VI: Lockdown: The World Stops Turning
Never in the whole history of humankind has the entire world stopped at the same time, with people told not to go to work, factories and offices shut, citizens locking themselves in behind closed doors, venturing out only for essential shopping and exercise. Never before had we been encouraged, ordered in fact, to stay at home, stay safe. Never before had the roads been so clear, the streets been so quiet, the parks so deserted. Italy, unsurprisingly, given it was now not only the concentration point of the highest number of cases in Europe, but second globally, was the first to institute lockdown orders onMarch 8, and Ireland would follow soon, on March 12. Spain began lockdown from March 14 while France was in complete lockdown by March 17. Most other European countries would instigate this tactic of defence against the spread of the virus, but some countries remained stubbornly resistant to it.
In America, President Trump fought against the locking down of individual states. The USA is somewhat of a political oddity, in that policy can be made by state governors independent of, or even in opposition to that of the White House. It’s amazing to me. Here, the government says “we’re going on lockdown” and we all do. We have to. Laois or Carlow or Kerry or Sligo can’t say no we don’t agree, we’re staying open. They don’t have that kind of autonomy. Counties have in fact very little power, and none to resist or defy the government. They can butt heads with them a little, on issues on which they feel they need to, or their constituents expect them to, but it’s all decided within the framework of the Irish government. The UK is the same. In fact, I believe America is unique in being able to separate what they call state control from federal authority. In the USA, Texas can decide not to follow the rules, or California can give the President the finger, and this is what was happening.
With a Republican - and highly unpopular - President in the Oval Office, and America already deeply divided, that president minimising, all but ignoring or denying the pandemic, states began to make their own arrangements to protect their citizens, with resistance drawn along the line of blue/red defiance. In other words, when a Republican president who seemed to be - and was - acting not in the country’s interest and ignoring the science, putting his people at risk of disease and death to further his own political standing and agenda for re-election said no lockdown, the “blue” states - those run by Democrat governors - ignored him and instituted lockdowns anyway. As President, he could not overrule this disobedience legally, though he would try, or encourage others to try, through other means.
Britain, meanwhile, was sticking to - and now announcing - its policy of herd immunity. While Trump’s administration was also considering this but had come to no official position on it, since the President didn’t think the virus even worth talking about, Johnson’s government came right out and said it, terrifying many of the older and more vulnerable Britons, who knew they were about to be served up as cannon fodder, sacrifices to be offered to the gods of Covid in the hope the younger, healthier ones would be spared. It was almost a deal with the devil. For Johnson, that bill would quickly become due, in a very personal way.
My own personal experiences of lockdown were these: first, being a sort of hermit myself, with no friends or social life to speak of and my sister to look after, it made not that much difference to me. The main change was that I soon had to switch to doing the weekly shop at a very early hour. I typically get up at 11:25, and before anyone gasps or sneers, I usually hit the pillow about 4:00 AM. Karen, my sister, is looked after in the morning by carers, for those who don’t already know, and they arrive at midday, so there’s not a lot of point my being up before that; I’d risk waking her with any noise I might make, and the chances are that I’d probably just fall asleep again anyway. Remember, 4 AM to 11 AM (roughly) is seven hours, the same as if you went to bed at midnight and got up at 7. So it’s not like I’m sleeping longer, just a different cycle, which over the years I’ve got used to and find hard to break.
Anyway, to minimise traffic and avoid queues Tescos set up special hours for those who were disabled, old or caring for someone to do their shopping in relative safety. These hours were from initially 7 AM to 9, but then, with typical changeability, the opening hours went from 7 AM to 8, so you only had the hour. This early shopping was necessary, because at the height of the pandemic, before the lockdown, queues were huge for Tescos, stretching right through the shopping centre, and you could literally be waiting for hours to get in. On the “special” time slot, there was no queue and you just walked in. This however meant I had to get up early, as I say: originally 6:30 for a 7:00 arrival, then changed to an hour later, but still meant I had to be rising at 7:30, four hours earlier than I had been used to. But it was necessary.
Other than that one shopping expedition, I didn’t go outside the house. At all. If I was forced to leave I would take a taxi, as conditions on the local transport were still up in the air as bus drivers fought against having to enforce the likes of social distancing or mask wearing, believing - probably with cause - that it was not part of their job to be “policing” their passengers, and having in any case little or no authority to ban anyone from boarding the bus if they did not comply with the directives. Taxis were more expensive, but simpler in the long run. I began trying to make arrangements with the local taxi firms to have my cats’ monthly food and medication collected from the vet’s in Fairview (about a half hour away by bus, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes by taxi) and restricted my shopping to the one day, and the one place.
Everything had to be sprayed down each morning before the carers came in, and though I did not wear a mask around Karen - who cannot wear one herself - feeling that I was doing my best to protect both myself and her when I rarely went out - I made sure to wear one whenever I went past the door. Hands were washed multiple times a day, to the point where my skin began to flake and get very sore from the repeated application of sanitiser and water, and hand cream or moisturiser would help but it still hurt. Dry, cracked fingers and knuckles was the order of the day. One thing lockdown did help with was that there were no more unsolicited knocks at the door. Nobody rang our bell, smilingly asking if we wanted to switch electricity vendors, or change our broadband supplier, or help headless children in Africa or whatever. No junk mail (hardly any mail at all) and no unwanted callers.
