By a Road Divided

On the edge of the parish is a road - an unremarkable enough thoroughfare in itself. One side of the road is Tier 2, where I live. Here there are bunnies frolicking in the fields, children make daisy chains, policemen cycle the streets whistling, and the clergy sit at tea and cake. The other side, however, is Tier 4, where the fields are on fire, triffids attack the children, post-apocalyptic biker gangs roam the streets, and processions of flagellants ring the churches. Actually Tier 4 starts a field to one side of the road, but you get the point.

The Tiers make no difference to public worship, which continues in all. I would have accepted churches being closed under the highest restrictions, and some people have told me that their remaining open is crazy, even though I still maintain a distanced and ventilated said communion service is about the safest thing you can do indoors. That doesn't mean everything you might do in a church is equally safe. This week we hosted a concert which, Rick the verger and his sidekick Rob tell me, had what we might best describe as 'an atmosphere of incaution' and aspects didn't quite happen as agreed. Meanwhile, the only church-centred infection event I've heard about in months involved someone in Swanvale Halt parish who is Director of Music at a well-known London church, and who caught COVID along with ten members of the choir there at a rehearsal about a month ago. Singing, a relatively confined space, people being drawn from a wide distance (in my parishioner's case, some thirty miles away) - all these make for a risky setting, a risk increased by the heightened infectability of the new-variant virus. He's all right, thankfully.

My network of acquaintance spans a wide spectrum of opinion about the epidemic, including left-wing souls who believe the Government is exaggerating the figures so their friends can make money out of dubious PPE contracts, hyper-cautious worriers and those who chafe under restrictions. My own sceptical ponderings have been vanquished one after another. Back in May, I think, an undigested study was produced by a group of epidemiologists and statisticians at Oxford suggesting that up to 60% of the population had already had COVID; the pandemic has produced a lot of research which isn't peer-reviewed and which the media leap on for the sake of a story. This one I rather wanted to believe as it would have meant we were rather further through the danger than we thought at the time, but of course it wasn't true: it was a group of graduate students footling with calculators. I kept wondering whether the Swedish model of response made the sense the Swedes claimed it did, which again would have been very convenient. I began to waver when I heard Sweden's chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell being interviewed by Evan Davies (or someone) and when asked why Swedes weren't being advised to wear face masks answering 'We don't wear masks in Sweden. In Sweden we stay home when we're sick' - an argument even I could see the flaw with, and I'm not paid a lot of money by the Swedish government. Now it's clear that the Swedish approach has been disastrous.

No, there is no conspiracy, no secret plot, and no way out other than what we're doing. Whatever mistakes might have been made in western European countries early on in the pandemic's progress (and we could talk about those a long while), they allowed the virus to be seeded too widely to be extirpated in the same way countries such as Australia and New Zealand have managed, or kept suppressed as Taiwan and South Korea have. As I've said before, whether you think it's 'worth it' is basically a value judgement, no less now than it was in April; but this is it, until the pharmaceutical mills get grinding and rescue us all.