Lockdown Part 1: Start of 2020

I flew to Cyprus on March 2nd. Coronavirus was in the news but at that stage I don't think it was even called Covid-19. It was at the “novel cornavirus“ stage. A fancy way of saying new virus.

There were certainly no cases in Cyprus and very few in the UK, still less than a cruise ship called the Diamond Princess, so no big deal. It didn't seem like anything to worry about despite things being whipped up. I did take hand gel to Heathrow with me, something I’d never normally do, and immediately left it on the table in Spoons in T5. I got the usual 11:45am flight and an annoying group of Cypriot school kids wearing masks and carrying hand gel grouped around where I was sitting in the typical way people do without any awareness of why they were actually wearing masks. Staying away from people was, and remains, the most effective way to not catch germs.

In Cyprus, all was normal.

I spent the week working in the Ministry of Finance in Nicosia. Obviously they have close links to the Ministry of Health so I was hearing stories about Coronavirus being discussed. For me, all I really cared about was getting home at the end of the following week. I was hearing news from the U.K. of daily broadcasts by Boris. By the Friday a case had been confirmed in Cyprus. It was a Doctor who had flown into the island from the UK on the same flight as me but on the Tuesday.

I was due to be on site the following week but the client started worrying - with inbound foreigners being the top worry, so they asked that I worked remotely and not come in. This was fine for me, the apartments had air con, the Ministry didn't! I decided not to bother bringing my flights forward, it will all be fine!

However, on Tuesday at 11am the Cypriot Government announced that any arrivals from the UK in the last 2 weeks would have to quarantine for 14 days. By 5pm they had reversed that decision. I'm assuming that the British military and all the holiday makers who had recently arrived made the Cypriots realise that this was a knee jerk reaction they couldn't stick by. However, I decided to change my flight to get home, leaving Wednesday 11th.

Before I left I briefly crossed over with 3 colleagues who were in Cyprus, one who had just returned from Seville where there was a high number of cases, one who's son had just returned from a skiing trip in Italy where the first European peak was in full swing with hospitals being over whelmed. None of this I knew at the time.

Passport control at the airport checked which flight I arrived on. I think if I had been on the Doctors flight, I would have been asked to stay at the apartment for 2 weeks. Fortunately I escaped and got home.

On getting home, things in the UK escalated from Johnson shaking hands with people and saying there is nothing to worry about, to a rapid escalation. You couldn't predict what would happen next, things changed by the day. I had my last haircut in February and my hairdresser was just opening a new branch. I bumped into him and congratulated him, saying I needed by haircut so I would see him on Friday 20th March.

I certainly never expected schools to shut and I had never experienced a lockdown, but by Friday 20th March, that's what happened. Everything closed. We were only allowed out to shop and exercise. I had not made it to the hairdressers. By the end of March I was coughing, temperature increasing, breathing was becoming laboured and for a couple of days I was flat out on the sofa. I recorded 800 steps on 25 March from a previous average of 8,000.

The panic buying had already started. Toilet rolls being the number 1 commodity. Flour also seemed to disappear overnight. I read an article saying that the availability of flour wasn't the issue especially because the commercial buyers like factories and restaurants were not buying their volume, but the ability to get that from its normal large bags used commercially into the small supermarket sized bags was limited. I live in a student area and I always respect their priorities. Cheap vodka and red wine was all gone.

I usually had a Tesco shop delivered every month and I received an email from Tesco asking that I leave slots for people who need them, those shielding or the elderly. That was fine with me and I changed my shopping habits to daily and weekly shopping and switched to a local butcher and greengrocer and a local refill shop.

The narrative is that this lockdown was necessary to save lives. I'm afraid, all I saw was people who were not only willing, but asking for Government controls of their lives, personal freedoms that were straight out of from dystopian fascist fantasy. Emergency laws were passed unnoticed and unchallenged and unchecked and none of us blinked an eye. Of course there was apparently a pandemic. But fast forward, were the numbers any worse than any flu season? Given that we'd not had a hard flu season for a couple of years (thereby keeping some of the older and weaker people alive) were the numbers of deaths any worse than what should have been expected? With hindsight are our death numbers for 2020 really any greater than normal? Of course you cannot win this argument because everyone will say, “but what if we didn’t, what if we didn’t“ and to that I would say, what % is it killing in each age group? It is any worse than, say suicide, of which we do very little to nothing about? Is the number of healthy people dying aged under 60 significant enough to justify such long term, long lasting economic damage? Couldn’t we have just shielded the over 60s and those at risk? All of the future economic damage will have an effect on life expectancy, and I suspect deaths from lockdown will be far greater than this virus.

