It is 1.35pm and I’m having to explain coronavirus transmission to a nurse. I am due an appointment at 2.30, and I’ve been phoned because I say I’m clinically vulnerable. I ask whether the nurse has an N95 mask (as they’re
proved to be most effective). She does not. I ask whether she and the team are taking weekly lateral flow tests, like her colleague said. She is not, and is unsure why that was promised.
“We don’t need to do that any more,” she says breezily. What she means is: she has no official duty to do so any more.
Clinically vulnerable (CV) patients still “need” the Covid-19 protections. They just don’t get them.
We don’t really talk about this. We don’t really talk about coronavirus at all. More than three years on from the start of the pandemic, there’s understandably a desire to “move on”, to bury painful memories of lockdowns and watching loved ones dying on iPads. This has only been encouraged by the government, which has honed the message “Covid is over”, as if saying this somehow makes it so.
Since February last year, when Boris Johnson
removed all protections, such as the legal obligation for people with coronavirus to isolate and most free testing, there’s been no official strategy or guidance on reducing transmission of the virus. The result is a kind of mass denial – an agreed forgetting. The subject crops up from time to time. A breaking news banner announces a new variant. A friend texts that she’s stuck in bed “with the worst summer cough”. Then we carry on – until we are forced to remember once again.
Watching coronavirus make a return to the headlines in recent days has subsequently felt like a weird deja vu, like the return of your least favourite guest star in a long-running television show. First, the vaccine rollout in England was hastily brought forward in light of concerns over the new variant BA.2.86, which recently caused
an outbreak in a care home in Norfolk. Then it was announced that testing and monitoring would be
scaled up again after scientists warned the country was nearly “
flying blind”.
That sound you can hear is a stable door closing and the horse bolting. Though cases and hospitalisations are thankfully significantly lower than at the height of the pandemic, the daily number of positive coronavirus tests in England has been
increasing since the end of June – a trend that is likely to grow in the coming weeks, as we socialise more indoors and children mix at school. It’s hopeful that many cases of Covid-19 are now mild, but that isn’t true for everyone: at last count, 1.5 million people were experiencing
long Covid symptoms that adversely affected their daily activities, and the virus still poses a significant risk of death to many people with pre-existing health conditions.
Not that you’d know it. When was the last time you heard a minister even say the word “coronavirus”? As Rishi Sunak’s government lurches from crisis to crisis, Covid is labelled as “job done” because it is simply more convenient that way. Britain’s “Covid policy” in 2023 is effectively King Canute’s courtiers watching another wave coming and insisting sheer will alone can stop the tide.
