Going Viral: Forgetting and Remembering Coronavirus

Today (Jan 7, 2023) is the 3rd anniversary of Covid being officially identified by Chinese scientists. Jamie Maxwell on the impact and legacy of the pandemic in the face of our desire to forget. #stateofthenation

On 7 January 2020, public health officials in China identified a novel coronavirus as the source of an acute respiratory condition spreading rapidly through the city of Wuhan in the central Chinese province of Hubei. On 9 January, a 61-year-old resident of the city died from a combination of heart failure and pneumonia. This man, whose name has never been released, was the first official victim of the disease that would come to be known as Covid-19.

From Wuhan, a global pandemic took root. On 10 January, the World Health Organization published a “comprehensive package of technical guidance” advising governments on how to “detect, test, and manage” any potential cases of the pathogen. On 14 January, WHO scientists revealed that Covid could be transmitted directly between humans. By 17 January, outbreaks had been detected in Thailand, South Korea, and Japan. By 20 January, the virus had reached Washington State. 

Europe’s first confirmed encounter with Covid occurred in Bordeaux, France, on 24 January. But in the weeks that followed, Italy became the epicentre of the crisis. On 9 March, Italy’s prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, moved the entire country – 60 million people – into a state of quarantine. “The whole of Italy will become a protected zone,” Conte said at the time. 

An Italian National Police officer talks to a person in a car, wearing a respiratory mask, at the entrance of the small town of Casalpusterlengo, southeast of Milan, on February 23, 2020 (Photo by Miguel MEDINA / AFP)

As Europe cranked into gear, Britain’s response was slow. Boris Johnson skipped five consecutive meetings of his national emergency committee, COBRA, between January and February 2020. On 3 March, he boasted of “continuously shaking hands” with patients on hospital wards. By 9 April, the prime minister was being treated in an intensive care unit, where he only narrowly avoided life-saving intubation. “They were starting to think about how to handle it presentationally,” he later cryptically acknowledged. 

Johnson’s initial scepticism regarding the severity of Covid and his premature embrace of herd immunity underpinned his government’s handling of the outbreak. The Tories were reluctant to impose lockdown restrictions and eager to lift them. Rishi Sunak was the most vocal opponent of shutdowns in the Johnson cabinet. At the start of August 2020, Sunak launched the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, a policy designed to tempt diners back into restaurants and cafes by (modestly) subsiding their meals. The initiative was later cited by Warwick University as a trigger point for rising infection rates. On 26 August, Johnson, apparently unfazed by his recent spell in the ICU, told a group of English school kids that lost school days posed a greater risk to public health than the virus ever had.

The flippancy and inconsistency of Tory politicians cost lives. Britain’s weekly Covid death-rate spiralled at the start of April 2020, then slumped in July and August in the wake of the first lockdown, and then began rising steadily again in September 2020, before reaching a peak of more than 9,000 in the days leading up to 18 January 2021. 

Since then, vaccines and naturally accumulated antibodies have helped curb the impact of the pandemic, but the legacy of those botched opening months endures. By the end of 2022, Germany, with a population of 83 million, had registered 160,000 Covid deaths, while Britain, with a population of 69 million, had lost 200,000 people to the disease. A Westminster committee report published last October concluded that lockdown delays in the spring of 2020 amounted to “one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced.” The lack of an early testing regime marked another significant blunder, the report said.

There is a sense in Scotland that we avoided the worst of the virus or that any failings in our response to it can be attributed to English incompetence. In fact, many of Scotland’s pandemic missteps were homemade. In March 2020, Jason Leitch defended his wife’s decision to attend a Stereophonics gig 12 days before the first lockdown by insisting that mass gatherings didn’t pose a threat to public health. During the early stages of the outbreak, the Scottish government allowed Covid-positive patients to be discharged from hospitals into care homes. In December 2020, Nicola Sturgeon conceded that restrictions on travellers coming into Scotland should have been imposed much sooner than they were.

Covid also exposed the threadbare state of Scottish public services two decades after the onset of devolution. In 2018, my mum was diagnosed with dementia. When the pandemic hit, her package of NHS care was stripped back and she grew increasingly dependent on whatever piecemeal support friends and family members – ordinary people with no special insight into the treatment of advanced cognitive decline – could offer under lockdown conditions. I watched, too, as friends suffering from chronic depression drifted away from the health system – a system then, as now, buckling under the weight of soaring infection ratesoverworked staff, and crowded emergency wards.

Three years after the first Covid-19 strain was isolated by Chinese scientists, the reality of the pandemic is beginning to fade from our collective memory. In contrast to a shock event like 9/11, Covid left no permanent imprint on our physical infrastructure, the American journalist Ross Barkan observed in a recent Substack post. In 2020, a virus-stricken city “did not lose its office buildings, schools and churches; there were no bombs or airplanes, no smoke plumes or flaming rubble,” he wrote. 

Barkan is right that the absence of concrete memorials reinforces the temptation to forget. At the same time, 150,000 Scots are living with long Covid, our political leaders have yet to account for the mistakes they made, and, as Beijing junks its hard line containment strategy, there are concerns that infection rates in China are spiralling out of control. At the start of 2023, the plague still rages, and it may well be the first of many.

Comments (23)

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  1. Antoine Bisset says:

    From the outset there was clear evidence that Covid was developed as a biological warfare weapon. It is not clear that its release into the world was intended. This view is supported by many internet articles freely available at the start of the pandemic. They may not now be available, one supposes. There was collusion on the development the virus between scientists in the USA and in Wuhan. Moreover the virus itself apparently has aspects that more or less prove that it is a “splice job”, like grafting vine varieties onto American root stock to avoid Phylloxera.
    The Level 4 laboratory, the most secure and safe level of biological lab, was built with French know-how.
    Rather than wonder about the next plague, ask the USA, China and a number of individual players, what will happen next. They are planning it.
    The incompetence of governments in dealing with this virus, increasing the damage caused, resulting in deaths in care homes, misery for most people, and economic damage, especially to small businesses, will never be measured, and those responsible will never be held to account.

