rubber soul

It depends how old you are. I got my smallpox vaccine at age seven. That was in 1969, but they stopped giving out the vaccine somewhere in the seventies. Wouldn't know when they stopped it in Canada though.

__________________

Trollheart

V: Don’t Panic!

Timeline: March 2020

At this point it becomes a redundant exercise noting what new country reported cases or deaths, as eventually, and quite quickly after this, there wouldn’t be one left in the world that hadn’t been touched by the virus, though some would fare better than others, mostly due to decisive and quick action taken while other nations dithered or refused to face reality. So from now on I’ll only be noting significant points, deaths and developments. Suffice to say that by now, a map of the world showed more red than it didn’t, red being the colour used for areas with a high number of cases.

Note: As I begin to read and research from the book Coronavirus: 2020 Vision. The Road to Freedom Day: The Complete Diary and Events of the COVID-19 Pandemic by Keith Wright, written in 2020 obviously, it’s both shocking and comforting to note that his comment near the beginning of the book has thankfully proven to be completely wrong, and that his prediction has not come through. I’m sure he is as delighted as all of us that when he wrote “Our hope is for a vaccine, yet this is impossible for many months, probably years, if at all. Sadly, the world has been unable to develop a vaccine for any of the previous coronavirus such as SARS, (or even the common cold, which is part of the coronavirus family), so it would be remarkable if they manage to do so with this one” and further that “I start this diary uncertain whether I will be alive to finish it or sustain it if I become one of the coronavirus victims. Will I be too ill to continue? Will I die? Things change day-to-day, and suddenly the future is more uncertain than ever before in my lifetime”, he appears to have been happily wrong.

So far as I can see, Mr. Wright is still posting on Twitter as of today, so he did not die. I can only hope his family are all with us and well, and as he and the world know by now, though we have a long way (and probably a lot more variants) to go before we have Covid under control, we do at least now have not one, but multiple vaccines, so his gloomy prediction for the future has turned out to be wrong, and again I’m sure he’s delighted and relieved that it’s so.

However this does serve to illustrate, in very stark and real terms, the fear, actually the terror that Covid inspired in us. I once wrote that people living through the onslaught of the Black Death in fourteenth-century Europe must have felt like the world was coming to an end, and I remember too my sister saying to me at one point that she wondered this too. And so did I. All around us, people were dying at a phenomenal and terrifying rate, and until the vaccine came on the scene there was no respite. Medical science could not save us. Religion (not that I believed) could not save us. Money, power, an arrogant attitude or blind fear could not save us. Nobody and nothing could. The human race appeared to be dying, and there looked to be nothing we could do about it.

And I don’t have to say to you (unless you’re for some reason reading this twenty or more years in the future) this is how it was: we all know how it was. We all lived through it. We’re still living through it, though what we’re living through now is a different thing than what we coped with from early 2020 until the advent of the first vaccine. This is an event that has touched everyone, helped to bring the world together and helped to tear it apart, and reminded us all how small and insignificant the human species is. Without the knowledge or dedication to have created a vaccine, most of us might be dead or seriously ill by now. Only through the barrier of the vaccines have we been able to slow and slightly repulse the virus, though there are still paths open to it thanks to the ignorance and stupidity of millions of people who refuse to get vaccinated, out of fear, uncertainty, belligerence or political viewpoint.

I’m no fan of our government, but hell, credit where credit is due, for now. While Boris Johnson, UK Prime Minister, was going on TV talking about people being able to continue to lead normal lives and, worse, advising people it was fine to shake hands (it would very soon transpire this was one of the worst things you could do, one of the easiest and fastest paths for the virus to transfer from one person to another) the Irish government took the very difficult but very necessary decision to shut down the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade for 2020.

I’m sure nobody needs to be told what this is, or how important to Ireland, both in a cultural and an economic sense, it is to us. March 17 is for some reason I’ve never understood celebrated as what we know as “Paddy’s Day”, when Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, is celebrated. There are parades - the main one in Dublin but others throughout the country - and a general party atmosphere prevails. It’s a bank holiday; nobody works (other than publicans, bus drivers, police, taxis… you know what? A lot of people work but officially it’s a day off for most people) and everyone gets drunk, usually too much so. Fights break out, people get hurt, very Irish. Beer acquires a green tint, and revellers too start to look a little “Irish” after they’ve consumed perhaps one too many pints of the “black stuff”, sorry I mean the “green stuff.”

Not only do we have fun but people from all over the world come to us. Americans love it. Spanish and Germans love it. Africans love it. Hell, on Paddy’s Day everyone is Irish, no matter your skin colour, country of origin or how well you know the words to “The Green Fields of France.” Everyone is accepted, everyone is welcomed. It’s a party, and everyone’s invited. It’s especially a party for the exchequer, with all those tourists coming in, all that lovely foreign money filling up tills all over the Emerald Isle, all that excise duty and VAT… everyone wins. It’s also another opportunity to show Ireland off to the world, and try to erase the often-held view of our country as one of conflict and division between north and south. I’m pretty sure they even celebrate Paddy’s Day up the North.

So you can see what a big deal it was to call this off. And many were against it. But had the government not made the right call, the 2020 Saint Patrick’s Day Parades could have been one of the world’s first “super-spreader” events, sending people from multiple nations home with the disease, a nice reminder of Ireland, to say nothing of speeding the infection rate - and surely, without at the time any vaccine in sight, the death rate - in our own country. Ireland could have become a byword for overindulgence, drunken ignorance of medical advice, and fatal irresponsibility. Instead, the Irish government were hailed as forward-thinking, self-sacrificing and wise, which to be fair they were: they knew they’d lose millions in tourist revenue, and that many event organisers would lose their shirts, given that the announcement was only made less than two weeks before the day, but public health and safety came first (and surely they hoped that when the public went to the polls again they would remember how their government has protected them at its own expense) and this was the call they made.

Johnson was probably sneering to himself that we Irish were being weak fools, overreacting and deserved to lose all that money. He wouldn’t be sneering for long.

It should also be noted that, at the time the Irish Government made its momentous (and not at all popular, it must be said) decision, there was one single case confirmed in Ireland. Many countries, I feel, might have shrugged and said we were hardly touched by the virus, it would be all right, no need to panic. But our boys said no: there’s only one case now, but if we go ahead with the parades, how many will we have by the end of March? It just didn’t bear thinking about. Britain, at this point, completely downplaying the seriousness of the outbreak, had 51 cases. Although not yet announced as their official strategy, we would later find out that Johnson’s government, based on the medical advice they were getting (or hearing what they wanted to hear) was to go for “herd immunity”, basically the idea of letting the virus tear through the population until enough had been infected that natural immunity was achieved.

