bourbiza mohamed
It is the elephant in the room. The public health emergency that cratered our economy, flung us under extreme, illiberal laws without Parliamentary debate and almost killed the Prime Minister.
It devastated our children’s education, saw thousands of our elderly die isolated, terrified and alone and, as of mid-April, has slain 232,112 people in Britain.
A further 22,954,691, though, caught Covid-19 and survived – which raises huge questions wholly unvoiced in this General Election.
Not once has it been publicly discussed by those soliciting our votes. It has been raised at no televised debate.
Huge questions – what went wrong, and what has been learned for the next pandemic? – hang unheard.
Because, perhaps – and especially from March 2020 to the summer of 2021 – it was a time so wretched that no one wants to remember it.
The overreaction to the Covid pandemic has contributed to the hollowing out of our city centres
And, come to think of it, a like nightmare just over a century ago was also swiftly expunged from public memory.
Not that we can ignore the NHS backlog, the soaring number of benefits claimants, our biggest post-war tax burden, and the hollowing out of our city centres. All a direct consequence of Covid and all feeding into a deepening narrative: a failed, discredited Government ruling over ‘Broken Britain’.
Personally, you recall the worst of the emergency in fragments.
The terror of ‘shielding’ elderly parents as an unpaid carer. The indignity as we, the sheeple, queued outside supermarkets.
Our raw, incessantly washed hands. The irritation if someone shouted in a shop; the terror if you heard a cough. Glasses constantly misted above your sweaty mask.
The bizarre shortages: eggs, flour, yeast. The early weeks when soap and sanitiser were all but unobtainable.
And deeper sadnesses. Wedding rings engraved with the wrong dates. Swings, roundabouts and park benches prohibited by shrieky hazard tape.
Police cars patrolling the most respectable suburbs. Men in spacesuits all but dropping a coffin into the ground with neither mourners nor ceremony.
And, years on, habits prove hard to break. It took months to reschool myself to touch the buttons of an ATM or a pedestrian crossing unafraid and with a naked finger.
I still have to suppress the urge to spring off the pavement when someone approaches from the opposite direction; still catch myself raising my left hand in me-Tarzan-you-Jane courtesy at the checkout because, for so long bemasked, I could not deploy my disarming smile.
There was the odd light moment. Twice, staff at Tesco demanded I prove my age.
But we can each recall our lowest one. Mine was a ghastly Saturday in October 2020.
It had poured and poured all day. My elderly parents were in foul mood. I couldn’t eat out, could not – by Scottish Government decree – go beyond the bounds of Edinburgh City Council, call in on a friend or even browse in a bookshop.
And there was no vaccine in view; no end in sight. I stood for a minute over the sink, and wept.
Now anyone can be wise with the luxury of hindsight. And one cannot exclude human factors. In February 2020, Boris Johnson, weeks after his triumph at the ‘Christmas election,’ was badly distracted by personal issues.
And do remember that we got some things brilliantly right.
We were among the first countries to have a reliable test for Covid-19. Humiliated the EU with our rapid development, testing and rollout of an effective vaccine.
Our world-leading recovery trial early identified useful treatments. (One, Remdesivir, in October 2020 probably saved President Trump’s life.)
And furlough – though we are paying for it now, and how – kept untold businesses afloat.
In terms of excess deaths, we fared better than Italy, Spain, Greece, the United States and indeed most of central and eastern Europe.
Five European nations did worse than us: eight better.
Britain had three vulnerabilities – considerable population density, especially in England; a high BAME population, many in cultures of extended family in very crowded homes; and, in London Heathrow, the world’s busiest international airport. Yet appalling British mistakes were made and Sweden, which refused to lock down, had the lowest excess deaths of all.
Haplessly, back in 2011 and when detailed plans were laid, we had prepared for the wrong pandemic – influenza.
You might think flu and Covid much of a muchness. There are key differences. Flu has a briefer incubation period. During a bad outbreak and if you are vulnerable, you can be about your business in the morning, floored by teatime and dead by midnight.
Flu is also potentially dangerous to children and in a bad year – our last was 2018 – can carry off over 30,000 people. (In 2020, seven British children of nine or younger died of flu: only three succumbed to Covid-19.)
Bluntly, more children, trapped out of sight in awful family situations, were murdered as a consequence of coronavirus than would die of it.
If one man voiced the greatest fallacy, it was Michael Gove at a Downing Street briefing in March 2020. Insisting that the virus did not discriminate, he intoned: ‘Everyone is at risk.’
And from that gross misapprehension, all else followed.
For everyone was not at risk. Indeed, a lot of us never caught it – even in that clammy, unvaccinated first year of terror.
I have never had Covid. My late father never caught it, my mother has dodged it and neither of my brothers has ever had it. As was soon evident from cruise liner experience at the time – elderly people in quite a confined space – many proved immune to it.
As we noted, the vast majority who catch Covid-19 survive and most experience it only as a mild illness, if to greater or lesser degree unpleasant. And those who perished? Their average age, in this country, was 82.
Coronavirus is, in fact, little threat to anyone under 50 and in the whole of their health.
Yet the world in which our young people glow and thrive was dramatically shut down – the sports-clubs, the malls, the cafés, their wine bars and restaurants and nightspots.
Worse, it was the sphere in which most were employed. Two groups particularly affected were professional or semi-professional musicians and those who worked in hospitality.
