Not Catching Covid – Audio Essay for BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme

Click to listen – running time 5 minutes, 30 seconds.

In his infamous “Sunday Address” on 10th May, Boris Johnson abandoned the Stay at Home message.

As a result, the UK lock-down is rapidly relaxing, and as it does so, we’ll increasingly be going about our business, but with the constant fear of catching the virus.

Trying to get back to normal, but everything – travel, the shops, bumping into friends – laced with anxiety.

Did I just make a mistake?  Did I just touch something I shouldn’t have touched?  Did that person just breathe on me?

At all costs, we have to avoid catching it. Right?

But, if you think about it, there’s something worse than going out and catching it….

Here’s my story about where I was on the day we gave up Contact Tracing, on 12th March….

About how I did something worse than going out and catching it.

And about the little flashbacks of trauma which I thought were behind me.

Click to listen – running time 5 minutes, 30 seconds.

This audio essay was written and recorded for BBC Radio Four’s Today Programme in the days following the abandonment of the Stay at Home message. It aired, in a slightly different version, on 26 May.


Thanks for listening. Please help me reach more like-minded folk, using the Facebook and Twitter buttons below. Thank you!

Come Sunday

For eleven days in March, our government put up its hands and offered a white flag to the virus.

It’s safe to say the virus was unmoved by that surrender.

Since then, it has taken 54,300 British lives.

Chris Giles, Economics Editor, Financial Times, 6 May 2020

And that’s a “cautious estimate”.

New cases are now rising, at 6,111 per day.

Worldometer, 7 May 2020

And that’s the official number.

Let’s just say that again. Six thousand, one hundred and eleven new, confirmed cases per day.

And we know that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

As we still don’t have community testing, those 6,100 will be almost exclusively people arriving in a bad way at hospitals. Most cases are never tested.

Remember, too, that not all people who are taken into hospital with Covid-19 test positive. I was one such person.

Covid could have taken me, but I don’t appear in the figures. So even those who end up in hospital aren’t all included in that massive number.

If there are 6,100 known cases, we must conclude that there are tens of thousands more.

Every.

Single.

Day.

By the way, how does our new cases graph compare with other countries?

It’s not pretty. But, despite the bleak numbers and the ugly graph, the talk is of “easing lock-down.”

An announcement is promised – curiously, ominously – outside working hours on Sunday.

One extraordinary, baffling, criminally negligent decision in Britain’s maddest-ever March is, if not forgivable, at least mitigated by its context: it was made while deaths totalled a handful.

But now, in Britain’s saddest-ever May, when nightmare numbers have become chilling reality, what possible excuse could there be?

Is our capricious government poised to make another wilfully-deadly decision, come Sunday? Whether or not you are a person of faith, only prayer remains.

Thank you for reading. Please help to reach more like-minded readers by using the Facebook and Twitter share buttons below.