Of course, this would result in thousands of deaths, but unconfirmed reports, always denied, speak of the Prime Minister shrugging “if some grannies have to die so be it” and to “let the bodies pile up.” They would, despite the government’s change of policy. Despite calming words from Johnson, something seemed to snap in the British people at that moment and there was panic buying, though nobody knows why everyone suddenly wanted so many toilet rolls! Mind you, the same would happen here when the madness arrived. Johnson did advocate the medical advice of frequently washing hands, which would become a recurrent theme throughout the pandemic, and is still of course something we are very careful to do.

March 6 brought news of a second cruise liner, the Grand Princess, owned by the same line as the first one, Princess Cruises, reporting 21 cases on board. In Hawaii, their first case there was traced back to a person who had been a passenger on this cruiser. Meanwhile it seemed even God* couldn’t protect his representatives on Earth from Covid, as Vatican City recorded its first case. The first death in Africa occurred when Egypt registered its first fatality, a German man, on March 8. In France, members of the Assembly were dropping like flies, the fifth deputy falling ill on March 9, while the next day Italy and South Korea swapped places as second and third highest number of cases, as Italy passed the 10,000 case mark, with over 600 deaths, while South Korea had just over 7,500 cases and a “mere” 50-odd deaths.

In Britain, you had to think that God* was having some sort of dark joke as, of all people, the Health Minister contracted the virus. This despite the fact that Johnson continued to appear at local and national sports and other events, blatantly shaking hands and acting as if there was nothing to be concerned about. The US passed a grim milestone of 1,000 cases, though it would be the first of many, many such markers as the year unfolded.

The WHO finally declared the emergency to be a pandemic, which at this point just about anyone could have worked out for themselves, but at least it was officially labelled as such, meaning, I guess, that more stringent protective measures could be put in place, or at least governments could be advised to do so, and stronger efforts could be expended at trying to contain the disease. Iran began to close on Italy in a race in which nobody wanted pole position, as cases there pushed past 9,000, but Italy was not giving up its place so easily, with now 12,500 cases itself. The first person to die of the disease was reported in Ireland. In the USA, Basketball became the first major sport to suffer as two players on one of its teams fell ill and the entire NBA season was suspended, with the Grand Prix in Australia next falling as people began to belatedly realise that with a global pandemic on their hands, perhaps crowding together at sporting events was not the best response.

Meanwhile, in Britain, Arsenal (football club) manager Mikel Arteta tested positive but the hugely popular (and profitable) Cheltenham Derby went ahead, with horse racing fans pouring in from all over Britain and Europe, and further afield. No precautions of any kind were taken, or advised, this despite Johnson seeming to confuse everyone by stating on public television that Britain was facing “the worst public health crisis for a generation.” This was, of course, bullshit. Nobody alive had ever seen such a pandemic, not in one generation, or two, or three. In fact, discounting the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1919 - which is still not as bad as Covid - you’ve got to go back to that old reliable, the Black Death, for anything even approaching the worldwide infection and death toll Covid has wrought upon us, and that’s seven hundred years back.

Mixed signals and confusing directions would help spread the virus, as successive governments - our own included - would give us contradictory information. First we were told masks weren’t so great, then they could save our lives, then they couldn’t save our lives but they could save the lives of others if we wore them, and so on. A catalogue of errors, a dark comedy of blundering and U-turns and step backs and changes in policy, not all of which could be blamed on the changing advice from the medical world, the WHO and the CDC. It’s quite possible that many of the deaths in various countries came about because the people were told to do one thing, then the advice changed, and nobody really knew what to do to protect themselves. There really was only one way to assure the safety of as many people as possible, and by now some countries were beginning to realise it was a measure which, though unpalatable and a final resort, could no longer be avoided.

* If you believe(d) in him, which I don't.

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

music_collector

Things played out almost in the same fashion here. Who does that "Let the bodies hit the floor" song? That could have been the theme song for our governments' responses during the first year. There were some good decisions, though they were overshadowed by the large number of deaths, specifically among our elderly.

I admit, I was very worried for the first six months. By then, the contradictory information and mixed messages flooded in, making for an apathetic population. Still, I followed every rule put forth. At work, we needed permission by two levels of management in order to go on site to fix something.

I can remember worrying about the events I'd miss, such as our Rogers Cup (tennis tune up for the US open), Roger Waters live, and most of all, a hockey tournament I look forward to each year. In hindsight, I'm happy they were all postponed or cancelled. At the time, I was feeling almost as low as those Irish folk who missed the St. Patrick's parade.

Seeing a doctor do a daily press conference was weird. At first, everyone hung on each word out of their mouths. Eventually, they were lumped in with the other politicians and completely ignored. I know a few doctors had received death threats. Unreal.

The panic buying (nice photo there, by the way) was beyond laughable. Toilet paper somehow became the most sought after item on shelves everywhere. A few days before we went into lock down, I visited a grocery store. Produce (fresh and frozen), dairy, and meats were scarce. I went in to buy milk for my kids. There was none to be had. I stopped at a nearby pharmacy. I bought one bag of milk for the family. I wasn't going to be like those other selfish hoarding idiots.

Trollheart

VI: Lockdown: The World Stops Turning

Never in the whole history of humankind has the entire world stopped at the same time, with people told not to go to work, factories and offices shut, citizens locking themselves in behind closed doors, venturing out only for essential shopping and exercise. Never before had we been encouraged, ordered in fact, to stay at home, stay safe. Never before had the roads been so clear, the streets been so quiet, the parks so deserted. Italy, unsurprisingly, given it was now not only the concentration point of the highest number of cases in Europe, but second globally, was the first to institute lockdown orders onMarch 8, and Ireland would follow soon, on March 12. Spain began lockdown from March 14 while France was in complete lockdown by March 17. Most other European countries would instigate this tactic of defence against the spread of the virus, but some countries remained stubbornly resistant to it.

In America, President Trump fought against the locking down of individual states. The USA is somewhat of a political oddity, in that policy can be made by state governors independent of, or even in opposition to that of the White House. It’s amazing to me. Here, the government says “we’re going on lockdown” and we all do. We have to. Laois or Carlow or Kerry or Sligo can’t say no we don’t agree, we’re staying open. They don’t have that kind of autonomy. Counties have in fact very little power, and none to resist or defy the government. They can butt heads with them a little, on issues on which they feel they need to, or their constituents expect them to, but it’s all decided within the framework of the Irish government. The UK is the same. In fact, I believe America is unique in being able to separate what they call state control from federal authority. In the USA, Texas can decide not to follow the rules, or California can give the President the finger, and this is what was happening.