By the high summer of 2020, the luckier amongst us were driving vans or stacking shelves even as the teaching unions (in 2020 the average age of a British teacher, incidentally, was 39) hollered for ongoing closure of all our schools.
All this was compounded by two other mistakes.
Gravest was the failure to grasp – until after, fatefully, thousands and thousands of elderly people had been decanted into care homes – that many people who do catch Covid-19 are asymptomatic.
You can be wandering about without any hint of a cough, temperature or sniffle, blithely infecting many you breathe upon – and we all know what happened in our eventide homes.
Proportionately, the Covid mortality stats in that setting were even worse in Scotland, as first-term MSP Jeane Freeman tied herself in self-contradictory knots at Holyrood.
Prudently, Ms Freeman did not seek a second term: too many pensioners, on her watch, did not see 2021.
The second error was the initial belief that Covid was primarily spread by ‘fomite transmission’. That’s a posh way of saying you catch it largely by touching things – door handles, cash machines, railings and, of course, other people.
‘I hope nobody ever shakes hands again,’ wailed American expert Dr Anthony Fauci in April 2020. ‘Not only would it be good to prevent coronavirus disease – it probably would decrease instances of influenza dramatically in this country…’
Just one of many bonkers utterances in 2020. But, dutifully, we scrubbed chapped hands, winced as we sanitised or leapt online to order ‘Covid keys’ from Amazon.
You heard of people who made their partners strip off in the porch, or fanatically washed all of their groceries.
And it was in this delusion that playgrounds were locked up, the swings taped, with cops even ordering folk off park benches. Forfeiting our one great stroke of luck: the spring of 2020 was exceptionally fine and, as it proved, out in the open air was the safest place to be.
There are horrid things primarily caught from fomites – notably norovirus, that horrid vomiting-bug. If that breaks out aboard a Cunarder, everyone and the ship’s cat will be swiftly floored.
But Covid-19 is primarily an airborne respiratory disease and from the autumn of 2020, and as the cold weather set in, infections – despite what the Scottish Government, reimposing restrictions, laughably decreed a ‘16-day reset’ that would last till April 2022 –once more rose implacably.
Because, in winter and as Dr Chris Whitty grated at a silly journalist, that is what airborne respiratory infections do.
Our crisis would not endure. We were duly delivered first by our hugely successful vaccine rollout and then, as some had pointed out from the start, the ‘attenuation’ of SARS-CoV-2 to the much milder variants of Omicron and so on.
None of this is to make light of the bereaved, anyone still living with ‘long Covid’ or those unfortunate few who were felled by vaccines themselves.
And there was much else to infuriate. The number of politicians of all parties breaking their own rules. The gross failures in procurement of, for instance, personal protection equipment, the billions squandered in it, and certain matters now of keen interest to the police.
One does wonder how wise his party was to dispense with the services of Boris Johnson in the summer of 2022 – and if they would really be in such a mess, a week out from the election, if that ebullient figure was still there.
That said, if one thing above all now fuels the incandescent fury against the Conservative Party – and, indeed, against the SNP – it is the vague sense that, four years ago, we were all played for fools.
And we can never bring back, for instance, the ‘beautiful young man’ who, when an illicit student party was crashed by the police, in terror clambered out through a high window, stumbled on the roof and fell to his death.
Nor the spry old lady who enjoyed her daily walk to the park, where she could rest for some minutes, smile and chat with passers-by and hirple her way home.
Then she was forbidden to sit anywhere in that park. ‘Moved on’ by cops. She stopped going out. And isolated, sad, increasingly muddled, faded fast away.
Just two tales one could tell, and one image certainly endures.
Our late Queen, in full mourning, bemasked and tiny and alone as in April 2021 she buried her husband of 73 years.
And, indeed, after over 80 years of his service to this country. Like every other family in the land, only 30 mourners were permitted at his funeral. Her eyes said everything.
Most of us feel an inchoate, simmering range against our leaders – and all this, you could fairly argue, was a failure not just of the Government but of the Opposition too.
But few of us articulate it – and, as I said, there is a precedent.
On November, 25, 1918, a young woman lay desperately ill in a traditional Hebridean blackhouse in Shawbost, Lewis. Several weeks ago, I saw her death certificate.
Nothing could save Chrissie MacLean and she died that evening of ‘influenzial pneumonia’. She was only 32.
Her younger brother, my grandfather, had to walk to Carloway to register her death.
Eight years later, he would name his first child after her.
To her own death in 2013, she would speak wistfully of the aunt she had never known.
That infamous 1918 flu pandemic, especially dangerous for young people, took more lives than the whole Great War.
When it hit the Butt of Lewis district the following spring, there were 40 deaths in just five weeks, sometimes, four or five burials a day in the local cemetery.
The horror is still remembered, to some degree, in families like my own. But there is no cultural memory of it.
You glance at the Titanic disaster: the books and movies are legion. But there are no Spanish flu novels; no films. We shimmied into the Roaring Twenties and a great forgetting.
We have already done just this with Covid. There is no appetite for documentaries. It has spawned no literature. It is but the spectre at the feast; the unmentionable at the hustings.
And yet, in the general subconscious, and when we finally pick up that stub of pencil on a string, it may be about to vaporise a Government – and, in all probability, the way that for decades we have done politics in this sceptred isle.
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