Our year of living Covidly

War, a twindemic of flu and Covid, and the death of the longest reigning monarch of modern times. Truly, 2022 has been a year for tears.

Looking back on the year just past, two images stand out. The first is of a plume of smoke rising from the Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial in Kyiv following an unprovoked Russian missile attack on a TV tower there in February; the second shows mourners filing past Queen Elizabeth II’s catafalque during the British monarch’s Lying-in-State in Westminster Hall in September.

Both images represented significant historical ruptures and profound breaks with the past. But while one brought tears to my eyes, the other left me unmoved.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, followed by his missile strike on Babyn Yar, where 34,000 Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis in 1941, shattered the post-war consensus that Europe was immune from acts of state-sponsored terrorism and that, never again, would  the continent witness wanton barbarism. To the extent that prior to the invasion, military and diplomatic experts had assured us that Putin had no intention of invading Ukraine, like the Covid pandemic it was also a Black Swan event.

But even amidst the destruction of Babyn Yar, there were signs that Russian conscripts were beginning to question Putin’s motives – and it was their dawning realisation that they had been sent to war because of a lie that restored my faith in humanity and prompted my lachrymosity (this year, I also cried during Living, Oliver Hermanus and Kazuo Ishiguro’s film about a repressed civil servant who belatedly discovers a zest for life and for which Bill Nighy is tipped to win an Oscar, but that’s another story).

By contrast, the Queen’s death was entirely predictable – so much so that when BBC news readers donned black ties to announce her family were en route to Balmoral to comfort the ailing monarch, most Britons twigged she had already passed.

Elizabeth’s reign encompassed the Great Depression, the Second World War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the most lethal pandemic in 102 years. I could understand why people would want to pay their respects to this extraordinary woman, whose steadfast commitment to public service seemed to symbolise the best qualities of the British nation.

But at a time when the Union was reeling from Brexit, the pandemic and the legacy of 14 years of Tory austerity, the nostalgia left me cold. I could not understand why those who had queued overnight for the chance to view the Queen’s catafalque appeared unwilling or unable to summon similar sympathy for those who had perished in the pandemic, especially as the queue took them directly past the National Covid Memorial Wall on Albert Embankment, which is inscribed with 210,000 red hearts – one for every British victim of the coronavirus. As one mourner told me, the sight of all the hearts was “very moving” but she thought the Queen’s death was “a separate thing” from Covid and ought to remain so.

Three years ago, I was hopeful that Covid would be a wake-up call, uniting us against a common microbial foe and underlining our shared humanity. Although contagious diseases have the capacity to spread fear and stigma, I observed that the Latin root of contagion, contagio, means to “bring together”. And in the initial weeks and months of the pandemic, it seemed that the threat posed by SARS-CoV-2 would persuade us to set aside our political, religious and ethnic differences and forge a new unity of purpose.

“We are all in this together”, insisted the then Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, launching the job furlough scheme on 26 March 2020, three days after Boris Johnson’s belated decision to lockdown.

Now that Johnson has been dispatched from Downing Street and Sunak has taken up residency in No. 10, we can see that this was misleading. Britons were never all in this together. Sure, at one point Johnson was hospitalized with Covid, and the Queen, Prince Phillip and Prince Charles also suffered sporadic illness, but they were never at risk in the same that a London bus driver was or a member of an ethnic minority, who according to ONS figures, were two to five times as likely as whites to die of Covid-19.

Nor, when on the same day that Putin invaded Ukraine, Johnson removed the remaining Covid restrictions and declared “freedom” from the virus, was everyone able to return to work. That is because an estimated 2.2m Britons are living with long Covid – defined as someone who has struggled with symptoms for more than 28 days – and 1m people are too ill to work due to long-term illnesses. Some of these illnesses are a direct consequence of infection with Covid; others the result of treatment delays due to record waiting lists and a National Health Service on the point of collapse. To add to the misery, December also saw a resurgence of other respiratory diseases, resulting in a twindemic of flu and Covid. Unfortunately, our year of living Covidly looks set to continue into 2023.

The question is whether anything can be done to restore the NHS to health and revive Britain’s flagging economy. Certainly, it is difficult to see how Sunak can win a general election in 2024 with 7 million Britons awaiting operations and an economy 0.8 percent smaller than its pre-pandemic level - a marked contrast to the Eurozone which is up 2.2 percent compared to 2019.

Perhaps the biggest unknown of all is what is happening in China following the communist party’s decision in December to remove the remaining Covid restrictions. Some epidemiologists are predicting that the resumption of freedom of movement in the People’s Republic of China, which is home to ten percent of the world’s population, could be “thermonuclear bad”, spawning a tsunami of infections and dangerous new mutations in the virus.

One lesson of the pandemic is that travel bans are of little utility but we can certainly screen passengers arriving from China for new variants, thereby delaying the spread of mutant strains of the virus in our own populations. Given scepticism about data coming out of China – since December, China has shared fewer than 1,000 virus samples and claims there has been just one death compared with international estimates of up to 9,000 deaths a day – this is a simply common sense, hence the decision by Italy to immediately introduce mandatory testing for travellers from China.

Nonetheless, it took Sunak nearly three days to fall into line with other countries by insisting on similar tests. Let’s hope China will not be the cause of further tears in 2023. Until then, all that can be said with any certainty as we look to the year ahead is that the pandemic still a has a way to run.