With a Republican - and highly unpopular - President in the Oval Office, and America already deeply divided, that president minimising, all but ignoring or denying the pandemic, states began to make their own arrangements to protect their citizens, with resistance drawn along the line of blue/red defiance. In other words, when a Republican president who seemed to be - and was - acting not in the country’s interest and ignoring the science, putting his people at risk of disease and death to further his own political standing and agenda for re-election said no lockdown, the “blue” states - those run by Democrat governors - ignored him and instituted lockdowns anyway. As President, he could not overrule this disobedience legally, though he would try, or encourage others to try, through other means.

Britain, meanwhile, was sticking to - and now announcing - its policy of herd immunity. While Trump’s administration was also considering this but had come to no official position on it, since the President didn’t think the virus even worth talking about, Johnson’s government came right out and said it, terrifying many of the older and more vulnerable Britons, who knew they were about to be served up as cannon fodder, sacrifices to be offered to the gods of Covid in the hope the younger, healthier ones would be spared. It was almost a deal with the devil. For Johnson, that bill would quickly become due, in a very personal way.

My own personal experiences of lockdown were these: first, being a sort of hermit myself, with no friends or social life to speak of and my sister to look after, it made not that much difference to me. The main change was that I soon had to switch to doing the weekly shop at a very early hour. I typically get up at 11:25, and before anyone gasps or sneers, I usually hit the pillow about 4:00 AM. Karen, my sister, is looked after in the morning by carers, for those who don’t already know, and they arrive at midday, so there’s not a lot of point my being up before that; I’d risk waking her with any noise I might make, and the chances are that I’d probably just fall asleep again anyway. Remember, 4 AM to 11 AM (roughly) is seven hours, the same as if you went to bed at midnight and got up at 7. So it’s not like I’m sleeping longer, just a different cycle, which over the years I’ve got used to and find hard to break.

Anyway, to minimise traffic and avoid queues Tescos set up special hours for those who were disabled, old or caring for someone to do their shopping in relative safety. These hours were from initially 7 AM to 9, but then, with typical changeability, the opening hours went from 7 AM to 8, so you only had the hour. This early shopping was necessary, because at the height of the pandemic, before the lockdown, queues were huge for Tescos, stretching right through the shopping centre, and you could literally be waiting for hours to get in. On the “special” time slot, there was no queue and you just walked in. This however meant I had to get up early, as I say: originally 6:30 for a 7:00 arrival, then changed to an hour later, but still meant I had to be rising at 7:30, four hours earlier than I had been used to. But it was necessary.

Other than that one shopping expedition, I didn’t go outside the house. At all. If I was forced to leave I would take a taxi, as conditions on the local transport were still up in the air as bus drivers fought against having to enforce the likes of social distancing or mask wearing, believing - probably with cause - that it was not part of their job to be “policing” their passengers, and having in any case little or no authority to ban anyone from boarding the bus if they did not comply with the directives. Taxis were more expensive, but simpler in the long run. I began trying to make arrangements with the local taxi firms to have my cats’ monthly food and medication collected from the vet’s in Fairview (about a half hour away by bus, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes by taxi) and restricted my shopping to the one day, and the one place.

Everything had to be sprayed down each morning before the carers came in, and though I did not wear a mask around Karen - who cannot wear one herself - feeling that I was doing my best to protect both myself and her when I rarely went out - I made sure to wear one whenever I went past the door. Hands were washed multiple times a day, to the point where my skin began to flake and get very sore from the repeated application of sanitiser and water, and hand cream or moisturiser would help but it still hurt. Dry, cracked fingers and knuckles was the order of the day. One thing lockdown did help with was that there were no more unsolicited knocks at the door. Nobody rang our bell, smilingly asking if we wanted to switch electricity vendors, or change our broadband supplier, or help headless children in Africa or whatever. No junk mail (hardly any mail at all) and no unwanted callers.

Outside, it was as if the world had died. Quiet, but not a peaceful quiet. The quiet of dread, of anticipated horror. The kind of silence I imagined you got just before a big battle, or before that meeting where your company’s future might be discussed and decided. No sounds of traffic. No children playing. No ice cream van tinkling. No voices. No laughter. No music. It was as if the world was holding its breath, afraid to let it out. For future lockdowns we would be a bit more blase, but this time we all feared the worst. It was, after all, something entirely and frighteningly new to us. Kids, who initially no doubt thought the idea of schools closing a great one, found to their chagrin and annoyance that they were not allowed play outside; they had to remain indoors, and that was no fun! Might as well be in school! Parents, too, risked being driven mad by their bored children, many gamely trying to provide some sort of home-school education for them as the days turned to weeks and the weeks to months.

A famous video in Ireland (you can see it above) shows a deserted Grafton Street, usually one of the busiest shopping areas in Dublin, eerily quiet as a fox walks along the pavement. This showed how few people were abroad (obviously there was one: the one taking the video, but it shows no other human as the camera pans and follows after the seemingly-oblivious animal) that a creature which usually shuns human company could come out into the open, walk along one of the city’s premier shopping streets, and not encounter a living soul. That fox almost epitomised and symbolised the loneliness of Ireland, the retreat of mankind from its streets, the removal of the human presence from the world. It was almost as if the animals were about to take over, leaving us trembling and scared behind our doors and windows, looking out and wondering if the world would ever be ours again?

As lockdowns spread, the world began to slow, and then grind to a shuddering halt. With nobody in the factories, nothing was being manufactured. Even if it had been, there were no truck drivers or airline pilots or ship captains to take them to their destination, all transport having by now ceased. Supplies began to run low, and again for some reason toilet paper was a commodity everyone had to have. I remember going into Tescos and remarking that it was like a supermarket in Russia or something: no milk, no bread, no cheese, no eggs. Very little of anything, and what there was, really oddly, was NOT rationed. Tesco could easily have said “one or two per customer”, but they didn’t, perhaps not wishing to hurt their already fragile bottom line, and so ignorant and greedy people were able to snap up the bulk of everything. I remember seeing one woman pushing a trolley that was literally filled with nothing other than packets of rice. She must have had hundreds of them in there. She probably still has half of them today.

