The Year We Stopped Singing

Five years ago, when Covid hit, we did some extraordinary things. We avoided one another, met only online, covered our faces. Closing offices and schools, we stayed in our houses, counting statistics of Disease and Death, wondering if it would hit us, and hit us how hard, hoping to save lives by suspending animation. We got angry, variously, at the statistics, the scientists, the politicians or one another.

Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the arguments on what we should have done differently. Whether “following the science” was the safest path; where the true balance lay between epidemiology and sociology; which repercussions we should have been able to foresee. It was an ugly equation to solve: pitting hard-to-quantify danger of death against even-harder-to-quantify disrupted lives and societal damage. 

Remember, there was something peculiarly terrifying about Covid-19, in the early days, before real infection rates could be measured, while death rates were still emerging, and before we had any effective treatments, let alone any prospect of a vaccine. It was a Mystery Virus with strange symptoms and unknown long-term effects. 

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