It leads me to recollect that hallucinatory period that began when Mr Johnson appeared on our TV screens to say 'You must all stay at home', of which the children now at Church Club at the Infants School (which I will miss on Wednesday) will remember nothing. We treat covid remarkably casually now. My mum had it and made it through; so did Ms Kittywitch, who has several organs that aren't the ones she was born with and next to no immune system at all. It's fatally easy to forget how dreadful it seemed early in 2020, to forget that its fatality rate was 1% or so in the first wave, meaning that in this country not far short of 3/4 of a million people would have had to die before that resonant state, 'herd immunity', was achieved; to forget how we expected that sub-Saharan Africa was going to be devastated by the disease, when in fact it turned out to be relatively lenient with that part of the world. It sounds outrageous given the scale of death and suffering, but we got off reasonably lightly compared to how it might have been.
Back at (nearly) the beginning, I asked asked whether it was all worth it, the restrictions we placed on ourselves and the consequent economic and social damage, and I concluded that we would never reach a clear answer. The current covid enquiry isn't looking at all into the question of whether the Swedish solution or the Chinese or whatever would have been better than what we did in the UK, or rather the variants of what we did, as our constituent regional governments bickered and manoeuvred for advantage. I wondered whether the current advice on 'avoiding meeting people' for 5 days rather than complete isolation for 10 as it was in 2022 more reflects medical reality in terms of better epidemiology and dissemination of vaccines, or a different assessment of the balance between medical safety and socioeconomic harm. Now and again a news report appears in the lower reaches of the BBC homepage discussing some new finding about 'long-covid' or the like, but their obscurity reflects how we have moved on and don't want to think about it anymore. It's foolish, but I suppose, at the time, it's what I wanted as much as anyone.
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