This belligerent bulk and panic buying is one reason I was glad I was able to take advantage of the special shopping hours. Anything that did come in had just been put out on the shelves, and so I was able to get most of what I needed, things that would surely have long been sold out had I to wait for “normal” shopping hours. More than once I was stopped on the way in, told this was only for the old and disabled. I then told the guard I was a carer and was let pass. He never asked for any proof, which led me to believe that some of the very young people I would see from time to time there at what should have been specially set aside shopping hours for the vulnerable looked very young to be carers! But no identification was asked for, so there was no way to know. The irony being of course that, assuming they were not carers at fifteen or sixteen, some of those people may have been infecting others without knowing, or indeed caring about it.

Essential items for a world threatened by a pandemic soon sold out. Surgical gloves could not be got for love nor money, masks were out of stock, sanitiser for the hands was like gold dust. People tried making their own versions of the latter. Anywhere there happened to be old stock of anything in demand, the price suddenly sky-rocketed: it was a seller’s market, and the pharmacies were not about to lose the opportunity to make a buck. Symptoms of the disease were also vague: a high fever, aches and pains, cough. Not much more was known, but suffice to say, and I’m sure you felt it too, every time you got a bad cough your heart sunk to your knees. I recall having a very bad, hacking cough just prior to this all blowing up, and wondering if it had anything to do with an infection, but it passed luckily.

In April the thing I feared happened. Karen got sick. Not with Covid, but her pain was so bad that hospital was unavoidable. At first they wouldn’t even let me go in the ambulance with her, but when I explained that she couldn’t speak or make herself understood without me, they made an exception. It was like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie, arriving at the hospital and seeing all the people in suits and masks, tents set up outside for treatment of Covid patients. The hospital, like all others in Ireland and like every other establishment in the country other than those on the “essentials” list (shops, vets, doctors’ surgeries etc) was on lockdown, and I was sent home once she was admitted. I spent four terrified days at home on my own, hoping against hope that she would be all right. In the end, luckily, she was, and she returned to our locked-down house little the worse for wear. That trip to the hospital was my first, and really only direct experience of the fear and chaos that had gripped Ireland, and of course the world in general.

The idea of being able to literally walk right across the road without waiting for traffic lights or check for traffic was invigorating in an odd way. I don’t think I’d ever seen roads so completely empty before. It wouldn’t be this way for our second lockdown, but for now everyone was staying off the road. Fear gripped the country, fear gripped the world, and fear can have a very powerful and paralysing effect.

Until, inevitably, it wears off.

And that's when the real trouble begins.

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Around this time (early March) China, where the whole thing had kicked off, seemed to have reached critical mass and was now holding steady at around 80,000 cases. It was still the largest number of cases and deaths in the world (though it would soon be surpassed) but given that case numbers were hardly increasing at all, the government now began to turn worldwide quarantine policy on its head, and began screening any travellers into the country, in case foreigners were bringing new cases into China. Quite a turnaround, really, in less than five months. Meanwhile we began preparing for a full lockdown, with all bars and restaurants told to close permanently from midnight on March 15. Allah wasn’t protecting his people either, as the Grand Ayatollah of Iran, Hashem Bathaie Golpayenagi, died from the virus. Ireland’s cases topped 200.

People continued to ignore or resist health advice, putting personal and religious freedoms ahead of their safety and that of others. In Malaysia, a religious festival where thousands gathered saw a spike of over 125 cases, bringing the country’s total to over 500. Celebrities began to be hit: Tom Hanks, Idris Elba and Rita Wilson were all confirmed as positive for Coronavirus. While Spain, Italy and Ireland shut down - a mandated lockdown; no suggestions or advice, just do it - the UK took a more nuanced, some might say cowardly approach that might absolve them of the blame which would later be attached to countries who had forced their citizens to stay indoors and out of work for their own safety.

Johnson told his people they “should” stay at home, wash their hands, work from home if possible, and avoid pubs, restaurants and night clubs, while still allowing those facilities to remain open. Schools were not closed, and nobody was forced to stay at home, leading to a great percentage of the British public either shrugging and going in to work anyway, or being told by their bosses there was no support for them working from home and they had better haul their backsides into work or be fired. Once again, leadership was weak and most people were thinking in terms of their pocket and not their health, especially employers, who seemed to look upon the whole “stay-at-home” thing as unnecessary and over the top.

Further confusing things, the British government closed all theatres and cinemas, and advised anyone who had a cough or a high temperature to stay at home - isolation, another word we would become horribly intimate with - away from everyone. If this happened in a setting of more than two people, then everyone had to isolate. The virus had now been generally confirmed to be attacking two types of people: the old and those with what were termed “underlying medical conditions”, which as you can imagine scared the shit out of me, with Karen having MS. Initial reports of the deaths in Ireland confirmed this; almost every time we read of one it was someone in their eighties or nineties, and/or who had an existing condition. That’s how it was, until suddenly it wasn’t.

New issues began to come to the fore, particularly for Britain, later for Ireland and the USA. The first was the scarcity of ICU beds. Intensive Care Units had traditionally only been needed for the very sick, or for those recovering from a major operation. It’s in the name: when you’re there you get intensive care - round-the-clock surveillance, meds as you need them, constant observation and the best the hospital can offer. Coma patients might be in ICU, car crash victims, those suffering from cancer. Generally speaking, they tended not to be used as much as “normal” wards, with most people admitted into hospital there for a short time or maybe a long stay, but nothing that would require that sort of care, at least not constantly. Covid changed all that.

Because it attacks the respiratory system, the lungs, those contracting it find it hard to breathe. Therefore they must be provided oxygen through what are known as ventilators, and this cannot stop while the person is sick. There’s no such thing as moving a critically-ill person with Covid to another ward and out of ICU. They would die, and in fact, sadly, so many people would die in ICU wards across the world that they would begin to resemble battlezones, as if these were soldiers fighting in some horrible war they could not win, and kept dying. But more of that later. Right now, I just want to use this as a way to illustrate - if it needs to be - how desperate hospitals were for ICU beds.

And ventilators.

Not a terrible amount of point having an ICU ward without ventilators, and supply of these was running out as demand rose exponentially and to a level never before expected, or provided for. This would soon become a crisis, as companies in other industries would be asked to turn their manufacturing efforts towards making more ventilators as the world cried out for oxygen. And then there was the other side of the ICU equation. What about the people who needed intensive care, but who did not have Covid? What about the heart attack patients, the cancer patients, those with other respiratory conditions? How would they be looked after if their beds, as it were, were occupied by people suffering from Covid?

