t took the first week to work out how to handle deliveries. Gloves, disinfectant, wash hands, don’t touch my face, wash hands again. My pantry has nuts, rice, pasta, pasta sauce. The fridge has frozen vegetables, frozen fruit and fish; it’s as if I have a family with small children all over again. Three weeks ago, my fridge had wine and watermelon. Down here in Tasmania, the cruise ship passengers from Sydney doubled our coronavirus numbers, then tripled them. Cruise ships do unspeakable damage to our oceans. Now they’ve done unspeakable damage to our society. People tell me it’s a great time to be a writer, but I just lost all my forward income from festivals and author events until October. Bookshops are closing. Book sales may rise, or they may dive. I don’t have a partner with a job to see us through. I’m a single parent again because my 19-year-old lost her job in London and is home again, quarantined. Yesterday I visited my Dad. He’s 86 with a fragile heart. We walked at a distance. We enjoyed sunshine and cloudscapes and the river turning silver in the afternoon light. “Never worry about me,” he said. “I’ve had a marvellous life.” I don’t want him to die alone with pneumonia. My sister is an emergency nurse. They are all dreading the weeks ahead. There are only some 2,300 ventilators across Australia. We could have 5,000 people not being able to breathe. Or 50,000. We just don’t know. It’s early April. And patients on ventilators require one-on-one specialist acute care nurses. They’re in short supply, too. No one likes the idea of lockdown, but if we don’t, the deaths could be horrific. We have entered a time where, although everything feels strange and it’s easy to be fearful, it’s also a rare time to take stock. To discover who we are without the same patterns and routines. Some of us are busy in new ways, and in very intense ways. Nurses and teachers are at the forefront of everything we need right now. But they always were. Without them, everything else collapses. Yet we underpay them, we under-resource them, and we put them on the front line. Some of us don’t know who we are without constant action and interaction. Many of us have lost our work and security. Some of us are glimpsing opportunities we’ve waited a long time to explore. We are learning new ways to live, to be, to think. Maybe that’s the gift as well as the challenge. 2020 is making things clear. Today there is a high blue sky and a breeze whistling. I can see a swimmer plying the River Derwent and a few dog walkers on the beach. I spend a lot of time alone at home. I’m a writer. That’s what we do. I stick to a schedule otherwise it’s easy to lose days. We are all going to have to learn to be like writers in the coming weeks. Get a daily rhythm. Stay inside. Manage your mind. Manage your body. Manage your money. Exercise. Be patient. Be disciplined. Get to the end. It’s hard but, if you do it well, you’ll emerge with a good story. As Benjamin Law pointed out last week, remember the things that get you through this – the technology, the books and movies, the media, video games, TV shows, music … it’s all the result of creativity. In Australia, the arts are a $111bn dollar industry yet just a few months ago, this government scrapped a dedicated arts portfolio. It’s slashed the ABC, it’s slashed the Australia Council for the Arts. It’s been slashing hospitals and public schools for years. Covid-19 might be waking us up. We are nature. Nature supports us and it can kill us. We created governments to help society – not to create an economy. Globalisation and our current agribusiness models make us vulnerable to more viruses like this. Climate change will kill millions in coming decades. What changes do we need to make to plan for this? Will we continue to allow big business to pay no taxes? Will we trial a universal basic income in Australia? Now is the perfect opportunity to challenge all our assumptions. These ordinary times of Covid-19 call for extraordinary thinking. Like the images from China, we will emerge from this. We will hug again. We will hang out with the people we love. We will travel. We will grieve. And maybe we will look at this wonderful world with fresh eyes. What society will we create from this savage lesson? Heather Rose is an Australian author and winner of the Stella Prize