Without a paddle

To put it in the vernacular, my imaginary fireworks have been well and truly pissed on this morning with the staggering news that, in a “reasonable worse case scenario”, a second wave of COVID-19 this winter could kill 120,000 people. That’s not a prediction but an assessment of what could happen with the R rate rising from September to 1.7 (our ‘R’ rate at the peak was double that). Government figures suggest some 44,000 people have died so far, although it is widely believed that the actual total is closer to 70,000 and the projected 120,000 deaths represent only hospital deaths. My question is: what’s a reasonable best case scenario? I’m guessing it’s not none.

The increasingly desperate dreams and wishes of those who talk about what they will do “when this is all over” are already beginning to fade and die. We now wonder whether those holidays which we have seen postponed to 2021 are already in jeopardy and those street parties to celebrate the end of COVID-19 are little more than a pipedream.

Without a vaccine, without a treatment, we are well on our way up Shit Creek without a paddle. The virus is not, as Donald Trump suggested, going to disappear when the warm weather arrives because otherwise it would have disappeared during our long, warm spring. It’s a coronavirus, like many varieties of a common cold, and there has never been a vaccine for the common cold. Most of us get colds every year, which give us a few days of inconvenience and then disappear. COVID-19 could become its uglier and more dangerous brother, a permanent fixture in our lives. (“Sorry: I can’t come in to work today. I’ve got a new persistent cough, I’ve lost my sense of taste and smell and I can’t breathe very well. Same as that bug I had in April.”)

If the news wasn’t bad enough, we now learn that having had the virus doesn’t appear to provide immunity to having it again. Antibodies appear and gradually disappear.  Emerging evidence suggests COVID-19 can have permanent damaging effects on people of all ages, even the young and healthy, many of whom believe they are immune.

The government’s answer is that we all need to wear face coverings when we go into shops, although it will quite rightly not enforced by shop staff, instead quite wrongly by police officers, who will presumably have to drive around all day spotting people in shops who aren’t wearing masks. Those ID parades should be fun, then.

There is literally no good news coming down the tracks. COVID-19 isn’t going away, probably not for years, maybe even never. The future looks much like the present and things are going to get worse, perhaps much worse, before they get better.

I’m staying at home for much of the time, as prime minister told me to at the start of the semi-lockdown. When winter comes, I might well stay home all of the time. My chances of being able to plan things for “when this is all over” would be improved no end.