Interestingly, Boris Johnson had just been handed a memo from Oxford Imperial College, bemoaning the response of his government to the pandemic so far, and warning that if things did not change, if proper action was not taken, up to half a million people could be expected to die from the disease.

Finally, months after allowing people to travel from country to country spreading the virus, a worldwide travel ban was put in place. Sport suffered another setback as the Euro 2020 Football Tournament, which involves, or can involve, most of Europe, was postponed, not cancelled, but would not take place until the following year. Even in lockdown, Ireland’s cases kept multiplying, giving us by the middle of March a total of nearly 400, with, thankfully, only two deaths at this point. Italy, leading the field, was heading for the 40,000 mark with cases and now had almost as many deaths from Covid as had perished in the 9/11 attacks on America. Speaking of the Land of the Free, they were climbing towards 10,000 cases with 150 deaths. Trump continued to ignore the emergency. He played a lot of golf.

On March 18 schools closed in Scotland and Wales, but not in England. People began to worry about losing their jobs as businesses, shops and offices closed, nobody able to say for sure when they would be able to open again, nobody certain of getting their job back if and when they did. The stock markets began to crash, as the world hurtled towards an economic depression, just to add fuel to the already-blazing fire. On March 19, though following the example of Scotland and Wales - albeit later - in closing schools, Johnson confidently declared that “London will never be locked down.” I think a lot of people in the UK now realised this man is an idiot, a dangerous one, and that they couldn’t trust a thing he said. Still, he was in power and there was no way around that, so they had to bite the bullet and do as they were told.

Around this point President Trump started talking about the benefits of Hydroxychloroquine, which seems to be some sort of drug used to treat malaria. He also considered the possibility of people drinking bleach to “clean out the virus”. However we won’t be going into his possibly insane response to the pandemic here, as we will be going country-by-country in later chapters and you can bet that America will take up a few! For now, it seemed Italy had risen to the top of the dungheap and been awarded the first prize gold medal nobody wanted: deaths in Italy now outstripped even those of China, though for now it had only half the amount of cases, around 40,000. Despite being ostensibly on lockdown since early in the month, it was revealed that a visiting doctor from China saw people walking around, going into shops, eating in restaurants in Milan, and could not believe it. One reason for the high volume of cases in Italy was advanced as their population being so old, with the second-oldest population in the world. As the majority of people succumbing to the virus were over 70, that certainly made sense. The other point might have been to have actually observed the fucking lockdown, guys!

Speaking of which, Johnson finally grasped the nettle and ordered businesses to close. No suggestions, no advice, no requests, it’s a Nike thing. Just do it. He still seemed to think that Britain could beat the virus in three months. I get the feeling (though at the time I wasn’t following British response to the pandemic, having enough to do to keep monitoring our own) that he thought this was his chance to be Churchillian, to treat the threat of the pandemic as a kind of twenty-first century blitz and rally the people behind him against the menace. The problem there is that the virus is not a sentient thing, not a country, not a state, not a dictator, not even an idea. It didn’t care what mentality the British had, because it was and is incapable of caring. It has no free will, or will of any kind. It’s a bunch of cells that destroys other cells and replicates itself, and that’s all it does. It doesn’t stop to consider how good or bad you are, whether you’ve followed the advice or willfully ignored it. It doesn’t care. It never did. It never could. So Churchillian speeches and a “stiff upper lip” meant nothing to it.

At this point, it would be unfair and inaccurate to say Italy stood alone, but it was the top hot-spot for the virus, and its hospital systems were collapsing in on themselves. News reports from that country made it look as if there had been some natural disaster or a thousand bombs had gone off all over the city. It looked like a warzone. Terrified of the escalating crisis, the government tightened up restrictions, confining all people to their houses regardless. The most scary thing about this scene, as we watched it on Tv and listened, as it were, to the silence, saw the ghostly, empty streets haunted by only the spectre of the Coronavirus and with no living human to be seen, was that it was something which would, inevitably, and quite soon, be heading in our own direction. As Kent Brockman once said about “giant alien ants”, one thing was sure: there was no stopping it. The virus would soon be here.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Chapter II: My Country, Wrong or Right -
Individual Nations Respond to the Pandemic

I’ve spent a good deal of time outlining what happened at the start of this pandemic, how it grew from a few infected Chinese in some town nobody heard of or cared about (let’s be brutally honest) to an event of concern and finally to a worldwide panic as a danger we had never experienced in our lives (SARS? Hardly touched us. Foot and Mouth? We got through it. Bird Flu? Pah!) descended on our comfortable way of life and gleefully began ripping it apart like a pride of lions chasing gazelle across the Serengeti, or something. This was something completely new to us, which might to some extent explain why we were all so slow to react to it. I personally feel - as I felt at the time - that we were all kind of in denial. Nobody wanted to believe this was going to be as bad as it got, and so nobody did. We all adopted the equivalent position of someone sitting on the floor, hands over their ears screaming no no no!

But we couldn’t stop it, and our denials were useless. It was coming, and we had no choice but to try to prepare ourselves as best we could to weather the storm.

In this next chapter I’m going to look at how individual countries reacted to the news. How they prepared, how they informed, or didn’t, their citizenry, what help if any they offered and how many countries basically self-isolated while others tried to assist their neighbours. The pandemic has, as I said earlier, brought both the best and the worst out of humanity, and here I’ll be looking at how that attitude was distributed across the countries of the world. As we’re pretty much only talking about the outbreak here, I won’t be cataloguing each country’s total response to the pandemic, but just the first few months, usually comprising their first lockdown (if they had any), and generally up to a half-arbitrary date of June 2020.

In the case of the USA I’ll be doing it by state, as some states never did anything about the virus, while others locked down. Some, such as Texas and Florida, actually made the situation worse by legislating against mask and vaccine mandates, and encouraging their people to resist the efforts by the CDC and the government to protect them. We’ll be looking at those, probably in alphabetical order, or we may do it by blue/red states, or even just do the ones first that had lockdowns. Haven’t quite decided that yet.

I won’t of course be doing every country, but will be concentrating, inasmuch as I can, on those that had the biggest cases, those which entered lockdown first, those which had the most deaths and of course those who ignored, or tried to ignore it. This won’t be done alphabetically, but I think I will try to do it chronologically, as cases grew and deaths began to be reported. That being said, I am going to start with the three countries - or at least, with respect to smaller nations, the three significant countries - who decided to implement lockdowns first.

