For a few days now, I've been wandering the streets of Tel Aviv imagining you in all the places I've been living with you in China since 2007. 

But nothing today seems to be like yesterday.  The streets in your cities are deserted, the museums and galleries are locked closed, the malls are empty, the trains are hollow.  Clinics are filled with anxiety; hospitals in Wuhan are densely packed in horror.

New Year's holiday and the long-awaited family vacation anticipated all year have become a home curfew and a dejected despair that longs for the medicine, the pigeon that signals the fall in water level and that the end of the plague is approaching.

Western media broadcast what is happening to you from a selfishly focused perspective: how to limit the outbreak of illness outside your borders.  How narrow and sad that they never stop the sequence of programs to go beyond the routine, to give you a voice and to send you words of encouragement and solidarity.

It is important to tell you: we look after your health, ask for your peace and support you from anywhere in the world!

As one would appeal to friends in distress, please tell us how can we help you.

Be strong and courageous!

With friendship and hope.

Shoshan and Michael Levitt