Staying home during the COVID-19 pandemic: Day 27

Anna and I start our typical Philippine Easter Sunday before the crack of dawn for the traditional Salubong in Sta Cruz, Laguna with Mommy's side of the family (actually, we typically attend processions there from Good Friday to Easter Sunday; I typically spent Maundy Thursday with Tita Ising and Tito Sibing for Visita Iglesia). After moving to California, our first Easter Sunday was also spent with family; it was Gabriel's first Easter egg hunt.

This year, Easter is unique and very special (if we want to put a positive spin on the COVID-19 pandemic): it is a time we are sheltered-in-place... but far from being celebratory, this Holy Week is a time to reflect about the fragility of life; it shows how important faith and hope are for everyone, not just during the peak of the pandemic (we see news of people, including health workers, being hospitalised and dying without saying good bye to their families) but also afterwards when economies restart and people who survived through the pandemic embark on their new normal.

The sense of isolation that comes with widespread quarantines, particularly in COVID-19's most hard-hit cities, was perfectly and hauntingly visualised during Andrea Bocelli's concert at the Duomo di Milano, Italy's largest cathedral. He sang five hymns accompanied only by the Duomo's organist, Emanuele Vianelli. While he was singing, the scene cut away to B-rolls containing aerial shots of Bergamo (one of the worst-hit cities in Italy), London (whose Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, stayed in the ICU for several nights because of COVID-19), and New York City (the city with the most number of cases and deaths in the USA so far), among others. Throughout the solemn and powerful performance, which can be thought of as Bocelli's own prayer for hope and healing, I kept remarking that the church pews were empty; the plaza outside the cathedral was empty; the streets of major cities in Europe and USA hard-hit by COVID-19 were empty.

On the most important day in the Christian calendar, marking our salvation, Catholic parishes have gone high-tech to help avoid increasing, even further, the number of people sick and dying because of this epidemic. People can attend Easter celebrations aired via Internet channels.



More than 3,000,000 people watched Bocelli's performance on his YouTube channel. I found it to be a most uplifting 28 minutes because aside from his superb performance with the organist, the cinematographers really did a masterclass on storytelling. Haunting, spine-tingling, hair-raising, tear-jerking even. And they did all that while there's a quarantine in Milan and they had to work with a skeletal force only.

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