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Trollheart

Before I start, a few notes, which pertain to asterisks shown in the data sheets to follow:

* Refers to the first lockdown, if there were subsequent ones

** At time of writing here refers literally to when I wrote this, not when I posted it. Sadly, as cases continue to mount, even with vaccines, this figure may already have increased by the time I post this, never mind by the time you get around to reading it. The same caveat applies to vaccine uptake and current status.

*** Each country is scored, by me, on a scale of 1 to 100. 1 is a country whose people and/or government not only did not listen to the advice but went against it and which is now in a worse state because of it (and probably has the highest cases/deaths and lowest vaccine uptake) while 100 is a shining example of how to get through this with as little deaths as possible.

++ refers only to the party in power when the pandemic hit, ie from 2020, if the government changed during that time.

+++ Reaction level is based on how the public, generally, reacted to the lockdown. Were they supportive, resistant? Did they abide by it? Did it spark protests and/or violence? The level goes from 1 to 10, with 10 being total agreement and compliance and 1 being total anarchy and revolt.

Current Status: This is on a sliding scale and indicated by a letter, with a country "back to normal", in as much as any can be after two years of this pandemic, going into three, with industry back up and running, schools open, travel re-established and the population all or mostly vaccinated being ranked as A, down to a country still battling the ravages of Covid, probably not still under lockdown (as I don't think anywhere is now) but definitely struggling to recover. Letter not yet decided, possibly D or E.

Score is out of 100, and takes into account both the amount of cases/deaths, what the initial response was from government, and how the country is now.

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Trollheart

Country: Italy
Continent: Europe (Western)
Governing Party:++ Coalition of M5M and Lega
Political affiliation: Unitary (don't ask me: I've tried to figure it out - is this a left, right leaning or centrist, or other government? Dunno).
Main crisis leaders: Guiseppe Conte, Prime Minister
Status of country: Republic
Cases (at time of lockdown):* 9,172
Deaths (at time of lockdown) 463
Cases (at time of writing):** Over 18 million
Deaths (at time of writing): over 168,000
Date of first lockdown: March 9 2020
Duration: 70 days
Lockdown type: Full
Number of lockdowns (to date): Two
Result of lockdown(s): Initially pretty useless till they were finally enforced. By then, of course, that horse was already galloping across the fields and out of sight. Nobody took it seriously. Italy resembled a warzone. Eventually the government was forced to implement the strictest lockdown outside of China.
Reaction level: +++ 8
Vaccine uptake (at time of writing): 80 - 90 %
Current status (at time of writing): A
Score:*** 60

There’s probably a case, unfortunately, to point to Italy as a prime example of the belief that lockdowns don’t work. The first major country to instigate such measures, they still ended up racing to the top of the charts, so to speak, overtaking even China in the number of deaths in the country and easily taking second place with amount of cases until the USA caught up and overtook everyone. But the story of the road taken to the Italian lockdown might explain that in some part. It began in February, which you would think was pretty early, and it was; however the staggered approach may have been a problem. As everyone knows by now, and can remember, the main trouble spot in Italy was the area of Lombardy, in the northwest. Cases were spiking here and hospitals were coming under increasing pressure.

Like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel, the Italian government under Giuseppe Conte proclaimed Red Zones and Yellow Zones in the north of the country. Red Zones were under quarantine, and there were penalties for moving from them to the safer Yellow Zones, though there was no restriction within the actual Red Zones. This looks to me (and I haven’t fully researched it) like all the government were doing was putting a bunch of people together who might have been, or might going to be infected, and keeping them away from everyone else. Of course, that’s the very idea of a quarantine, but while this would save anyone outside of, say, Lombardy or Veneto’s Red Zones from being infected, it didn’t do much to help those inside the zones who were, or would be. The Italian military were called in to patrol the Red Zones, and these people must have felt a little like they were being forced into or contained within a ghetto.

Within the Red Zones, schools were closed, public events cancelled and church services curtailed. For an intensely religious and Catholic country such as Italy, the very heart of the Catholic Church, that must have hurt. Train and bus services were halted, and even outside of the Red Zones, within these municipalities, sporting events were now called off too. The closing days of the Carnival of Venice were cancelled, and anyone exhibiting symptoms of Covid was told not to go to hospital but to phone a special emergency number. Famous tourists attractions such as the Milan Cathedral and St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice closed. Italy was heading towards full lockdown.

The Ocean Viking, carrying migrants to the country, was quarantined for two weeks in Sicily, and people began panic buying, emptying the shelves at the local supermarkets. Tom Cruise’s latest Mission: Impossible instalment fulfilled the promise of its own title, and was cancelled, having been filming in Venice. Those who could, worked from home. Schools and universities began to close, as did the courts. In the Red Zone, under medical advice, people no longer shook hands or kissed each other on the cheek, which for Italians was surely as hard as not being able to go to mass, but would become common practice as we learned how Covid spread through droplets and human skin contact. At the same time, a report by the DW.Com website said that very few people in the Red Zones wore or believed they needed to wear masks. This might partially have been due to the scarcity, and thus the higher price, of such items.

Despite being supposedly quarantined though, it seemed, according to the same report, that police officers who were meant to be enforcing the thing were letting just about anyone through, if they had “a good story”. Clearly, at this early point in the unfolding story of the virus, few people were taking it seriously enough; almost everyone thought the government was being heavy-handed and bemoaned the closing of public events and the lack of football. With the churches all closed, funerals were a problem, as would become the case certainly throughout Europe if not the world; one resident noted with horror that a victim of the virus could not have their funeral and their coffin had to be carried directly to the cemetery.

The tourist industry took a big hit as some events were cancelled and ones previously booked were now unable to gain permission to go ahead. Fairs, exhibitions, expositions, all were cancelled or postponed. On March 4 all schools and universities in Italy were ordered to close, and all sporting events to take place behind closed doors (without spectators) until April 3. March 8 the measures in the Red Zones were dramatically tightened and the next day all of Italy went on complete lockdown. It was the first national lockdown in Europe.

The sad thing was that it kind of wouldn’t matter: the damage had been done. At the time the lockdown was imposed Italy had a total of 9,172 cases and 463 deaths. The very day after the cases pushed through the 10,000 mark and deaths rose to over 600. By the end of the first week after lockdown cases figures had doubled to over 20,000 and deaths had more than tripled to over 2,000. Perhaps if the people in the Red Zones had taken things seriously enough and not wandered from zone to zone as if this was some annoying inconvenience instead of their lives they were risking, and the lives of others, case numbers might have been easier to control. I know, I know: Captain Hindsight. But when you read the accounts of Italians living in the quarantined zones now, over a year later, you just feel like shaking them and saying “wake the fuck up! Your country is about to become all but a national cemetery!”

