How often do I think of Covid? Only about a dozen times a day, whenever I wash my hands. It was quite something, in my early 60s, to realise that an action I had been performing all my life had to be relearned. The automatic had to become conscious: more time spent kneading between the fingers, that twist of the thumbs, soap up beyond the wrist. But is this the only thing we learned to do better, the only dead habit we managed to slough off?
Five years ago today, the World Health Organisation announced it had found evidence that what it would call the Sars-CoV-2 virus could be transmitted from human to human. This was the moment when a vague disturbance from somewhere over the horizon began to press on our reality.
Do you remember how it felt, a week later, when the Centres for Disease Control in the US issued that visual image, created by the artists Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins, of the virus itself – a grey ball flecked with yellow and orange spots and studded with red triangles?
It was a simulation, a visual metaphor, but it made this abstract threat into a spiky mine floating towards us on an unstoppable tide.
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Very soon it exploded into our mundane lives. It forced us to learn its own language: coronavirus, PPE, mRNA, social distancing, lockdown, immunocompromised, herd immunity, flattening the curve, test and trace, cocooning, ventilator. It sent us into surreal spaces, hangars and car parks and racecourses repurposed as vaccine injection centres.
We acquired tracing apps on our phones and accumulated cards with dates and batch numbers on them. For a while, the opening gambit in a conversation was no longer the weather but whether you’d got the Pfizer, the AstraZeneca or the Moderna vaccine.
And what most of us were certain of was that things could never be the same again. The experience was scary, heart-scalding, tragic. But it was also a circuit-breaker. It forced us to think about what really mattered – food, shelter, safety, company and connection, human interdependence, the physical environments to which we were suddenly and intensively confined. It heightened our awareness of the fragility – and thus the wonder – of the everyday.
You rummage in the pocket of an old coat and touch one of those crude cloth masks we used
But habit has reasserted its grip. Perhaps all we have really learned is our collective capacity for forgetting. This extraordinary experience recurs now as fragmentary flashbacks. You step on a queuing area in a supermarket that still has the two-metre social distancing marks on the floor. You rummage in the pocket of an old coat and touch one of those crude cloth masks we used before the disposable ones became ubiquitous.
You glimpse at the back of the medicine cabinet an out-of-date Covid test and feel again the violation of a cotton-tipped stick penetrating the secret and tender cavities of your nose.
But these are the flotsam of a receded tide. We have not moved on – we have simply moved back. There were four big things we were supposed to have salvaged from the pain of the pandemic, but these already feel like the uncanny and bewildering shades of last night’s uneasy dream.
The first and most searing lesson was the implicit cruelty of our system of care for older people. Covid was, in essence, a plague on the elderly: 91 per cent of those who died with the virus in Ireland were over 65. It was at its deadliest in sites of supposed care and safety: 29 per cent of all deaths in Ireland happened in nursing homes.
We have still not had a proper accounting for this disaster, but one truth is obvious: out of sight is out of mind. Segregating older people from their homes, families and communities makes them less visible and therefore more vulnerable. What have we done about this? Really nothing – there is no strategy to keep as many people in their own homes as possible.
Second, we seemed to have learned something fundamental about equality. The pandemic was a searchlight illuminating the work of all the people who are obscured by false hierarchies of status and value. The poorly paid nursing home staff – often immigrant women – who were the ones risking their own lives and holding the hands of the dying. The bus and truck drivers who kept the show on the road. The supermarket workers who kept the supply of food going.
There was a surge of gratitude towards them, a realisation of how much they should be valued.
But, in reality, the pandemic was a bonanza for billionaires: when it started, billionaires collectively owned 2 per cent of household wealth worldwide. By its end they owned 3.5 per cent. And the world had returned to taking labour for granted.
Assurances offered to everyone “trying to reconcile childcare, commuting and accommodation costs with quality of life” have faded
Third, recovery from the pandemic was one of the greatest triumphs in the history of science. The speed with which vaccines were created, developed and delivered was staggering. So was their effectiveness and safety. Yet we’ve gone back to not bothering with vaccines. As of last week, only 27 per cent of Irish people in their 60s had received their Covid booster – shockingly, fewer than one in 10 healthcare workers had done so.
Fourth: what happened to all that profound reflection on work-life balance and the need to end the waste of commuting and presenteeism? Last week, John McManus wrote in The Irish Times about a ruling by the Workplace Relations Commission that “will be seen by many as the final nail in the coffin of the promised right to remote working”. The assurances offered to everyone “trying to reconcile childcare, commuting and accommodation costs with the desire of a decent quality of life” have now faded into the pandemic twilight.
One of the symptoms of long-Covid is memory loss, so it is apt that a brain fog now shrouds so much of the coronavirus experience itself. The biggest lesson our governing systems have learned is how to wash their hands of what the pandemic taught us.