Outside, it was as if the world had died. Quiet, but not a peaceful quiet. The quiet of dread, of anticipated horror. The kind of silence I imagined you got just before a big battle, or before that meeting where your company’s future might be discussed and decided. No sounds of traffic. No children playing. No ice cream van tinkling. No voices. No laughter. No music. It was as if the world was holding its breath, afraid to let it out. For future lockdowns we would be a bit more blase, but this time we all feared the worst. It was, after all, something entirely and frighteningly new to us. Kids, who initially no doubt thought the idea of schools closing a great one, found to their chagrin and annoyance that they were not allowed play outside; they had to remain indoors, and that was no fun! Might as well be in school! Parents, too, risked being driven mad by their bored children, many gamely trying to provide some sort of home-school education for them as the days turned to weeks and the weeks to months.
A famous video in Ireland (you can see it above) shows a deserted Grafton Street, usually one of the busiest shopping areas in Dublin, eerily quiet as a fox walks along the pavement. This showed how few people were abroad (obviously there was one: the one taking the video, but it shows no other human as the camera pans and follows after the seemingly-oblivious animal) that a creature which usually shuns human company could come out into the open, walk along one of the city’s premier shopping streets, and not encounter a living soul. That fox almost epitomised and symbolised the loneliness of Ireland, the retreat of mankind from its streets, the removal of the human presence from the world. It was almost as if the animals were about to take over, leaving us trembling and scared behind our doors and windows, looking out and wondering if the world would ever be ours again?
As lockdowns spread, the world began to slow, and then grind to a shuddering halt. With nobody in the factories, nothing was being manufactured. Even if it had been, there were no truck drivers or airline pilots or ship captains to take them to their destination, all transport having by now ceased. Supplies began to run low, and again for some reason toilet paper was a commodity everyone had to have. I remember going into Tescos and remarking that it was like a supermarket in Russia or something: no milk, no bread, no cheese, no eggs. Very little of anything, and what there was, really oddly, was NOT rationed. Tesco could easily have said “one or two per customer”, but they didn’t, perhaps not wishing to hurt their already fragile bottom line, and so ignorant and greedy people were able to snap up the bulk of everything. I remember seeing one woman pushing a trolley that was literally filled with nothing other than packets of rice. She must have had hundreds of them in there. She probably still has half of them today.
This belligerent bulk and panic buying is one reason I was glad I was able to take advantage of the special shopping hours. Anything that did come in had just been put out on the shelves, and so I was able to get most of what I needed, things that would surely have long been sold out had I to wait for “normal” shopping hours. More than once I was stopped on the way in, told this was only for the old and disabled. I then told the guard I was a carer and was let pass. He never asked for any proof, which led me to believe that some of the very young people I would see from time to time there at what should have been specially set aside shopping hours for the vulnerable looked very young to be carers! But no identification was asked for, so there was no way to know. The irony being of course that, assuming they were not carers at fifteen or sixteen, some of those people may have been infecting others without knowing, or indeed caring about it.
Essential items for a world threatened by a pandemic soon sold out. Surgical gloves could not be got for love nor money, masks were out of stock, sanitiser for the hands was like gold dust. People tried making their own versions of the latter. Anywhere there happened to be old stock of anything in demand, the price suddenly sky-rocketed: it was a seller’s market, and the pharmacies were not about to lose the opportunity to make a buck. Symptoms of the disease were also vague: a high fever, aches and pains, cough. Not much more was known, but suffice to say, and I’m sure you felt it too, every time you got a bad cough your heart sunk to your knees. I recall having a very bad, hacking cough just prior to this all blowing up, and wondering if it had anything to do with an infection, but it passed luckily.
In April the thing I feared happened. Karen got sick. Not with Covid, but her pain was so bad that hospital was unavoidable. At first they wouldn’t even let me go in the ambulance with her, but when I explained that she couldn’t speak or make herself understood without me, they made an exception. It was like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie, arriving at the hospital and seeing all the people in suits and masks, tents set up outside for treatment of Covid patients. The hospital, like all others in Ireland and like every other establishment in the country other than those on the “essentials” list (shops, vets, doctors’ surgeries etc) was on lockdown, and I was sent home once she was admitted. I spent four terrified days at home on my own, hoping against hope that she would be all right. In the end, luckily, she was, and she returned to our locked-down house little the worse for wear. That trip to the hospital was my first, and really only direct experience of the fear and chaos that had gripped Ireland, and of course the world in general.
The idea of being able to literally walk right across the road without waiting for traffic lights or check for traffic was invigorating in an odd way. I don’t think I’d ever seen roads so completely empty before. It wouldn’t be this way for our second lockdown, but for now everyone was staying off the road. Fear gripped the country, fear gripped the world, and fear can have a very powerful and paralysing effect.
Until, inevitably, it wears off.
And that's when the real trouble begins.