In his novel The Plague, Albert Camus writes, ‘the first thing that plague brought to our town was exile’. In late April at least a third of the world’s population were under one form of lockdown or another, with many megacities falling into silence.

My loved ones, stretching from the shores of the Mediterranean and the Caspian Sea all the way to the west coast of the United States, are grappling with variations of collective quarantine, under a whole host of increasingly desperate governments. As for me, I’m trapped in Manila, in the ever-widening shadow of president Duterte, who has been granted unprecedented emergency powers in the name of fighting a pandemic whose origins lie in the very country he so admires.

The United Nations secretary-general António Guterres has warned that the coronavirus crisis is ‘threatening the whole of humanity—and the whole of humanity must fight back’. Following the announcement of a three-week-long lockdown in the world’s second-largest nation, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi appealed for cooperation: ‘If we are not able to manage this pandemic in the next twenty-one days, the country and your family will be set back by twenty-one years.’

• Tags: China, Issue 19, Jiwei Ci, Richard Heydarian