Consulting Covid-19
An Open Letter to Baroness Morgan of Cotes and the UK Commission on Covid Commemoration.
Dear Nicky (if I may):
You recently launched a consultation exercise seeking people’s views on the commemoration of Covid-19. As a historian of medicine specialising in pandemics, this is a subject to which I have given much thought and I have several ideas I would like to share with you. But as your consultation document only allows me to do so in 500 characters or less, I hope you don’t mind if I write to you directly.
I would like to begin by applauding your efforts to commemorate the Covid pandemic – an event that, as the commission’s terms of reference point out, is “like nothing within living memory”. Although similar numbers of Britons perished in the 1918-1919 ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic, in 1918 Britain was embroiled in a world war and there was no realistic possibility of locking down the country to, as Boris Johnson put it in March 2020, “save lives”. Instead, the national priority was to keep soldiers and munitions flowing to the Western Front.
Covid-19 was different because for the first time in history we had the economic means and medical know-how to protect individuals who, either because of their age or pre-existing medical conditions, were vulnerable to the complications of Covid and risked severe illness and death if we had simply “carried on” with business as usual. Nor, in 1918, did Britain have a National Health Service to provide free medical care at the point of need. That only became possible on 5 July 1948, when the NHS Act came into force. But it wasn’t until the polio outbreaks of the 1940s and 1950s spurred the development of mechanical ventilators employing positive air pressure that iron lungs were phased out and the concept of the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) was born.
I see that in recognition of the heroism and sacrifices shown by ICU doctors and other frontline NHS workers, 5 July is one of the dates you have suggested for Britain’s Covid Remembrance Day. Other suggestions include the anniversary of the UK’s first confirmed Covid case (30 January) and the anniversary of World Health Organisation’s declaration of a pandemic (11 March). But I suspect that the date that will resonate most with the public is the anniversary of the first UK lockdown on 23 March. That is the date favoured by the bereavement charity, Marie Curie, and on which it held a well-received National Day of Reflection in 2021 bringing together more than 50 organisations from across the UK.
However, in my opinion the main reason for choosing 23 March is that the first national lockdown, and the lockdowns which followed, are what distinguish the coronavirus pandemic from other plagues and pandemics in history. For instance, the third British national lockdown lasted 194 days, more than three times the length of the quarantines imposed during the plague of Florence in 1630. China, home to a fifth of the world’s population, is currently in its third year of lockdown.
Never in history have so many people been locked down at the same time, or for so long.
The commission’s terms of reference state that we have a “solemn duty …to come together and mark this momentous and life-changing occurrence”, and that the commemoration of the Covid pandemic ought to be a “national endeavour, above party politics and distinct from any public inquiry”. I agree.
However, while during the initial phase of the pandemic Britons rallied around frontline health workers and “clapped for carers”, when it came to the measures needed to suppress the infection and prevent the NHS collapsing there was little evidence of national unity. Instead, the pandemic provoked divisions along broadly ideological lines, with left-leaning Guardian readers tending to favour masks and lockdowns and right-leaning Telegraph readers denouncing the restrictions as illiberal.
As you know, these divisions have been exposed by your consultation exercise. Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice – the group behind the unofficial National Covid Memorial Wall on Albert Embankment – has called for you to adopt their red heart as a symbol of remembrance out of respect for the 220,000 red hearts, one for every British victim of the pandemic, daubed on the wall. By contrast, Yellow Hearts to Remember argue that the red heart is closely associated with CBFFJ’s campaigns for an independent public inquiry and is too “political”. Instead, they have called for you to adopt their yellow heart symbol.
What makes the dispute peculiar is that the colour red has long been associated with the poppies worn on Remembrance Sunday, the ceremony held every November at the Cenotaph in Whitehall in remembrance of the casualties of the First World War and other wars. But while some pacifists refuse to wear the poppy, this is not because of its colour but out of concern not to be seen to be glorifying war.
However, while wars are endlessly commemorated in Western culture and draw on a familiar suite of symbols, images and rituals, there is no template for commemorating a pandemic. Pandemics have no equivalent of the Last Post or the pageantry of the Queen’s Lying in State. As the memory studies scholar Astrid Erll puts it, they haven’t been sufficiently “mediated” in our culture. And without pre-existing symbols and rituals to drawn upon, we struggle to incorporate them into our collective remembering-imagining systems.
Another problem is that while 220,000 is an awfully large number, the overall mortality rate from Covid, as a proportion of the UK population, is just 0.3 percent. In other words, for most Britons the pandemic was an inconvenience rather than an experience seared in memory. And for those who did not lose a close family member or friend to the virus, the impulse may to move on and forget. But if we wish to “learn lessons” from Covid, it is important that we embed the experience in public memory. The question is how to do so without provoking further political polarisation?
I have no easy answers to this question but given how divisive the hearts have become we could do worse than follow the example of the red AIDS awareness ribbon. Since AIDS activists adopted the ribbon in the 1990s as a symbol for people living with HIV and their carers, coloured ribbons have been used to raise awareness for several other diseases, including pink for breast cancer and purple for pancreatic cancer.
In the case of Covid-19, I propose we adopt a blue-coloured ribbon. Blue because the virus primarily attacks the air sacs in the lungs, causing people to choke and suffocate. But also because for many people blue will bring to mind those early, sun-filled days of the first lockdown when air travel was suspended and there were no contrails to mar our view of the sky. Yes, it was a fearful time, but it was also a moment to contemplate the beauty of the natural world and the possibility of planetary and spiritual renewal.
In my opinion, that is something is it would be worth all of us remembering.
The UK Commission on Covid Commemoration’s consultation exercise closes on 5 December. Click here for further information: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/covid-commemoration-consultation