Covid-19 the fallout

Its hard to imagine 2 years ago we were living under a situation akin to nuclear war.

In February 2020 I was planning a holiday to Greece and Croatia. I paid my deposit and I was looking forward to it incredibly. I then left a job I hated, but no worries. I would get another one. However the next 4 weeks were the most scary of my life. 2020 changed me in ways I cannot imagine.

Remember in February 2020 there was absolutely no testing. My parents arrived back from a cruise for their 30th wedding aniversary where other ships in the company had had passengers with COVID, they arrived back into the UK during those crucial weeks, no tests, nothing. I then took them on a theatre trip when if it had been 6 weeks later, they’d have been in quarantine. Then in March 9th I got a job to start on the Monday with the Tate Modern. I had an interview with another company, face to face. They hiring managers name was Kevin. The recruitment agent who arranged the interview met me at the location, it was the first time we’d met, so I shook both of their hands. Those 2 people would be the last 2 people I would touch for 3 ½ months. That Friday my parents did something unusual, they went to a birthday party and danced the night away. I was so happy for them. It seems incredibly stupid now, because a load of black over 55’s and co-morbidities were there. Almost 100% of the party were in the shielding category a few weeks later. Then that Monday, my prime minister, Boris Johnson, told us not to go out and not to go to pubs, it was his first national address. Then the week after that he told us not to leave our homes at all. This began a period known as “Lockdown 1.”

I found a job during lockdown one. I was so relieved and a little desperate. It was truly dire out there because the jobs just dried up in a way you’ve never seen before. It’s sureeal, the job at the tate was postponed until after the lockdown, by which time was about August and I’d already secured a job. My job at Porstmouth Diocese was meant to be a temporary one. It was, just a bit longer than I planned.

I, like the rest of the nation would tune in daily at 5pm for the Downing street briefing. I would bewail the government whilst putting forward 0 excuses. I would sideye the neighbours regarding the rules. But something we don’t talk about when experiencing collective trauma, is the terror.

The terror we all felt. No job security, millions on furlough. Millions more working from home having a wonderful time almost seeing their families for what felt like the first time. I know, as a person who commuted to London everyday and spent £5,000 on the train every year that I really felt that Lockdown 1 was an incredible wonderful time for me. Because you could only leave the house to exercise, I exercised. I completed couch to 5k and so did about a million other people (not an exaggeration they reckon it was circa 960,000 people.) I baked cakes. I had video chats with my parents and had some beautiful moments, but we forget the terror. It was a deep anxiety people were dying. I remember when it started to hit home. When they started showing us footage of Italy.

I’ve always thought that Europe has had comparable health services to the NHS, so when I saw towns being blocked off, quarantines happening and lockdowns happening I was certain it would happen here. After all, barring the Irish, everyone seems to have some Italian in them, so that’s a lot of flights daily, and the disease was airborne. We forget that the weeks before we went into lockdown, all major European countries all went into lockdown, it was those critical 3 weeks that cost thousands of lives.

We heard tales that Downing Street had actually got viral pandemic plans in place from 2017 and yet they were never implemented and the infrastructure never built. This meant that in the UK at least, we were almost literally caught with our trousers down. No plans, nothing. We had to build our testing capacity essentially from March 2020 to present. Now we have an impressive over capacity of testing and everyone is accustomed to having to test to go on holiday etc… but back then nothing…

We had to build the “nightingale hospitals” I believe there were meant to be 7-10 of these to deal with lack of capacity in hospitals. They were in things like the EXCEL centre in London and football stadiums. I thank God that there weren’t necessary. Because the honest truth is we didn’t have the doctors to look after the people.

Then there were horrendous scenes of NHS doctors doing 12 hour shifts back to back in this awful space suit of protective clothing, it would have been hot, and uncomfortable and distressing for the patients.

