Brave New World: part one

“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.

Then in mid-January reports took a more serious turn, as news started to filter through that the city of Wuhan in the Hubei province of China was being placed in drastic measures by the Chinese authorities. More information started to come through, in particular how the Government had covered up the initial warnings by a local doctor of the outbreak; which in itself was nothing surprising for a totalitarian regime. Then images of Wuhan- a city with a similar size to London- being locked down and the city being quarantined started to focus people’s attention. Cruise ships were made to self-quarantine, or refused entry to ports where suspected Covid-19 symptoms were on board, and UK citizens were being flown back home from China. Once footage of whole hospitals being constructed overnight by the Chinese military emerged, it became clear that this was no ordinary outbreak of seasonal flu. China is now being held up as the exemplar of how to deal with this global pandemic, but it is important to remember that China’s incompetence (and possible corruption over this matter) has cost the world dearly. We will never know how the Coronavirus pandemic would have turned out if China had dealt with it honestly, openly and made it clear what the scale of the problem was from the start. At this time it is hard to tell what the global opinion is of China, because all the G20 countries are desperately battling to stop their health services from being overwhelmed by Covid-19; whether it is this preoccupation or the fear of China’s economic and military power that may be muting criticism will be something for historians to decide.

Since February events progressed rapidly. Covid-19 behaved like a house fire, at first beginning with a small and slow flame that gently licked the edges of the objects that lay near it; with the fire developing in size and momentum until those objects became consumed. The fire grew, as the room shrank. Before long the noise, size and speed of the fire was beyond control, the room became smaller than the fire and the fire stands to consume the house. Countries surrounding China started to report a sharp rise in infections and subsequent deaths. South Korea has dealt with this admirably with a formidable system of testing and reporting to its citizens, learning its lessons from the MERs and SARs outbreaks. Iran appears to be badly affected, and is still trying to contain the outbreak at the time of writing. From a UK perspective, it was when the flames of Covid-19 began to touch Italy that events appeared to gain an impetus all of their own.

Newspapers and news outlets seemed to believe that it was a small outbreak in the Lombardy region in Italy, which could potentially be contained with the right measures. Numbers rose, but in a sporadic fashion, as the Italian Government responded in a haphazard manner to Covid-19 landing on its shores. At first the Lombardy region began to be placed in quarantine, but reporters were still able to get access to these ‘restricted’ areas and relay the scenes taking place in Italy to UK audiences. Then the number of infections and deaths started to rise, and in correlation to this the Italian authorities imposed ever stricter measures on the movement as well as activities of its citizens. Pictures in the evening news conveyed a country becoming ever emptier, quieter and in many ways ceasing its normal way of life. The flames of this deadly event had taken hold in the heart of Europe and were beginning to spread to surrounding countries. Interestingly Spain, a country that is also suffering a horrific death toll from this virus, was slow to respond at first; with a relaxed approached by its people to Covid-19 (e.g. still going to bars, catering for tourists, etc.), but with the numbers of dead rising rapidly it quickly reacted by implementing a full-blown lockdown upon the country. The fire had well and truly spread across Europe, with France imposing similar measures to Italy and Germany’s Chancellor – Angela Merkel- comparing Coronavirus to the greatest threat to Germany since the Second World War.

This post, which is already too long and a rare venture beyond the running world, will not try to address whether the UK Government has taken the right steps to prepare for the predicted ‘peak’ in the infections from Covid-19 in the UK. Instead it will be written from a personal perspective, as a husband of someone who falls within the vulnerable category since 16 March 2020. Largely with a feeling of dismay at the public’s response to the crisis and how it has been portrayed in the media. The next part of this blog will look at how running has been affected by this global pandemic.

At the beginning it was disturbing how people seemed to write off the need to maintain social distancing or self-isolate if they believed that they had Covid-19. Depending on your viewpoint the Government decided to do a tricky balancing act of keeping the UK economy going, whilst trying to slow the spread of the infection. Events since 16 March have taken on a titanic nature, with the Government promising £330 billion to stop the economy going into recession and providing support for self-employed workers. The world appeared to fragment; with some people becoming ill with Covid-19, others dying, workers concerned about being furloughed, airline companies ceasing to operate and amidst all of this the Government trying to tread a vague middle-ground of ambiguous advice to the public. Rumours are that Boris Johnson genuinely abhors the idea of treading on people’s rights and liberties, and does not want to impose a full-blown ‘European’ lockdown on the UK.

