The Streets Are Empty

There are no cars on the road. There's no one walking on the pavements. The shops are closed.

The streets are empty.

There are now no more words for how serious this is. The coronavirus has spread across the world, causing thousands upon thousands of deaths and an unprecedented amount of illness, causing the world to grind to a halt.

Economies are tanking, people are losing their jobs, (the USA now has 3 million unemployed people, an American record), and any semblance of normal life has gone.

For me, the weekdays are fairly normal. I am classed as a "key worker" in the NHS, so at least I still get a regular income and get to keep a routine but for millions of others, their world has been turned upside down. It's really rather horrible.

And because of the situation, there's nothing else to talk about. Nothing else to do. If you're caught outside and either not going to or from work (if it's essential) and not gaining supplies that are food and medicine, you can be fined by Police.

Therefore, nothing is happening.

And to make matters even worse, I've just this second found out that my number one crush in the whole world, AJ Pritchard, has quit Strictly Come Dancing.

When will the bad news end?!

The World Has Changed

I'm still trying to get my head around what is happening throughout the world. It's a scenario I never imagined I would find myself in, where we are being asked to stay inside because of a virus. It's like a really boring Hollywood movie.

I've already clarified in the two previous posts that I am highly anxious about all of this. In the last day or so, our Prime Minister has enforced the closures of pubs, clubs, cinemas, restaurants, theatres, sports grounds. You name it, if it isn't essential, it is closed. We are being asked to live the most basic of lives in the most complex and interesting world and it is absolutely horrible.

The numbers are startling. Italy has recorded thousands and thousands of deaths because of Covid-19 and current statistics have our country heading towards the same path. The fact of the matter is, this hasn't really started yet and no one knows what is coming.

However, as a lot of people keep saying, it is important to stay positive. Working for the NHS, at least I have a secure job unlike 5 million self employed workers who are now left in a state of worry.

There are also some fantastic initiatives going on, such as community kindness groups on social media, the ongoing mix of humour that is Twitter and even an online pub quiz hosted by a sports commentator called Nick Heath, that I managed to get 26 out of 50 on this evening, which distracted me for an hour or so.

And it's Mother's Day tomorrow, which is an exceptionally important day in our family's calendar as Laura and I nearly lost our wonderful Mother 6 years ago, (doesn't time fly!) We're going for a river walk and a small picnic, which is technically against the advice of "social distancing" but a boy needs his Mother from time to time. I have also written a poem to go insider her Mother's Day card:

...

It's been a long old time since '91
the world has changed some may say.
I am the person I am because of you,
looking out for me come what may.

Thank you for being my counsellor,
my personal shopper, my cleaner.
Thank you for always being there
even during the times I was meaner.

Thank you for your constant support
through times, both thick and terrible.
My sister and I, both adults now
will always be eternally grateful.

It's been a long old time since '91
with bottles, toys and cots.
But one thing that has never changed
is that I love you lots and lots.

Lockdown

We are in unprecedented times.

Five days after I wrote a post on the outbreak of coronavirus, Covid-19, I don't think I anticipated how quickly and how ferociously everything would just stop. And it's absolutely horrible.

Schools are closed, restaurants are closed, offices are closed and everyone is working from home, apart from us in the NHS. I am quite thankful for this, as I'm not sure my mind could cope with the genuine isolation for weeks on end so keeping some semblance of routine has become a god send.

But that is it. Everything is cancelled, from football and indeed all sport to the Bedford River Festival, from theatre shows to Eurovision, everything is off. My calendar, once full of rugby and football fixtures, waiting for the influx of cricket fixtures is as empty as the hospital I'm sitting in, and quite frankly, I'm terrified of the affects of zero social interaction whatsoever will have on my once fragile mind.

Wait, I said the hospital was empty? During a pandemic? That's right. I work on Paediatrics at my local hospital and initial fears that the whole child population and literally their Mothers would appear, no one has. It seems people are too scared to go to hospital unless absolutely necessary, but despite social distancing measures and even talk of a complete lockdown, one fears this is the very definition of 'calm before the storm.'

The last 36 hours or so have been personally quite scary. I have developed mild chest pains leading to a shortness of breath, one of the symptoms to look out for when it comes to this respiratory illness that's sweeping the lands; and I had begun to panic that I had come to work and infected an entire department.

I spent the majority of this morning in the ghost town that is Accident & Emergency, being hooked up to every machine under the sun to come to the conclusion that there is nothing physically wrong with me and I am in fact suffering from quite acute anxiety about the whole thing.

As I mentioned in my last post, my anxiety doesn't come from the pandemic itself, but the effects of it. I'm not sure how I can cope without football, without cricket, without sport or bars or nights out or EUROVISION. The idea of all work and no play has been a perennial fear of mine for as long as I can remember and I'm about to be forced into it.

Things are going to get worse before they get better...

Coronavirus

We've had SARS, we've had MERS and we've also had swine flu and bird flu amongst the regular influenza that we all know and want to avoid at any cost. We seemed to get through it all without as much as a whisper, but now? COVID-19 seems to be in a different league.

There was a game I used to play as a teenager, called 'Pandemic'. The objective of the game is to create your own virus and kill off the human race by acquiring attributes such as symptoms, whether it becomes airborne etcetera etcetera. At one point it was just a game. Now it's real life.

You see, I was complacent. "It's just flu", and sure, for 28-year old me, it might well be but there is something about this latest outbreak that scares me. It's been four whole months since this mysterious new illness sprung out of the bat caves of Wuhan and only in the past week have I appreciated how dangerous this could be.

There is no immunity, there is no vaccine or cure and we have gone from a few cases on the other side of the world to an increase of 100% per day on cases and deaths. Yes, death. Governments around the world have put their countries on lockdown, closed borders, cancelled events en masse and quarantined huge swathes of the population. This is bad.

But what makes it worse is that our Government, the British Government have taken a typically stubborn and stoic stance on the whole thing and with over 1,000 confirmed cases and 21 deaths as I type this, we're still at the point where the official advice is to wash our hands.

Think about that for a second. Countries across the globe are closed for business and our government is saying, "Wash your hands". There is even debate about letting the virus pass through the population to make it quick, and while on paper that may sound like a logical argument, let's break it down into numbers.

67 million people live in the United Kingdom, and the mortality rate based on figures around the world is at 2%. That's 277,000 people. And our Government are contemplating sacrificing them to speed up the economy. I can't think of anything more ghastly.

But that's not it. 10% of the people who catch this illness will be critically ill, (6.7 million if you let the illness roll freely) and our NHS is fatally underfunded as it is. We are in no position to deal with this, and frankly, I'm a bit nervous of going to work on Monday morning. I think it's inevitable I'm going to catch it.

There are numerous and wide-ranging factors that I simply haven't got time to talk about in fear of turning this blog post into a thesis, but one factor I do want to speak of is self-isolation. Official advice states we need to self-isolate for 7 days, which if you're a Netflix and/or Football Manager fan sounds great, but the impact on ones mental health is not good when you're locked inside for a whole week on your own. Maybe I fear that more than the actual virus.

But what else can we do but carry on? Trust that what we're being told is true. I may be reading back on this in a decade's time, like I have recently on old posts here, and wonder what all the fuss was about.

Or maybe I'm the last human alive and lamenting the lack of action and purpose when it was vital we weren't so God damn British about the whole thing.

We don't know. And maybe that's what I fear the most.