Then there were the funerals. Everyone had a funeral in 2020. The excess deaths as a result of the pandemic were truly awful. I lost my great aunt to Covid on mother’s day. This was during Lockdown one. IDIOT people decided to break lockdown (risking fines) and go and visit the bereaved, creating a super spreader event. My friend lost his grandad and his partner lost a family member. Both couldn’t go to the funeral because the numbers were cut down and they were from big, catholic families. The trauma of not being able to say goodbye to people was heart-breaking. Conversely, people had babies and no one could visit. Milestones were missed or caught on Zoom. Weddings were cancelled or shrunk drastically. People missed out on life.

In the UK the prime minister caught Covid and ended up in hospital. Now I really intensely dislike the Conservatives (not hate) and especially Boris Johnson. But I found myself praying for him, he was a new father and husband after all. I didn’t want him to die.

We also had the viral scenes of Donald Trump’s “inject bleach to cure Covid” (Disclaimer, I heartily recommend you do not ever ingest or inject bleach into your system. It will kill you.)

All the while we were still letting people in, quarantine free, we saw other countries such as New Zealand doing better with a hard-line strategy. We saw the sky being “lockdown blue.” And traffic evaporating. We also became anti-social. Rather than seeing someone in the street and smiling, you would cross the street to stay 2 meters from them.

We’d clap for the NHS heroes and tell people to “spread kindness not the virus” People volunteered on masse to help out the needy. The Queen lifted the nation’s spirits by telling us we’d get out of this. I remember feeling very patriotic and very moved by her words. You can hate the Royals all you like, but when a woman in her 90’s tells you don’t be afraid, bad times come and they go too. You sit up and listen. She’s been there, she’s done that. We had people doing artwork to lift spirits, memes and GIFs. It was a strange and beautiful time. I remember telling my dad about Christmas 2020, that we should treat it as a novelty because by God’s grace, it was a once in a lifetime thing. However that was my dad’s last Christmas.

Then there was the rules. Rules which we have given politicians one hell of a beating for now. We forget that it was once illegal to sit on a park bench with someone not of your household. To exercise more than once a day, or to say hi to someone you knew when on the way to buy food.  We forget that people wore masks to buy milk and we queued in mid winter, risking our deaths from every other winter virus and hypothermia because there could only be a set amount of people in a shop at 1 time.

I remember following the rules to the letter. I remember the distance and the crippling loneliness. I remember the constant praying that me and my family would be “passed over” from this horrendous disease. I remember them talking about the mental health pandemic, the rise in domestic abuse and the feeling that we were going through something that a lot of people weren’t going to walk away from whole. We definitely left some people behind. The mentally ill, the people on the margins and the people who weren’t protected by furlough. I also remember the campaign “everybody in” where we magically worked to get all the homeless people off the streets, they couldn’t beg, there was no one to beg from. Everyone was in their homes. So councils were told to house these people in hotels because the hotels couldn’t host anyone not on urgent and essential business.

I remember during a brief hiatus everyone rushed to France for some nice weather. Then we started closing the boarder with France (as this is post Brexit) and actual chaos ensued. It was almost comical.

The anxiety for friends and family was real. My aunts all work in the NHS, one got Covid. She recovered, albeit after having “Long covid” being a black woman in a high risk category, I would check in with her. She’s my favourite aunt and she is a mother and grandmother, too many people love her for Covid to take her.

In short. There is so much we forget about that time. We need to give each other the grace and space to grieve the years we lost. We need to process the horrors of what everyone was exposed to and also hold fast to the good and keep it. No one has a timeline for healing. Some of us will be healing for the rest of our lives. Some of us got 18 months to be away from bosses we hated. One thing that struck me during the pandemic was the phrase. “we’re not all in the same boat, we’re in the same storm, some of us are floating on pieces of wood, others are in yachts” So please, be courageous and ask someone if they are okay. We’ve all just been through a pandemic after all.

Grace and Courage

Annetta Mother Smith