Around this time (early March) China, where the whole thing had kicked off, seemed to have reached critical mass and was now holding steady at around 80,000 cases. It was still the largest number of cases and deaths in the world (though it would soon be surpassed) but given that case numbers were hardly increasing at all, the government now began to turn worldwide quarantine policy on its head, and began screening any travellers into the country, in case foreigners were bringing new cases into China. Quite a turnaround, really, in less than five months. Meanwhile we began preparing for a full lockdown, with all bars and restaurants told to close permanently from midnight on March 15. Allah wasn’t protecting his people either, as the Grand Ayatollah of Iran, Hashem Bathaie Golpayenagi, died from the virus. Ireland’s cases topped 200.
People continued to ignore or resist health advice, putting personal and religious freedoms ahead of their safety and that of others. In Malaysia, a religious festival where thousands gathered saw a spike of over 125 cases, bringing the country’s total to over 500. Celebrities began to be hit: Tom Hanks, Idris Elba and Rita Wilson were all confirmed as positive for Coronavirus. While Spain, Italy and Ireland shut down - a mandated lockdown; no suggestions or advice, just do it - the UK took a more nuanced, some might say cowardly approach that might absolve them of the blame which would later be attached to countries who had forced their citizens to stay indoors and out of work for their own safety.
Johnson told his people they “should” stay at home, wash their hands, work from home if possible, and avoid pubs, restaurants and night clubs, while still allowing those facilities to remain open. Schools were not closed, and nobody was forced to stay at home, leading to a great percentage of the British public either shrugging and going in to work anyway, or being told by their bosses there was no support for them working from home and they had better haul their backsides into work or be fired. Once again, leadership was weak and most people were thinking in terms of their pocket and not their health, especially employers, who seemed to look upon the whole “stay-at-home” thing as unnecessary and over the top.
Further confusing things, the British government closed all theatres and cinemas, and advised anyone who had a cough or a high temperature to stay at home - isolation, another word we would become horribly intimate with - away from everyone. If this happened in a setting of more than two people, then everyone had to isolate. The virus had now been generally confirmed to be attacking two types of people: the old and those with what were termed “underlying medical conditions”, which as you can imagine scared the s
hit out of me, with Karen having MS. Initial reports of the deaths in Ireland confirmed this; almost every time we read of one it was someone in their eighties or nineties, and/or who had an existing condition. That’s how it was, until suddenly it wasn’t.
New issues began to come to the fore, particularly for Britain, later for Ireland and the USA. The first was the scarcity of ICU beds. Intensive Care Units had traditionally only been needed for the very sick, or for those recovering from a major operation. It’s in the name: when you’re there you get intensive care - round-the-clock surveillance, meds as you need them, constant observation and the best the hospital can offer. Coma patients might be in ICU, car crash victims, those suffering from cancer. Generally speaking, they tended not to be used as much as “normal” wards, with most people admitted into hospital there for a short time or maybe a long stay, but nothing that would require that sort of care, at least not constantly. Covid changed all that.
Because it attacks the respiratory system, the lungs, those contracting it find it hard to breathe. Therefore they must be provided oxygen through what are known as ventilators, and this cannot stop while the person is sick. There’s no such thing as moving a critically-ill person with Covid to another ward and out of ICU. They would die, and in fact, sadly, so many people would die in ICU wards across the world that they would begin to resemble battlezones, as if these were soldiers fighting in some horrible war they could not win, and kept dying. But more of that later. Right now, I just want to use this as a way to illustrate - if it needs to be - how desperate hospitals were for ICU beds.
And ventilators.
Not a terrible amount of point having an ICU ward without ventilators, and supply of these was running out as demand rose exponentially and to a level never before expected, or provided for. This would soon become a crisis, as companies in other industries would be asked to turn their manufacturing efforts towards making more ventilators as the world cried out for oxygen. And then there was the other side of the ICU equation. What about the people who needed intensive care, but who did not have Covid? What about the heart attack patients, the cancer patients, those with other respiratory conditions? How would they be looked after if their beds, as it were, were occupied by people suffering from Covid?
