![]() The new antiviral drugs that will revolutionise the treatment of Covid-19 and save lives attracted a burst of positive headlines then faded from the news. We are eyeing up Europe, desperately wondering whether we are ahead of their curve or behind it. ![]() You can see it in the panic that now, even with 80 per cent of adults double-vaxxed and a booster programme under way, there might be another one: in the fact that trends for the search term “ lockdown Christmas” have gone up by 300 per cent in the past week, and the attempt to make the Prime Minister rule out cancelling Christmas for a second year in a row. We won’t know the full picture for decades.īut I think deep down, most of us sense how traumatic the lockdowns have been. Some people will bounce back, others will be left with lifelong mental health conditions. It’s a mix of short-term shock and long-term emotional deterioration, combined with anxiety, loneliness and unspeakable amounts of grief. The psychological impact is much, much harder to measure. ![]() Or else we look at the economic indicators – jobs lost, businesses folded, the hit to GDP. We look at the death toll – 166,730, at the time of writing. Whenever we look back at the pandemic so far, the story is told in terms of data points: cases, hospitalisations, fatalities, vaccines delivered, comparisons to other countries. Science and Technical Research and DevelopmentĪnd of course we were – although not as many as we wanted to.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.But it was the November circuit breaker that broke me. The third, which consumed the first quarter of this year as the vaccine rollout got under way, felt the longest. ![]() The first time around – when the world as we knew it shut down overnight to be replaced by empty roads and police patrolling parks – was the most dramatic and destabilising. The desperation for any kind of break from my artificially lit sitting-room-turned-office is reflected in the photos I took: of cold, wet walks in the dying sunlight, of the fox that lives on our street looking suspicious, of the rainy view from my window out over empty railway tracks.Įveryone has their lockdown stories. The pubs and restaurants closed and the stay-at-home orders returned just as the clocks went back, depriving people of that precious hour of after-work daylight. Maybe it was my chronic anxiety or maybe the signs – transmission rates, NHS pressures, the dysfunctional rhetoric coming out of Downing Street – were obvious, but it seemed inevitable to me that Christmas would not, in fact, be saved. We were halfway through the four-week “circuit breaker” lockdown that Boris Johnson had imposed to “save Christmas”. I remember because of my iPhone’s insistence on showing me my “memories”, taking me back to those damp, dark days in November 2020 when all the joy and light in the world was ebbing away. This time last year, I was losing my mind.
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