“It certainly felt like we were trapped.” Tim and Marisa
Notier, on the road for three years, suddenly found
themselves halted.
Trapped?
Kampala, Uganda is a large bustling city, a population
of well over 6 million people in the metro and
surrounding areas, suddenly home to a rider and pillion
from the United States. Strangers, in a strange land.
Trapped?
“Crazy range of things to think about when you’ve been
on the road so long,” agreed Dan Byers also a rider from
the USA. He too is, well, trapped. Unlike the Notier’s
he’s closer to home, at least in the Americas, yet another
world away.
“Now not only stranded, the prospects of things
returning to any semblance of normalcy any time soon
seem to wither daily,” Byers continued.
Trapped? Stranded? Statements that many
overlanders initially used to explore the concept of a
world locked down by the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost
all nations, around the world, closed their borders in
an attempt to halt the spread of the latest Coronavirus
strain. For many this came as a shock, at the time of
hearing of the virus it seemed insignificant, a problem
for another place.
Late last year (2019) Chinese authorities announced to
the World Health Organisation of numerous pneumonia
cases in Wuhan City. The cause was unknown. A
few days later officials closed a local seafood market,
believing that to be the source; 44 people had contracted
the illness, all linked to the market.
Within a week the first death occurred and a new
Coronavirus (COVID-19) was announced, Chinese
authorities shared genetic sequencing details with the
world to help with testing and tracing. By the third
week of 2020 17 deaths had been reported yet the WHO
wouldn’t announce that the COVID-19 outbreak was a
‘health emergency’ of ‘international concern’; three other
nations confirmed cases all traced to Chinese nationals.
The end of January saw COVID-19 outbreaks reported
across the globe, with Australian scientists suggesting
they had successfully grown the virus under laboratory
conditions, a chance to help diagnose cases. Eventually
the WHO announced this to be an ‘international health
concern’, and with it many nations started closing their
borders to Chinese travellers, the World Bank began
reviewing procedures, acknowledging that the outbreak
and resultant closures would impact the international
economy.
“It took a while for people to realise that COVID-19
would have serious implications on world travel,”
explained 29-year-old Buck Snyder, also travelling from
the United States. Like many, Snyder first heard of
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