were ready to let loose. Not that their parents would have denied them. Just as the Saturday rains passed, there is a sense now that the superstorm of COVID-19 has passed and that it’s safe to come out.

All around are the signs of society waking up. Bars and clubs are still shuttered. But cafes and restaurants are largely open and stores are packed with goods. Pump bottles of hand sanitizer are always on dutiful display, but there’s no obvious social distancing of customers and there isn’t a mask in sight — neither patrons nor staff. 

If this picture is not strictly in compliance with government guidelines, it is not a serious enough matter to enforce. In any event, it is not clear why Lao would worry.

Authorities have kept a running count of the days since the last infection, that being the 19th one, in mid-April. Should a new case appear, the lockdown can snap back into place. Until then a tentative reopening, desperately needed by Laos’ many small businesses, is both feasible and reasonable. Further easing may come as soon as June 2.

At least in public, nobody seems to have any problem with this. Part of this is because it wouldn’t be very Lao to ask hard questions about a good thing. The sceptical foreigner finds himself suddenly quite out of touch with the prevailing mood. He becomes obtrusive — an aged falang, wearing the only mask in sight, shuddering at a centre table as kids snap ducky-face selfies all around him.

Laos did take strong measures, considering its capacity. It mobilised a lockdown within two weeks of the first positive case, back in March. It was initially overwhelmed by the flights of migrant workers returning from Thailand, but now it has official quarantine centres at border crossings. Its lockdown was bolstered by an impressive level of compliance from civil society — no more apparent than in the non-celebration of the April water festival.

The joyless question remains. Has the virus passed over, or is it lying in wait?

To this masked falang, either seems possible.

Laos has very few land and air connections compared to most of its neighbours. Very few people ever get here to start with.

But Laos also has natural attributes that may, in the long view, turn out to have worked as something of a moat.

1. Laos is a young country, even by Southeast Asian standards. The median age is 24. The WHO’s initial analysis in Africa suggests that demography may be one factor reducing total COVID-19 mortality there.

2. The Lao public is already well distanced. Population density is 30 people per square kilometre, less than a quarter of Thailand’s. The three biggest cities comprise about one-seventh of the population.

3. It is hot. The data on this is evolving, but current info suggests that intense heat, or light, or both, can slow infection — though not necessarily prevent it.

Then there are the far-out theories. Some friends think coronavirus may have cruised through in December when a particularly nasty bug made the rounds. Lao lao is still poured into shared glasses and playfully rationalised as a disinfectant. One doctor was quoted in the press crediting something called “nasal irrigation.”

All of it can lull even the twitchiest falang into a sense of safety. And that can hold until he talks to his mom, back home in the west, where this virus is rampaging through communities, killing so fast that they’re scrambling for places to put the bodies. In the place I grew up, the act of visiting a cafe with no mask (!), has become one of the most selfish, ignorant things you can do.

It is an experience to be upbraided by your mother for failing to comprehend the sense of dread that overshadows her world — the gripping fear that you can’t lower your guard for an instant — because where you are feels more like youthful abandon.

There remains a deep, deep discordance between the world I’m from, and the world I’m in. It left me gasping for words last week, when a Lao friend asked: “How are your mother and father doing, back home?”