“Let me just put on my mask,” I said a few days ago as I entered an office in an apartment building. “Oh, don’t worry about it,” the unmasked employee responded. A few days later a doctor told me in her clinic that she and I are “pretty much the only ones still wearing masks in Egypt.” You would think the pandemic had all but passed. But it hasn’t. Statistically and from a distance, one could certainly argue that we’ve been getting off easy here in Egypt when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic. Our numbers were never as high as those of other countries with similar population sizes, and we experienced a few months of relative calm, where we were almost able to resume a normal life. But this time of relative normalcy is over and it seems that many of us here aren’t really catching on. Though we know that limited testing and asymptomatic spread suggest that the official numbers of cases and deaths are not entirely accurate, they still suggest a definite and unmistakable rise in infections and coronavirus-related deaths. At the beginning of this month, recorded…
