And, on Halloween night, the government rushed out an announcement about a second national lockdown. This has felt inevitable, but even as recently as two weeks ago, the Prime Minister was brushing aside Labour calls for one. Everything about this pandemic feels shambolic.
Now that the initial shock of the announcement has worn off, I can see that I’m not practically affected by what has been announced. I’ve not been socialising indoors much anyway, I’m working from home, and most of my shopping has moved online. I’m not going to be practically affected.
The main effect is on my morale. We seem so far away from solving this issue. Wuhan is mostly back to normal. Thailand, New Zealand and Taiwan have sustained low caseloads. Australia has managed a day without new caseloads. Meanwhile Britain blunders through different approaches and announcements, with numbers rising.
The Prime Minister claimed to be optimistic about the future, promising renewed, faster testing. Which sounds great, but everything the government has done related to tracking and tracing so far has been a disaster. Every target set has been missed. Mid-March: we’ll turn the tide in 12 weeks. In May, we were told we’d be near normality by July. September, it was back to normal by Christmas.
Mistakes are going to be made during a crisis of this scale. But there seems to be a failure of leadership, with blunders and cronyism at all levels. I’m tired and I am angry, and I can’t see when this is going to be solved. We can only hope that the Johnson government is handling Brexit rather better than they are managing Covid, otherwise January’s Covexit is going to be a disster.