Rumination: COVID-19

It should come as a surprise to no one that we are now officially on hiatus, as my ninth season of walking is suspended until further notice as measures to restrict the spread of the Corona Virus are being put into place to attempt to reduce the risk of increasing the COVID-19 infection rate, a move that I hoped wouldn't be coming, but the speed of the evolution of events over the last week has ultimately rendered inevitable. It's a huge shame on the personal level, especially as I had just arrived at the start of a 10 day break from work, which I was due to spend Down Country, helping Mum with a heavy dose of Spring cleaning of stuff that got somehow lost in the whirl of events of last year, during which we were scheduled to travel to London to see the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery and now it looks like doing anything like that will not be possible for a while. We had both acknowledged that a jaunt down to London looked unwise a week ago, but absolute confirmation came with the announcement of the gallery's closure on the 18th, along with advice against all non-essential travel being issued on the 16th, meaning that I won't be travelling anywhere as far away as Leicester for the foreseeable future, and advice for the over 70s to self-isolate being given on the 15th means that Mum is going to be home alone for a while too. As public transport was still running to a regular timetable this weekend, my hope was still to get out on one last walk so that I wouldn't feel like all of Spring was to be lost, slipping out un-noticed on an under-used train to an under-populated corner of the county, burning off a 5 hour circuit before returning to formal social distancing and self isolation back in Morley, but the preceding evening was filled with disturbed and stressed-out sleep, as if my sub-conscious was telling me that the time to stop had already arrived. Thus that is where we are, with me having been told to not think that I know better, staying in while the wider world starts to shit down around us, with the schools having closed down on Friday, the leisure and service sector having had their last night in business on Saturday, and the sporting calendar having shut down more than a week ago, with a restricted public transport schedule to start on Monday 23rd, the next act has to be lockdown, effectively closing down everything except essential services, and then we shall all be into completely unknown territory.

What's frustrating now is simply having no idea of where this is all leading, especially with the rapid escalation of events over the last couple of weeks, as the situation has been regarded at a remove for quite a while, and judging the Corona Virus on terms of raw numbers, it's proved very easy to be blase about it, especially when the best data that we've gotten so far suggests that 80% of COVID-19 infections haven't required hospital treatment and that even in the worst affected areas, the mortality rate has only been 6%. But such an approach is ultimately unhelpful, especially when as an ongoing student of history I should be aware of the precedents, having taken an interest in the centenary of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic a couple of years back, and seeing how terrible decision-making, secrecy and a failure in basic quarantining caused a global catastrophe that ultimately resulted the deaths of more people worldwide than the First World War, with the knowledge and application of hygiene being far less thorough than it is now. Still, an H1N1 viral infection causes an entirely different kind of response than than is seen with COVID-19, having a much shorter period between exposure to symptomatic onset than the 14 days of the latter, making direct comparisons unwise, making me glad that I'm not a public policy maker or an epidemiologist, as my opinion of the situation has shifted all over the place since the start of the month. Nonetheless, we hope that those who do have the power to make the decisions have been acting in the best interest of all, especially as only a week ago HM Government was still proposing keeping the country working as close to normally, in the hope of building up herd immunity in the population, despite that fact that to achieve such a thing, 60% of the population would need to be exposed to the Corona Virus, risking the potential death of 500,000 people in the process. Thus I hope the precautionary measures that have been put in place will do enough as I have to face self isolation as a week is taken away from work in the hospital, feeling the uncertainty of what's going to be on the table when I return at the end of the month, feeling paranoid that every odd symptomatic moment might be the harbinger of something awful, or merely a normal response to something in my environment. Whatever happens, we can only assume that the next few weeks are going to be rough, as they gradually reveal to extent of the pandemic's spread in the UK, and then the following months will show the real quality of this nation, as the infection rate either spikes and overwhelms the NHS or evens out and becomes socially manageable, with the ramifications being felt for months and probably years to come.

Next Up: National Lockdown has to be a certainty.