Covid-19 : Five Years On

 

We are coming up to five years now since it arrived: you will each have your own memories of how you were affected, what changes to your life you had to make. Because the changes were sudden and dramatic. Covid appeared in January 2020 from China; by February in Italy people were forbidden from going out of their houses; and by the end of March we in the UK were in lockdown. And a lot of people were in hospital, and a lot of people were dying - and one realised this was not going to go away soon, that something was happening that was affecting, and was going to affect, everything we did.

It may be hard to remember the sheer surprise and drama and fearfulness of those months. I remember writing, talking, about it in that early period:  about life from now on being divided into two time periods: BC and AC. BC was Before Covid – which we’d look back to with nostalgia for its freedoms, and our assumptions of how life could go on pretty much unchanged; a period of naivete and wishful thinking. And then there’d be AC – and AC didn’t mean ‘After Covid was over’,  because for that first year there didn’t seem any possibility of that, but AC meant the new reality of living with an uncontrollable disease that had turned our lives and our freedoms upside down.

Why recall this ancient history? Well, not only because new variants of Covid are around that are evading the vaccines and causing mayhem to people’s well-being; but also because things happened in 2020 that shouldn’t just be swept under the carpet now that Covid just raises a yawn. Because that first year was pre-jab and the speed with which vaccines were developed was an extraordinary and almost miraculous international endeavour – although we just accept that now as if it’s just what medical science does, find the drugs we need to keep us going. But we didn’t know at the time how long it would take to develop some protection – or indeed it was going to be a possibility.

In those first 9 months with the dynamics of lockdowns and ‘bubbles’ and 2 metres distance, there were two parallel strands of experience: there was the brutal reality of over-stretched hospitals, of care homes overwhelmed, of all the death and suffering, numbers kept on rising; and there was the disproportionate impact on ethnic minorities – I’ll never forget the picture spread in the Guardian after a couple of months of thumbnail photos of dozens and dozens and dozens of front line staff of NHS doctors and nurses who’d already died and they were almost all Asian and black faces; and that wasn’t just a reflection of how much the NHS is dependent on British and non-British ethnic minority staff but the particular historical and social circumstances that made some people more constitutionally vulnerable than others. This was a particular kind of British scandal that maybe the ongoing UK Covid Inquiry might illuminate – or maybe not.

But suffice it to say that there were all these dark and desperate social realities going on as people suffered, there was all the pain of separations in hospices and care homes, the heartbreaking inability to be with some one as they were dying; and then there was the claustrophobia for children not at school, for teenagers who couldn’t meet their friends, for community life no longer functioning. All this just descended on us.

And yet in parallel to that, and maybe you had to have a degree of middle-class privilege to appreciate it, there was something else that happened: there was a quiet that descended as roads became almost traffic free – apart from grocery delivery trucks that suddenly became a lifeline – the air in the street was fresher, at a time when breathlessness was a major issue, you could breathe in the air when you walked outside, you could hear the birds, who seemed to take over the urban soundscape;  you could look up at quiet plane-less skies as international air traffic just stopped, overnight; animals started appearing in deserted city streets; and meanwhile new bonds were being made closer to home – neighbours, community, human contact took on a much sharper focus and value in our lives. Screen life became a lifeline for many, opening up new ways of being together. You met new neighbours on those weekly evening appreciation gatherings for NHS staff. Something emerged that was healthy and life-affirming.

It was as if there was a glimpse of a whole new way of life that had become possible, with more humane values – patterns of work and business and leisure all changed, people realised that maybe they didn’t have to fly abroad on holiday or for work  and their lives wouldn’t collapse, they could even be enhanced. The great slowing down that was forced on us as a society opened up new possibilities, a glimpse of how we could live together without such manipulation of the environment, without so much abuse of resources, without so much anger on the streets. Acts of kindness to other rippled through society.

So on the one hand there was this awareness – or so it seemed – ‘things will never be the same again, we didn’t know how fortunate we were’, as if we’d be been living in a Golden Age. It felt like it might have done to those who’d lived in Edwardian England 1910, 1911, 1912, a world that those living through it never realised would soon be gone forever; along with that regret that we hadn’t sufficiently appreciated things.

But it was balanced with that growing awareness that maybe something was being opened up for us, maybe something was being offered to us, as if – and here I speak in a language that anthropomorphises the virus in a way that is intellectually suspect, but I will do it anyway to make the point - it was as if the virus had appeared from some deep place of a planetary consciousness that was forcing us destructive plunderers of earth and air and water into a realisation that we could all manage with much less, that we could all survive and thrive by focusing on the simple and sustaining good things of life: human connectivity, attention to nature, attention to living more lightly on the planet and in the world.

As if the virus was on the side of the ongoing survival of all interconnected life forms on the planet, not just homo sapiens.

We would never have chosen what happened to us, and it was no gift, but certain lessons became available to us through it. And those lessons seem worth trying to spell out now. Firstly, the work of being human means learning to pay attention, to find out what really matters about human flourishing, and pay attention to what matters here and now; secondly, we were being told to learn to be patient, not a quality that we find easy: be patient, and find out what it is that really counts, don’t just grab for something because it is there or because someone else has it – not everything we think we need, or we’re told we must have, do we really need.

So: pay attention to what matters; cultivate patience; and thirdly, keep a humble eye on your dependence on your body – remember that your body is vulnerable, it will wear out and you will die, but while you can still breathe, appreciate it, treasure it,  it is carrying your life forward moment by moment.  

 

 

 

I was wrong about BC and AC – for most of us, most of the time, it’s as if Covid was just a blip, an inconvenience, that we have put behind us. Life has gone back to so-called ‘normal’. Of course if you lost loved ones, or if you are still suffering from the complex aftereffects of long Covid, it’s not just a blip. But so little has really changed – work patterns, to some extent; and yes there’s been a knock-on effect for schoolchildren and students. But that glimpse of another world to live in – where has that gone?

It’s as if that year, before the vaccines, the year of living more frugally, more simply, more focused on what really mattered – that tantalising intimation of other possibilities than the derangements of late capitalism – the door to an alternative way of living and being has closed almost shut. But maybe we can peek back in again – my own uncomfortable debilitating brush with Covid these last few weeks has prompted me to look back in and wonder what might have been lost.   

I would never describe Covid as a gift, but collectively it was an opportunity. Can we still salvage something from it? After all, I think I am not alone in feeling something was missed. There was an extraordinary YouGov survey done in that first 6 months, in the UK, where people cited the air quality and the wildlife and the closer social bonds and other factors and 85% of those questioned said they wanted to retain at least some of the changes wrought by the pandemic. Fewer that 1 in 10 wanted to return to the status quo ante. So what are we doing with that knowledge, those wishes, and hopes?  I don’t believe they have been lost. We need to keep that door ajar. Glimpses of another way of living don’t come along that often.

[based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, January 4^th, 2025]