Opening Up

'Not before 18^th July 2115’ is the O/C of the Air Cadets’ estimate of when the Corps will issue guidance to local squadrons responding to the Government’s announcements on Monday releasing coronavirus restrictions, ‘and even then it will amount to “local commanders are finally responsible for any decisions”’. I expect the Church of England to come out with something earlier than that, and imagine Bishop Sarah Mullaly of London who is the lead of the Covid Recovery Group will have something to do with it; but to judge by previous experience the bottom line with us will also be ‘it’s down to you’. We will of course have to interpret and mould whatever guidance we get around our local circumstances, but a steer, a rationale, would be helpful, and I don’t know whether we will get that, because it will require making some sort of implied public judgement about the wisdom of the national approach and the Church doesn’t seem to want to wade into those waters.

Not that the Government is telling us what it really thinks, how many deaths or cases of post-covid syndromes it regards as ‘worth it’ in that impossible but inescapable calculation of risk and benefit. Driven by a historical perspective – covid-19 isn’t the Black Death, it isn’t even SARS, MERS or Ebola – I’ve always looked on the pandemic with what I like to think of as a ‘robust’ attitude though I concede others might have different words for it. We have got off, so far, really relatively lightly from this. We have vaccines which have been developed miraculously quickly and which batter infection down significantly at every degree of severity. While we can argue which of the measures the Government is casting aside we might prefer to retain (as I write I’ve only just heard that lateral flow tests will no longer be freely available from the end of the month, which is not exactly helpful), it is hard to see, in broad terms, how things are going to be much better than they are now. And this is what, I suspect, we may not want to face. Looking at my own reactions, I see a conflict between what I know rationally and what I feel emotionally.

Rationally, once we (we, being humanity in general) let covid escape and circulate, that was it: eradication became impossible. The misjudgements made by virtually every western government made it inevitable that it would eventually become an endemic disease. SARS, MERS and Ebola are all far, far more deadly, but they’re also easier to control: in the case of MERS (case fatality rate 35%) you basically have to steer clear of camels and you should be OK, and even the terrifying Ebola can be stamped on pretty effectively with determined hygiene measures. In contrast, a disease that can only be controlled by stopping ordinary human contact, but at least a third of whose victims won’t even know they’re infected, can’t be contained indefinitely, unless you test your whole population, constantly, forever. Eventually, even the countries which have been far more effective than us at preventing infection, New Zealand, South Korea and the like, will face the question of what to do in the long term when vaccines don’t provide anything like full protection. We (we being the British) can’t get to where they are, and the likelihood is that they will end up closer to where we are. So, rationally speaking, this is probably as good as it gets.

But even I don’t want that. What I want is a world in which I don’t think about covid any more, about the possibility of being infected or infecting others. This is my emotional, as opposed to my rational, state. I think it’s the desire I have been secretly harbouring behind the longing to ‘get back to normal’: ‘normal’ doesn’t really mean the absence of restrictions, it means the absence of anxiety. And while I expect that will probably come, it will only come after several years, perhaps, of living with it, of our expectations being reordered around this new reality. We will have to grow towards normality, not legislate for it: the relaxation of rules doesn’t mean the relaxation of the heart. Although a government can help it or hinder it, it can’t make it happen.