This must surely be the first time in human history when our
response to an emergency such as coronavirus has been to impose lockdowns on entire
countries.
When Spanish Flu swept around the world after World War One,
there was no nationwide lockdown. When the
first person died in Britain in May 1918, war took precedence over suppressing
the virus. Suggestions (and there were
some) that the sick be advised to stay at home and that people should avoid
large gatherings were dismissed.
Hospitals were overwhelmed; nonetheless, while many theatres, dance
halls and cinemas closed, there was no widespread lockdown and pubs remained
open, large crowds attended football matches and people continued with their
everyday life. Some wore anti-germ masks,
but they weren’t compulsory.
I wonder what someone from 1918 would make of our twenty-first
century reaction to coronavirus.
Sudden, widespread death seems to have become unconscionable
to us. Numbers of potential deaths are
used to scare us – the first lockdown began after half a million deaths were
predicted and this second one was ordered after newspaper headlines screamed projections
of four thousand deaths per day. Each
day, the latest number of recorded deaths is reported and grimly, we watch the
death-toll rise. Like never
before, we watch television with sadness as strangers talk about the tragic deaths
of their loved-ones and fearfully, we reflect on death’s proximity to us all. Above all, we have become familiar with the
concept of ‘excess deaths’ – the idea that only so many deaths should be expected,
perhaps even that only so many should be tolerated.
In March, the Prime Minister even talked of families losing
loved ones ‘before their time’. It’s a strange phrase that also reveals a lot about our attitude to death, implying that we have
‘a time’ when we should expect to die and even that we know when it is. It goes hand-in-hand with the seemingly inexorable rise in life expectancy that has
come with our advances in science and medicine, improved diet and nutrition and
better living standards. We should
expect nothing less than to achieve that grand old age of eighty-one.
Perhaps we’ve even started to believe we can control death. After all, we’ve eradicated smallpox,
engineered antibiotics to fight infection, created drugs to suppress viruses
like HIV, dramatically improved treatments for many cancers, halved the number
of deaths from malaria since the turn of the century and achieved immunisation
of vast populations against diseases like tuberculosis, polio, meningitis and
measles.
Personally, I’m fortunate to have had little close experience
of death. I’m forty-three now so it’s
not surprising that my four grandparents have all passed on but I enjoyed
nearly forty years with two of them who lived into their nineties. An aunt, Marion, died last year and sadly, I
lost a good friend, Luke, to cancer in his early-twenties. Many people of my generation would have experienced
a similar, low tally of deaths – probably much lower than our grandparents would
have had at our age. We don’t have to
confront death with the regularity they and their forebears did; maybe we don’t
even have to contemplate it in the same way.
Coronavirus, a plague out of place in the twenty-first century,
forces us to contemplate death. And our
instinct, born of the last century, is to control it, diminish it, defeat it. One hundred years ago in Britain, 228,000
people died of Spanish Flu. Today, we
can’t countenance the scale of death that perhaps ought to be wrought by a rampaging
pandemic while it runs its course and enough of us build that herd-immunity. Neither, however, can we bear the measures
that might keep it in check.
Education is central to our vision of continued progress and
a better future and we value it too highly for schools, colleges and universities
to close. Our health services, as miraculous
as they would seem to someone suffering from Spanish Flu one hundred years ago,
creak ominously under the strain of a global pandemic for which they could not
be prepared. Many of us object to any
infringement of our liberties and wouldn’t tolerate the surveillance that has
made track-and-trace systems effective in more authoritarian corners of the world
or harsher enforcement of restrictions and tougher penalties for rule-breakers. Our way of life depends on the strength of
our economy – even our health and well-being are inextricably linked to it – so
deserted high streets, shut down businesses and increasing unemployment are
deeply damaging. Rising government
spending to support business, industry, families and individuals is both imperative
and unaffordable and we fear its impact on future generations. Socially, we depend on pubs, restaurants, coffee
shops, cinemas, theatres, leisure centres, clubs and gyms. Not only do we struggle to cope without them
but our mental health suffers while they are closed. For many, a Christmas during lockdown would
be unendurable.
Our comfortable, sociable, affluent, liberal twenty-first
century lifestyle and society just isn’t up to the imposition of a lockdown –
let alone repeated lockdowns. Some scientists
even say that this is not the terrible pandemic the world is still due; that could
still come in the coming decades. What
then? We will surely have learnt from this
historic experiment that the lockdown is not the answer. As awful as any unexpected death is for the
friends and family of its victim, perhaps we need to reassess our grim
relationship with death and accept that tragically, from time to time,
something unexpected emerges and takes many of us.
Perhaps Covid19 is our terrible but necessary
reminder that we are not invincible.
