“Turning and turning
in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear
the falconer;
Things fall apart; the
centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed
upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide
is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of
innocence is drowned;
The best lack all
conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate
intensity.”
W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming (1919).
“About a month to a few weeks ago I was talking with colleagues about
how we were going to work around having to stay at home, a couple of weeks ago
I had to take my daughter home from university and this week I found out my
mother died alone from Coronavirus. All I ask is that people take this
seriously and follow the guidance….” (Anonymous).
Coronavirus
(also known as Covid-19) has turned the seemingly innocuous flu illness into
something far more sinister and deadly, which step-by-step has had an insidious
effect upon the UK, and the rest of the world for that matter, than any of the
other social upheavals that have taken place recently (e.g. Brexit, Trump
election, the Syrian civil war, etc.). It is hard in the current situation to look
back on and envisage how the general mood was towards Covid-19 when it first
surfaced in China. The spread of this virus was initially greeted with little
attention by the media and the public in late December 2019 to early January
2020, with more focus on Brexit and the changes that the Johnson Government were
going to be bringing in. A good explanation of how Covid-19 began can be found here, in particular
the article provides a link to the John Hopkins University dashboard on how the
pandemic is progressing globally.