I don't buy into the narrative that the Government really has our best interests at heart. If they did then perhaps don't run the NHS so close to the bone in normal winters leaving it close to falling apart. This is the usual strategy put in place to justify privatisation, reduce funding, people cry at how poor the service it, the service is privatised and people make a profit from it (at a greater cost to the taxpayer). And just because you flank yourself with Doctors and scientists when you make announcements, doesn't mean that you suddenly speak the gospel. Doctors have a great track record of being wrong just as much as anyone. Dressing up political decisions in science was just a con (in my unpopular view).

I also think this medical obsession with the preservation of life is wrong. If you're above average age and you die, yes, its sad for the family and friends, but its what's supposed to happen. If you have medical complaints that weakened your immunity, yes, its sad if you die, but your condition makes that a higher risk anyway. If that medical complaint is obesity, then YOU do something about that if you also expect me to do something about that. If you are old and your quality of life is low because of dementia, then yes, its still sad when you die, but we really should think twice before we prolong that life just because we can.

The media went into melt down and started demanding that we wore masks. This seemed odd to me as people on the streets in Bristol were showing no desire for this nor did they appear to be wearing mask voluntarily themselves when out. But despite the WHO clearly stating that there is NO evidence that masks can protect the wearer, and then little to no evidence that masks protect others, and only a small amount of evidence to say they may protect someone else, if worn properly (which no one does) the media hysteria and the Governments need to give the general public something that made them feel safe, masks because compulsory.

Despite my natural negativity to the Government encroaching on our private lives and personal freedom, I did comply with mask wearing in shops and wherever. I'm certainly not going to abuse a retail worker or security guard just because the Government makes shit rules and I am happy doing things which makes other people feel safer if thats whats needed.

I was willing to keep an open mind on Boris and wondered whether this would be his making. Fortunately, he stayed true to himself and the year panned out with him looking ever more inept and incompetent with a U-turn on virtually every decision and inexplicable rule which made following them pointless and confusing.

The first lockdown felt like a novelty. I hate to say there were good bits because I feel the whole thing was such a long term disaster and the a tragedy for people separated from dying loved ones, but there were some nice aspects, my change in shopping habits that I’ve mentioned being one. Adding a weekly Wilko shopping trip for plants also became strangely enjoyable, partly because it was the only thing to do.

Having the kids home from school felt nice (ignoring the huge damage being done to their life expectancy, and the life expectancy of their currently unborn children, due to the impact on their education). Nature did seem to recover. Greens became more green as I passed the summer lying in Queens Square looking up at the sky.

I did spend the summer focusing on looking after myself. Losing 2.5 stone in weight. Radically changing my diet and significantly reducing my alcohol intake. Ramping up my walking and exercise now averaging over 12,000 steps a day. All indicators of health went in the right direction.

There was a cloud in relation to what was going on which appeared to be affecting everyone's mental health in some way, whether it made them hide indoors, clean everything, ignore everything, fret about everything. It was a heightened sense of anxiety and uncertainty that became the norm. I stopped watching the news as the level of pointless rubbish designed to divide people or make people anxious seemed unnecessary.

I also tried to help, registering for the NHS responders app, but it was in the early days of chaos and no alerts came though. I logged my health on the Zoe/Kings College research Covid app as I guessed that may help. I walked by a police woman in an empty street standing outside premises that had suffered a fire and I got her a coffee to make her day slightly better.

Outside, the lack of cars on the road and no one in the city was an improvement. In February school children had gone on strike from school and Greta Thunberg marched with them through a wet Bristol appealing to people to drive less and fly less. The usual response was "we can't its the economy stupid".

The summer showed that apparently we can, if the will is there. In addition to this, my kids have also been a big inspiration to me to be more environmentally friendly, so with my increased walking and local shopping, I sold the car, putting action, as well as words into my own personal reduced use of fossil fuels.

A colleague who I work with in Cyprus gave me an update on the situation there, helpfully highlighting when I travelled to Cyprus in relation to when the pandemic started:

In the U.K., the Government assured us that the situation will get better before winter with a world class track and trace system being put in place. Each year the U.K. spends £30bn on its armed forces. All those warships, tanks and guns, soldiers, sailors and pilots. Plus all the support needed. The food, the uniforms, healthcare, accommodation. We get so much for that spend we can literally invade other countries. So when the Government spends £22bn on track and trace, we knew we could all rest assured that the U.K. would be on top of the pandemic before autumn. There would be no need for further lockdowns or to wait for a vaccine. Students could go to University in September and know that they wouldn’t be blamed for any spread because it would be contained, schools would re-open. You don't spend £22bn on something that delivers nothing.

Part 2 next week, how Lockdown 2020 ended.