There were riots in the prisons as conjugal visits were prohibited, and several prisoners in various jails died. Others took advantage of the confusion to escape, apparently. Realising that people who can’t work because everything is closed down by their orders, the government introduced the world’s first “pandemic payments” system, which they called the Curia. It consisted of "funds to strengthen the Italian health care system and civil protection (€3.2 billion); measures to preserve jobs and support income of laid-off workers and self-employed (€10.3 billion); other measures to support businesses, including tax deferrals and postponement of utility bill payments in most affected municipalities (€6.4 billion); as well as measures to support credit supply (€5.1 billion)."

Many other countries would find they would have to follow suit. A grim development on March 19 saw the army come out on the streets, not to maintain order or enforce lockdown, but to get the bodies of the dead to the crematoria. There were just too many to be handled by normal means: by now Italy was the country with the most deaths from the virus in the world, surpassing even China with 3,405, and dealing with over 40,000 cases. The next day, exercise was strictly limited to one person alone rather than groups and only within a short distance of one’s own home. Industry began to shut down across Italy, and heavy fines - and even threatened prison sentences (which sort of made little sense, as the prisons were in a hell of a state, but they probably meant after the lockdown) - were imposed on anyone breaking the lockdown regulations. This was deadly serious, and there would be no more tipping the wink to a guard and slipping out of your house to visit a mate, or go for a walk. The only thing walking the Italian streets now was Death. (Yes, yes, very poetic, Trollheart, give it a rest…)

On April 1 the lockdown was officially extended to April 13, with all ports and airports closed on April 8, and two days later Conte extended the lockdown into May, with a hopeful gradual restart set for May 4. By now the country’s death toll had climbed almost to 20,000, with cases now reaching a record 150,000. Only the USA surpassed this, with over half a million cases and a comparable number of deaths to Italy. Worldwide, the coronavirus was responsible for close to 107,000 deaths with 2 million cases. Italy’s medical community was being hit hard, with the death of 100 doctors announced.

Schools were to stay closed until September, but industry could begin a slow comeback from May 18, with people allowed to move freely, but only within their own region. On June 3 the first lockdown officially ended. By now the country had suffered over 30,000 deaths and had in excess of 220,000 cases. A second lockdown would begin in October as the second wave of the virus hit.

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Trollheart

Country: Spain
Continent: Europe
Governing Party:++ PSOE (Spanish Socialists’ Workers Party)
Political affiliation: Democratic/Socialist
Main crisis leaders:++ Pedro Sánchez
Status of country: Kingdom
Cases (at time of lockdown:* 5,232
Deaths (at time of lockdown) + 1,000
Cases (at time of writing):** 12,890,002
Deaths (at time of writing): 108.259
Date of first lockdown: March 15 2020
Duration: 98 days
Lockdown type: Gradual, from “state of alarm” (March 13) to full lockdown (March 15) to gradual re-opening of services through de-escalation in certain areas and for certain services.
Number of lockdowns (to date): 2
Result of lockdown(s): First one lifted too soon, as once this was done the infection rate skyrocketed, making Spain the country in Europe with the highest total of cases.
Reaction level:+++ 6
Vaccine uptake (at time of writing): 79%
Current status (at time of writing): Back to normal, as it were
Score:*** 64

Spain was another country whose name would become synonymous with Covid, and find its tourist industry decimated by the sheer volume of cases it would deal with over the next two years. Initially slow to restrict travel from China, the government believed this to be "xenophobic and reactionary", possibly in part because the measure was called for by the opposition. Unlike Italy though, Spain’s first case did not occur on the mainland but in the Canary Islands, when a German tourist was tested and came back positive for the virus on January 31. The second was also on an island, this time Palma de Mallorca, and this time a British tourist who had had contact with a French infected person. This was February 9, and three days later Barcelona cancelled its lucrative Mobile World Congress. The following day Spain recorded its first death.

The spectre of the horror unfolding to the northeast in Italy came with a vengeance to Spain on February 24, when a doctor from Lombardy who had been on holiday in Tenerife tested positive. The hotel he had been staying at was placed under lockdown. This was the first real action Spain took in relation to lockdowns, although it was very local and specific. Over the next week, Italians in Spain began testing positive and the caseload went up. By the end of the month there were 58 cases in Spain, one of which was responsible for the first case in Ecuador, a woman returning from holiday in Spain bringing the virus to the South American country. On March 8, as the government dithered and the opposition fumed, a planned march for International Women’s Day went ahead and a big football game was not called off. After this, Spain’s figures doubled, with 1,231 cases and 32 deaths the very next day (not that much in one day I mean, just that the previous day cases had stood at 616 and deaths at 17, so basically, whether it was to do with the two events - which surely it must have been - there were another 615 cases and another 15 deaths announced).

Regional governors such as the Catalan began suspending events, but still there was no lockdown nor any travel restrictions. Schools shut down from March 12, but again this seems to have been an independent decision by the establishments, not an order received from the government. This came, more or less, the next day in the announcement of a “state of alarm” (basically a watered-down version of a state of emergency; I suppose to some extent you could call it a state of mild worry?) and then at last a national lockdown from March 15 was imposed. By now Spain was heading for the 10,000 mark in cases and had recorded over 300 deaths. Like Italy before it, Spain announced a support package for those who would be out of work due to the lockdown, theirs comprising 200 billion Euro. A moratorium was put on mortgage payments, signed into law by the King of Spain, Juan Carlos, and efforts begun to research to find a vaccine.

On March 22 the lockdown was extended into April, and, a grim reminder of how many deaths there were - over 1,000 now - one of the ice rinks in Madrid was converted into a temporary morgue. This was a sight we would see in other countries too, a harrowing visual representation of the threat the virus posed, and a reminder to those who dismissed Covid as “a small flu.” As more and more medical staff were found to be positive and unable to work, and the hospitals and care homes began to creak at the seams, a horrible discovery was made. Old people left abandoned in retirement homes, left, presumably, to die while their so-called carers saved their own skins. Like I said, the pandemic showed us the best and the worst of humanity, and this was certainly a bitter example of the latter.

