What a ‘joke’ Covid-19 is now

It’s party season, finally.

I was at a neighbour’s Christmas dinner the other night – a splendid affair with sparkle everywhere, 13 guests, hired glasses, and actual caterers – and I looked around the room with benevolence, even though the man I was (briefly) chatting to had just announced he never, ever reads books.

He told this to a writer. He’s an anaesthesiologist, putting people to sleep for a living, quite possibly with his conversation.

Anyway. There were at least five doctors at the table, so I reckon they invited me and Himself as light entertainment, an amuse bouche in human form.

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During dessert, the neighbour declared her happiness at having us all gathered together, at last, for she’d been planning a Christmas party for three years: 2020 wasn’t an option, and 2021’s bash was cancelled when Covid cases skyrocketed again, causing another lockdown.

How we laughed. Remember those days? Wasn’t it madness?

The socially distanced drinks in the front garden, the chats through the window, the waving across the street.

“I can’t believe how compliant we all were!” said one guest – not a doctor – and the doctors gently changed the subject.

But her comment stayed with me.

Yes, we were compliant, sometimes to things that made little sense – the cigarette ban, the closure of beaches – but hindsight is 20:20, and how quickly we forget what was at stake and what was happening in hospitals, in care homes, on the streets.

Perhaps forgetting is how we heal ourselves from trauma.

But did I dream the digging of mass graves in New York? No.

Did I dream the queues of ambulances? The overflow wards and the hospital ships? The exhausted medical staff?

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The people left to drown in their own flooded lungs because there was no emergency room capacity?

Even back then, we discussed how it was a lose-lose situation: if restrictions worked, they’d be seen retrospectively as excessive; as an overreaction.

And yet nearly seven million died despite the lockdowns, masking, sanitising, isolation, and distancing, and that’s without counting the “excess deaths”.

Many millions more who would have died without our collective efforts. Yes, we were compliant. Thank God we were.