One year on. Or should I say one year in.
I worry that there seems to have been a sea-change in people’s attitudes over the last few days. It feels like it’s over. More and more people are getting their vaccines, the numbers are coming down, the sun is shining. We have the prospect of things starting to open up.
It isn’t over.
We are going to be wearing masks, sanitising our hands and keeping our distance from people for a long time to come. Or at least we should be.
There’s even talk of making 23rd March a Covid Memorial Day.
NO!! It’s too soon.
You start thinking about memorials when something is over, finished. Not when it’s barely started. It’s much, much too soon to be thinking about a memorial day. The first Remembrance Day was 1919, not 1915 – and 11th November was the end of the war, not the beginning. Wait until the last person has died of Covid, then we can start to think about a Memorial Day.
It’s just a year since that first lockdown started. Just four weeks, they said. Four weeks should do it. I wrote this exactly a year ago – Lockdown. I wonder how we would have felt if we’d known then that we would still be living with Covid a year later.
Because I work for a major DIY store, we were classed as key workers.
With two-thirds of the staff furloughed, and ‘only’ providing the Click and Collect service, jeez that was hard work. I honestly thought my feet would never recover.
But it’s been a strange year in many ways. Strange because I think the pandemic has had less of an impact on me day-to-day than it’s had on most people.
I’ve still been working, which means I’ve still been with people. Socially distanced of course, but still out of the house and doing something.
Days off have been difficult, unable to get out and about or meet up with friends – but nothing compared to what some of those friends have been going through.
I volunteered to take part in clinical trials for a Covid vaccine back in November. The trial was meant to last for a year, but events overtook us and the Pfizer/Biontech and Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines came on stream phenomenally quickly. When I got the call to go for my ‘normal’ vaccine, I was unblinded from the trial and told that I had in fact had the real thing back in November.
So all that time I’d been immune, without realising. Which is a very odd feeling.
Apart from having to cancel my holidays and not being able to meet up with friends or relatives for any sort of fun and games, Covid really hasn’t had that big of an impact on me.
Yet.
It isn’t over.
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