Spain’s head of the Centre for Health Emergencies, Fernando Simon, tested positive on March 30. Simon was the face of the daily coronavirus briefings, so I imagine it would be as if Dr. Faucci had caught the virus. At this point there were over 64,000 cases in Spain, and over 4,000 deaths. The lockdown was again extended, this time to the end of April. Finally, from the beginning of April cases began to slow down, and the peak of the first wave seemed to have been reached. As case numbers dropped, Spain began partially re-opening, from April 13, with a phased de-escalation in four sections resulting in the country coming fully out of lockdown on midsummer’s day, June 21. Case numbers had risen to over 220,000 and deaths to over 25,000. For a country whose government confidently predicted that there would only be a “handful” of cases - not deaths now, cases - this was a stunning shock and probably seen as hubris by the Spanish government. Mind you, as we’ll see, and as we know, very few countries took this pandemic as seriously as they should, so we can’t be too hard on Spain. They were only saying what every other government was saying.

As would be the case almost always after lockdown was eased, people went mad with their freedoms restored, and inevitably the case numbers, and deaths, began to climb again, leading in Spain’s case to a reinstitution of lockdown from October.

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Trollheart

Country: Denmark
Continent: Scandinavia, Northern Europe
Governing Party:++ Social Democrats
Political affiliation: Left I guess
Main crisis leaders:++ Mette Frederiksen (Prime Minister), Queen Margrethe II
Status of country: Kingdom
Cases (at time of lockdown:* 674
Deaths (at time of lockdown) 1
Cases (at time of writing):** 2,519,057
Deaths (at time of writing): 4,250
Date of first lockdown: March 12
Duration: 33 days
Number of lockdowns (to date): 2
Reaction level+++: 90
Vaccine uptake (at time of writing): 82%
Score:*** 95

When Covid first popped its ugly head into our world, and we began to learn about - and later to fear - it, the initial contacts were always from China, where the whole thing had kicked off. But as you read above in its entry, China was pretty soon superseded by Italy as the go-to place for infections, and so anyone coming from there was liable to carry the virus on its travels. Such was the case for Denmark, where the first two cases came, not only from Italy but from Lombardy, the very first major hot-spot in terms of the virus. Denmark might have been somewhat isolated, being up there in the far north and kind of removed from the rest of Europe, but once one of its citizens decided “You know what? I fancy a skiing holiday. Wonder where I’ll go? Oh, Italy looks nice!” they were screwed. Dragged down into the morass with the rest of us, Denmark recorded its first case pretty early, at the end of February. A third case resulted from a conference held in Germany, and Denmark was well on its way.

Iran had also by now become quite the place to go if you yearned for Covid in your life, and so it came to pass that the country’s tenth case in all (seven more from Italy had already been found) had been to the Islamic Republic, and as March got going the Danish authorities were not that bothered, only ensuring anyone infected (ten up to now, as I said) self-isolated at home. Of course it wouldn’t stay that way, and twelve days into the new month the country would be on lockdown. Prior to that though, they must have thought there was hope, as their “Patient Zero” recovered fully. Meanwhile, Danish - and, by association, Dutch - sport began to be affected, as a player for one of the national teams was infected, leading to his teammates and those in the teams that had played them recently having to quarantine. Ajax (pronounced eye-yax) from Holland had been involved, so also had to isolate. As the country entered lockdown on March 12, whether she wished to evoke a “blitz mentality” or whether she really believed this to be the worst crisis her country had faced since then, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen invoked the words used by her predecessor at the onset of World War II, calling for samfundssind, or a sense of community spirit, to get the country through this difficult time.

Like most countries, the level and speed of escalation was frightening. From a “mere” 53 cases on March 9 the figure had jumped to a massive 674 in just three days as the country entered lockdown. On this same day, Thomas Kahlenberg, the footballer who had originally tested positive, recovered, but on the other side of the scales, Denmark registered what could have been its first death. I say could have, because the man in question did exhibit symptoms, and died of a heart attack, but the link between the two could not be proven. He might have had his heart attack and died anyway. He was eighty when he died, and had had a history of heart problems. Another man died in similar circumstances on March 14, almost the same age.

Denmark, like most of its neighbours, recognised the vulnerability of the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions to the virus, and so grandparents were asked to stay away from their grandchildren, and as we all had to do, they self isolated. Schools were closed (I’m sure, like here, the hurrahs soon faded as the kids realised they couldn’t go outside to play) and the order to work from home where possible was instated. A sight soon to be familiar to us all, large and then smaller gatherings of people were banned, shops, restaurants and night clubs were closed, leaving only essential outlets such as groceries and pharmacies open, and sporting events were cancelled. On March 14 Denmark closed its borders, and only commercial vehicles delivering vital supplies were allowed on the roads, along with a few other specific exceptions, such as people returning home to Denmark, which any Dane abroad was advised/instructed to do without delay.

This seems odd to me. I suppose nobody wanted to trap or hold anyone in the country, but the government allowed any non-Dane to leave, and at this point their country had over 600 cases. True, there had not been many deaths, but still, you’re talking about letting someone leave a country which has infections, potentially allowing them to spread the virus to wherever they lived, which might at that time have been a Covid-free zone. Just seems a little irresponsible to me, but then, many countries would of course put their own interests first as the pandemic grew and spread across the world, and everyone looked to their own safety. The idea, too, of Danes being allowed to come home? Did they check where they were coming from? Was it likely they were returning from Italy, Iran, Spain? China? Was anyone tested on re-entering the country?
I don’t have those answers.

Look, we were all learning about this damned virus, and it’s not fair to, nor will I, place the blame for poor information or guidance on one health authority in one country - the CDC kept changing tack, and so did the WHO, and these are two biggest health authorities on the planet, so what chance had Demark got? Nevertheless, they did get it wrong, they said on April 10, when they agreed with the general consensus around the world that asymptomatic cases (those not showing any symptoms at first) could also transmit the virus, where before they had said there was no danger from this. In effect, this led to workers continuing in jobs - particularly in nursing homes and medical facilities - who turned out to be positive but originally asymptomatic, with the resultant transmission of the virus to those they came in contact with.

And then, there was that touch of mink.

We all read about how mink on a farm in Jutland were found to be infected by a mutated form of the virus, and had already transmitted the new variant to humans, so the mink were culled. Rich women everyone must have gasped in shock, as no doubt did animal rights groups. A new lockdown was instigated for Jutland, beginning November 6, the national one having been lifted April 13. On Christmas Day Denmark would enter its second lockdown, which would last three months into the new year, however this year they became the first country, not only in Europe but in the world to suspend their vaccination programme, so they must now be doing all right.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018