23rd March 2022 – That’s all folks!
It is two years since the first lockdown, and just over two years, since I started this blog, and I think that it has run its course. I started with daily posts, for about 6 months recording the development of the pandemic, the initial novelty of lockdowns, working from home, movement restrictions, toilet roll shortages, queues, Zoom gatherings, and, to be honest, a degree of anxiety. The frequency of posts reduced in proportion to fewer “new developments”, although for months changes were still taking place fairly often; returning to work with restrictions, limited opening of retail outlets, and then pubs, masks, returns to lockdown, and a disrupted Christmas 2020. And then the 2021 optimism of vaccines, and the new greeting to strangers and acquaintances; “Have you had yours yet?”
A comparison of March 2022 with March 2020, or even March 2021, demonstrates that the “New Normality” is in reality pretty much normal. After a flurry of cases affecting friends and relatives a month ago, including a cancelled baptism at my church because of cases within the family, at the moment I know of no-one who is positive, although with 44,000 current cases, there are still more than ten times as many Covid cases as pre-pandemic influenza cases, although the majority of these are considerably more mild that a dose of flu.
Despite day-to-day life feeling relatively normal, there has been a culture change. We continue to keep masks in our pockets, just in case. Some shops and other venues still request that customers wear masks, and mask wearing is required in most health-related premises. In our shared-desk-and-pool-car practices at work we still sanitise surfaces before and after use, although I recently read an article suggesting that this should stop in in the interests of encouraging natural immunity to the host of diseases and infections that has always been present in our environment. Interestingly the most recent person who I know with covid is my sister, who has spent two years carefully avoiding exposure to the virus, perhaps avoiding a degree of immunity in the process. We all still get asked from time to time if we have Covid symptoms before we visit or are visited. We lateral-flow-test before visiting susceptible people or attending gatherings. Being crushed together in an enclosed space still makes us feel vulnerable.
World events have driven Coronavirus from the news, but in any case, Covid statistics during news bulletins were already moving further from the headlines and closer to the weather forecast at the end of the bulletin. Regular testing will decline as test kits cease to be free next month, and so the number of cases will no longer be confidently known.
And so I propose that this will be my last post. The blog started as a personal diary, before being shared, a record of “Changes to our lives as lockdown started, and, hopefully, ends”. I have recorded the changes that have affected me, and have been very fortunate that they have been interesting, but not catastrophic. Over 160,000 people have died within 28 days of a positive Coronavirus test, and, according to the Office of National Statistics, about 500,000 suffer from Long Covid more than 12 months after becoming infected. I consider myself to have been fortunate in being able to record Life Under Covid, but not Life With Covid.
I sincerely hope that I will have nothing more of interest to record in my Covid Blog at a future date. But one thing that we have learned, and continue to learn, is that we have absolutely no idea of what is around the corner.