Nothing much. It's close to normal, though schools are closed and no one is kissing or shaking hands as far as I can tell. Last night, our young neighbor come over to ask if we happened to have a bocacubierta, mouth cover, because her mother was going to a meeting. We didn't. It was necessary for admission to a women's meeting. It turned out they were available at the meeting. Today, Blanca and I drove into Coatepec to get the stitches taken out of her puppies belly following spaying (Tati is the cutest puppy around, or at least one of the cutest.) Blanca said that she thought it was a good idea to wear the mouth covers at the meeting because there were visitors from outside the colonia and it was crowded. She very clearly understood that they were to keep people from sneezing and coughing on each other much more than to protect the wearers from germs. She thought all the measures were quite sensible and not a particular burden here because all the local shops and stands can stay open.
Her one complaint was that they'd been given tons of schoolwork to do at home. One of the projects was to design a product and then to come up with a marketing campaign for it. She squinched her face. It didn't sound like fun. I told her I'd seen on Mex Files some pictures of decorated bocacubiertas. Below you can see a couple from the site Guanabee which I found via Mex Files:
Maybe she could do a set of designer bocacubiertas, we thought. We suspected she wouldn't be the only one. In fact, there are already commercial sites. Fox News offers a quick view of a bunch here.
I kind of like the home-made ones better.
We both had heard that this weekend was a long one because of a holiday. She thought the holiday might be the Fiesta of the Three Crosses. The shrine where this is celebrated is right behind our neighbors house, but there's been no evidence of it being ready for a mass or a party or anything else. Several activities have, in fact, been suspended, and she thought this might be one of them.
The funny thing is, Jim and I just heard that the holiday officially involved in the long weekend is Cinco de Mayo: the big drinking day in the US. Here in our colonia, no one seems to pay attention to it.
Anyway, everyone here seems quite aware of the situation, and nobody seems the least bit panicky and no one is walking around with a mask. Just careful. And traffic in Coatepec seemed busy, busy, busy as usual. And no one there was walking around with a mask on.
And no one knows anyone who is sick with flu-like symptoms. And no one is terribly scared of the flu. Not that there aren't problems: diabetes, for one. In the past few months, two people in our colonia in their forties died from complications of that disease.