We’ve only just begun

Not the best start to whatever day it is today. With my mouth tasting as fresh as the bottom of a parrot’s cage, I squirted in a large quantity of breath freshener. Only it wasn’t breath freshener: it was hand sanitiser. If that wretched Covid-19 was hanging around my face this morning, it might have come as much as a surprise to it as it did me. Then, an accident with the Marmite pot gave the appearance of me engaging in a dirty protest. Finally, I bought my newspaper to find that, probably for the first time ever, the lead story on the front pages of yesterday’s Sun, Mail and Express was a lie. Knock me down with a feather.

Just 24 hours ago, I was slightly more hopeful when I saw headlines like ‘Vaccine on the way: it’s the Sun what found it’ and the Mail’s ‘house prices set to rise as Boffins find Covid cure’. (I am not sure these are the exact headlines but you get the drift.) Clinical trials were already underway and most of us would be queueing at the local health centre as early as this afternoon before going to my hastily reopened local. Our June holiday was back on again. Who said the tabloids were nothing more than a bunch of lying toads?

My optimism of yesterday has returned to despair having seen the comments of Professor David Nabarro, head of global health at Imperial College, London and an envoy for the World Health Organisation (WHO) on Covid-19. The good professor pricked my bubble by delivering what we experts call a ‘stark message’ in which he said humanity will have to live with the threat of coronavirus ‘for the foreseeable future’ and there is no guarantee a vaccine can be successfully developed. And the bad news keeps on coming.

Maria Van Kerkhove, the head of ’emerging diseases and zoonosis unit’ (nor me) at the WHO said there was no evidence that antibody tests now being developed showed that someone who had already had Covid-19 now had immunity and was no longer at risk of being reinfected. Yesterday’s reasons to be cheerful have melted away.

In fact, the news just gets worse. Less than a month ago, government health advisors said if Covid-19 deaths could be kept below 20,000 by the end of the pandemic it was be ‘a good result’, although probably not a good result for those who died of the virus or their families and friends. But we’re way over that figure already. Over 15,000 people have died in NHS hospitals alone and if you add those who died at home or in care homes, the figure could be nearer double that. 30,000 people who have died before their time with at least a thousand more dying every single day.

So, far from being near to the end of the coronavirus nightmare, as Karen Carpenter might have put it, we’ve only just begun. Those hugs with family and friends and those promised street parties (because there will be so much to celebrate once the final body count is complete, won’t there?) will just have to wait, quite possibly forever.

The so-called journalists who write fake stories about the imminent arrival of an effective vaccine in order to flog a few more newspapers should hang their heads in shame. I always dreamed of being a successful writer but I’d far rather be an unsuccessful one if it means I can cling to some vestige of decency and honesty.