Interestingly, Boris Johnson had just been handed a memo from Oxford Imperial College, bemoaning the response of his government to the pandemic so far, and warning that if things did not change, if proper action was not taken, up to half a million people could be expected to die from the disease.
Finally, months after allowing people to travel from country to country spreading the virus, a worldwide travel ban was put in place. Sport suffered another setback as the Euro 2020 Football Tournament, which involves, or can involve, most of Europe, was postponed, not cancelled, but would not take place until the following year. Even in lockdown, Ireland’s cases kept multiplying, giving us by the middle of March a total of nearly 400, with, thankfully, only two deaths at this point. Italy, leading the field, was heading for the 40,000 mark with cases and now had almost as many deaths from Covid as had perished in the 9/11 attacks on America. Speaking of the Land of the Free, they were climbing towards 10,000 cases with 150 deaths. Trump continued to ignore the emergency. He played a lot of golf.
On March 18 schools closed in Scotland and Wales, but not in England. People began to worry about losing their jobs as businesses, shops and offices closed, nobody able to say for sure when they would be able to open again, nobody certain of getting their job back if and when they did. The stock markets began to crash, as the world hurtled towards an economic depression, just to add fuel to the already-blazing fire. On March 19, though following the example of Scotland and Wales - albeit later - in closing schools, Johnson confidently declared that “London will never be locked down.” I think a lot of people in the UK now realised this man is an idiot, a dangerous one, and that they couldn’t trust a thing he said. Still, he was in power and there was no way around that, so they had to bite the bullet and do as they were told.
Around this point President Trump started talking about the benefits of Hydroxychloroquine, which seems to be some sort of drug used to treat malaria. He also considered the possibility of people drinking bleach to “clean out the virus”. However we won’t be going into his possibly insane response to the pandemic here, as we will be going country-by-country in later chapters and you can bet that America will take up a few! For now, it seemed Italy had risen to the top of the dungheap and been awarded the first prize gold medal nobody wanted: deaths in Italy now outstripped even those of China, though for now it had only half the amount of cases, around 40,000. Despite being ostensibly on lockdown since early in the month, it was revealed that a visiting doctor from China saw people walking around, going into shops, eating in restaurants in Milan, and could not believe it. One reason for the high volume of cases in Italy was advanced as their population being so old, with the second-oldest population in the world. As the majority of people succumbing to the virus were over 70, that certainly made sense. The other point might have been to have actually
observed the fucking lockdown, guys!
Speaking of which, Johnson finally grasped the nettle and ordered businesses to close. No suggestions, no advice, no requests, it’s a Nike thing. Just do it. He still seemed to think that Britain could beat the virus in three months. I get the feeling (though at the time I wasn’t following British response to the pandemic, having enough to do to keep monitoring our own) that he thought this was his chance to be Churchillian, to treat the threat of the pandemic as a kind of twenty-first century blitz and rally the people behind him against the menace. The problem there is that the virus is not a sentient thing, not a country, not a state, not a dictator, not even an idea. It didn’t care what mentality the British had, because it was and is incapable of caring. It has no free will, or will of any kind. It’s a bunch of cells that destroys other cells and replicates itself, and that’s all it does. It doesn’t stop to consider how good or bad you are, whether you’ve followed the advice or willfully ignored it. It doesn’t care. It never did. It never could. So Churchillian speeches and a “stiff upper lip” meant nothing to it.
At this point, it would be unfair and inaccurate to say Italy stood alone, but it was the top hot-spot for the virus, and its hospital systems were collapsing in on themselves. News reports from that country made it look as if there had been some natural disaster or a thousand bombs had gone off all over the city. It looked like a warzone. Terrified of the escalating crisis, the government tightened up restrictions, confining all people to their houses regardless. The most scary thing about this scene, as we watched it on Tv and listened, as it were, to the silence, saw the ghostly, empty streets haunted by only the spectre of the Coronavirus and with no living human to be seen, was that it was something which would, inevitably, and quite soon, be heading in our own direction. As Kent Brockman once said about “giant alien ants”, one thing was sure: there was no stopping it. The virus would soon be here.