According to the Covid Calendar, it is March 1843rd 2020. Five years ago, the UK was shutting down. My office had just closed and I was adjusting to the prospect of spending weeks trapped in my flat. I started keeping a lockdown blog, making my first entry on March 17th 2020.
In many ways, Covid has been good for me. It led to me leaving Brighton after 25 years, and I love living in the countryside. Remote working has meant no longer spending five days a week in open-plan offices, a huge improvement to my quality of life.
I’m still angry about some aspects of covid: the arbitrary and pointless rules that were inflicted on people, and then removed just as randomly; about a government which allowed some people to party while fining others; about the way covid is now being ignored after all the fuss made in 2020/21.
A few times I’ve found myself telling people that covid is still playing out. There’s an interesting struggle around return-to-office. In the present weak economy, some companies are using it as a mean to thin out their staff. Personally, I choose to visit an office once a week. But I can’t see the point in being there more often when I’m on calls with outsourced colleagues. If we need to be in the office to collaborate, why do we have distributed teams? The debate seems a long way from settled.
The other big ongoing aspect is the after-effect of social isolation. There are people I know who’ve never resumed their social lives after covid. I know that I’ve stopped going out as much as I did. I enjoy the slower pace of life, but I wonder if I should be putting in more effort?
The biggest question is whether covid is over or not. It’s gone from being the most important topic in the world to ignored. Long covid has become a topic for cranks. Nobody wears masks any more. I’m not sure if this is because the danger has gone, this exotic new virus becoming benign, or because – like climate change – people ignore the subject because it’s too big.
Given where we’ve ended up now, it’s hard to look back five years to a world where covid was taken so seriously. The urgency of that time seems ridiculous now. All the corruptions, the lies (“three weeks to flatten the curve”), the horror. And now it’s just a weird thing that happened, absorbed into nostalgia.