Week Zero

It is already March when I finally listen to This Podcast Will Kill You’s coronavirus episode, first published at the beginning of February. Information from it nestles in my brain but still Covid-19 as it later becomes known feels like it’s somewhere else, something far away, that will not affect me.

Then on the Friday the 13th, when I’m supposed to go down to Huddersfield to stay with friends and attend a conference the following Monday, I cancel. It feels like a overreaction but i read something on Facebook that says ‘Don’t act like you might get it, act like you have it already and don’t want to pass it on’ and it lies on the top of the pile of information that has been collecting over the past few weeks and I can’t forget it. Almost instantly the conference organisers email me back, postponing the event indefinitely. It’s as if we all just needed to hear someone take it seriously to validate our fears.

Meanwhile Boris Johnson announces his plan to let the virus ravage the islands and take out the weakest. I read articles on the responses to it in China, South Korea and Taiwan. Aggressive testing coupled with social distancing if not a full lockdown are posited as the most effective tools.

The British Government does neither. We watch Italy be consumed. We do nothing.

Our leaders are evasive. Not wanting to take on the responsibility of actually leading.

BoJo begins to make suggestions that everyone should stay at home. People, probably responding to their social media feeds and the news, begin to do that anyway. In the absence of definitive government instructions people either panic or ignore it. We see the pandemic approach like a slow punch. Businesses are saved at the last minute even though the uncertainty had already forced many to cease trading and protections for them and their employees comes too late. There is still nothing in place for self employed or gig workers.

We are still not blanket testing.

I’m walking home from one of the last city wanders I’ll take for a while and I pass a guy I know. We talk a little about what’s going on and I ask if the Barber Shop he works in will close. He shrugs, he says it’s all bullshit, then he adds ‘If I don’t have work, what am I going to do?’ He’s had a hard couple of years, his marriage broke down, he’s drinking too much but his job has given him structure, purpose, human contact…suddenly everyone for whom isolation may be fatal slides into view.

The government introduces tougher measures on people staying indoors, with fines and the special police powers, but they don’t announce how they are going to test more people, how they are going to protect the most vulnerable. Every dialogue has been about what we can do. Other than the business bailout the Government has been reactionary and erratic in it’s responses, making few clear announcements of their intentions. Of the things only they can do.

This is week zero.