No clearer example was there of the public’s failure to respond to the Government’s pleas to stay at home than over the weekend 20^th – 22^nd March, exacerbating the already precarious situation that London was and now finds itself in (around 500 people have died in the UK yesterday, with a significant proportion of these coming from London). This selfish behaviour was further demonstrated by people panic buying, hoarding and subsequently wasting tonnes of food. The crescendo of how disjointed and unthinking British society is at the moment, was illustrated by –unsurprisingly- the banks. It turns out rather than allowing small struggling businesses to access the £330 billion of state aid mentioned above, the banks are instead forcing small and medium sized businesses to take out loans against their homes. There can be no other words but to describe the actions of the financial sector as shameful. If this wasn’t enough, English Premiership footballers had decided not to take a salary cut during this ongoing crisis- unlike their European counterparts- showing how Coronavirus has further exposed the sharp divisions within certain sections of society that don’t feel like they have to help the UK in its time of need. This selfish action by Premiership footballers is made all the sadder by the fact a number of Championship football clubs (as well as their players) have already taken pay cuts with no pressure from the media or the public.  

This blog is not designed to understand or critique the way modern society is working at the moment, but suffice to say something is badly wrong. Could we lay the blame at the fundamental shift in British politics and economics in the 1980s, during the Thatcher era; make money and profit now, whilst worrying about the consequences later. Is it the modern view of happiness?: People should be able to get whatever they want, whenever they want it. Is it the ‘X-Factor’ view of the world? That only one person can succeed and the rest can be forgotten about.  Whether it is people overcrowding Snowdonia, hoarding food so that NHS workers cannot get access to food after a 12 hour shift or ignoring Government guidance and inadvertently spreading the virus; people do not seem to care about the society they are living in. These actions are not illogical, they are people just thinking of their own interests and not taking the time or having the intelligence to imagine the consequences of their actions.

This is the crux of what makes Covid-19 so deadly, it has exposed how divided and segmented British society has become. The public wants a solution, but is unwilling to take responsibility or co-operate to see through the objective of defeating the virus to the end. There are surprising similarities to marathon running and the steps needed to beat the Coronavirus. Both activities involve daily, boring and repetitive steps; most importantly, these activities are not conducive to Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. Sure people can send funny pictures, videos of people exercising at a distance or write an emotive Facebook post. Unfortunately it is going to be the actions that no one sees, which are going to save lives. Just like those groggy Sunday mornings where you have to go for a dreaded long-run, washing your hands when you get back into the house (or when you cough) is a mandatory action that will get the country across that goal-line. When everything is quiet and there are no alarming messages on the news- when you are tired and bored- that’s when people’s actions count to stop Coronavirus. It’s also why people continue to find the marathon such a challenge, because it’s those boring acts that enable someone to successfully cross the finish line after running 26.2 miles or so. 

We have fallen into a false narrative about comparing the current response to Covid-19, as the same actions taken during the Second World War (WW2). There are stark factual inaccuracies with this comparison. The private sector, e.g. grocery shops and banks have operated largely undisturbed by Government action, whereas during WW2 there was a strictly implemented rationing system. Recent research on the Spirit of the Blitz has shown that during WW2 behaviour was just as complicated when there wasn’t an impending crisis in the UK, instead it made the extremes of human behaviour more evident; people did pull together for their country, but there were others who saw it as a time to exploit their fellow citizens. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s PBS mini-series on the Vietnam War probably does a better job of explaining the situation that the UK finds itself in, whilst trying to combat Covid-19. An ‘enemy’ (note the war-time reference that commentators are using) who is hard to pin down, dividing society on how it should be attacked and the situation constantly evolving. We have to realise that symbolic gestures like clapping for the NHS or celebrities showing how they deal with the crisis, whilst heart-warming and well-intentioned; does not mitigate the clear and present dangers of the lack of testing and not enough protective equipment for our front-line NHS staff.

We as a society are standing on a beach in stormy weather, the tide is pulling out, as a large wave is about to come crashing down on us. We have a choice to stand together to brave the storm and the waves; to find a way through this crisis. We are hoping that we can solve this crisis- to dive through or under the wave so to speak- but deep down we know that this is not the case. The Covid-19 pandemic has fundamentally altered the way the UK will operate for years to come, making the 2008 Financial crisis look like a drop in the ocean. We are about to enter a new, possibly harsher, world and it will be up to us to decide how it is shaped. The way things were cannot hold, but we have a choice to work together and become a genuinely more caring society in our journey to rebuild the UK after Covid-19.