    1. John Wood says:

      I agree completely with most of this, except the final comment that ‘those responsible will never be held to account’. On the contrary, Fauci has already resigned and he is definitely going to be held to account. And so will the others. Gates will probably be next. As this unravels, those responsible will become increasingly desperate to distance themselves from it. Or shift the blame endlessly.

      The pandemic was planned and executed quite deliberately, and those responsible know this perfectly well, which is why they are so desperate to control the narrative and silence any dissent. However, as they are already discovering, ‘you can’t fool all the people, all the time’.

      The problem for people addicted to the pursuit of absolute power and possession of everything and everyone is that they cannot share anything at all. Thieves fall out. The WEF tried to con the Russians, Chinese, Indians, Europeans that the world was united against a common enemy. But it was a lie. And various governments-especially the US – will now face the consequences. We need to be very careful not to allow the world to be drawn into a global, potentially nuclear war. Because these oligarchs have become psychopathic.

      1. Antoine Bisset says:

        “Never say Never”. But will anyone be hit where it hurts – their pocket? There is a real sense of irresponsibility amongst our politicians. Unfortunately they have the power to do anything, to ruin the planet. The stramash over the Russian-Ukraine conflict is becoming more serious by the minute with the increasing EU and US involvement strongly suggesting it is a proxy war against Russia.
        The thousands of deaths of ethnic Russians from 2014 onwards, brought about by the Ukrainians, is conveniently ignored. All it would take would be for the Russians to destroy US/EU weapons en route to the conflict, as per the sinking of the Lusitania, for us to move in to a really bad place.

      2. “The pandemic was planned and executed quite deliberately”. Who by John?

        1. John Wood says:

          Well Anthony Fauci was the one who set up the ‘gain of function’ bioweapon s research at the Wuhan Lab. It looks as though Bill Gates may have had a big part in it. According to Prince (now ‘King’) Charles, The World Economic Forum saw the pandemic as a great ‘opportunity’ to unleash the totalitarian ‘Great Reset’ (world-wide coup) on us all, and according to the WEF the Great Reset has been planned for some time. Well the WEF is an exclusive club of the world’s oligarchs who have the stated aim to ‘make the world a better place’ (for themselves, naturally – as they told us, ‘You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy’. This agenda continues on various fronts. They are the only stakeholders in their ‘stakeholder capitalism’ – otherwise known as the new feudalism.

          The Great Reset requires governments to ‘co-operate’ with the agenda, and to a surprising extent they do, but will never admit it. We are all bought and sold for oligarchs gold.

          The point about all this is that they have announced what is happening themselves – and simultaneously denied everything. It is classic psyops, behavioural psychology straight out of the Edward Bernays or George Orwell playbook. And UK government ministers have been keen on this: they seem to have done very nicely out of their ‘Behavioural Psychology Unit’, not an official government body but a private enterprise owned by cabinet ministers. Check it out. It’s been hard at work putting Union Jacks on all our shopping too.
          The problem for Klaus Schwab in particular is that thieves fall out. Schwab was telling us that a group of countries would run the world together, but of course the US will never settle for less than complete world domination. Which is no doubt why they are now trying to create regime change in Russia and China.

          But then, what do I know? After all I’m just a ridiculous ‘conspiracy theorist’ who questions the official propaganda.

          1. Antoine Bisset says:

            Tinfoil hats all round… (Do not ask “Cui bono?”)

    2. That’s some hefty claims without evidence Antoine?

      1. John Wood says:

        There is actually no shortage of evidence, and more is emerging all the time despite increasingly frantic efforts to ignore, deny and suppress it.

        Robert Kennedy’s book The Real Anthony Fauci is a good starting point, and it’s a bestseller despite an almost total media blackout and even some bookshops refusing to sell it.

  2. Peter Havelock says:

    The idea that lockdowns were essential to “stop” Covid is a very false one.

    Imposing lockdowns did more harm than good. The cancelled and delayed life-saving operations and the subsequent long waits killed people for sure and is still doing so.

    But the really damning thing is that when you look at the death figures for the few places that did not impose lockdowns then the whole justification for lockdowns comes crashing down. The numbers prove it – per 100,000 population there were no more deaths in Sweden, which did protect the vulnerable as well as encouraging mask use, but had no Covid lockdown whatsoever.

    Likewise the current experience of China which had the strictest lockdown in the world is now finding it was all utterly futile as it has simply unleashed a totally avoidable wave of deaths. If they had avoided a lockdown and focused health resources totally on those most vulnerable they would have had a much better outcome.

    Sadly back here in all parts of Britain a media-fuelled hysteria was allowed to run out of control. The media love bad news, and keeping people scared about what “could” happen was a very handy way of creating “news.” The problem is it just wasn’t true and reached quite Orwellian proportions. Opposing the accepted wisdom literally became “thought-crime.”

    When the next big virus comes along, as it inevitably will, we need to be calmer and saner in dealing with it . Avoiding over-reacting and avoiding a lockdown will save lives rather than take them.

    1. BSA says:

      Pretty confident assertions here but not much evidence on the association between cancelled operations, lockdown/no lockdown and mortality. Not much evidence either for your assertion that no lockdown would have massively reduced mortality in China where lots of other factors besides lockdown would be influencing outcomes as they would in other countries. ‘Calmer and saner’ is maybe good advice for yourself.

      1. John Wood says:

        I have to take issue with this. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence; and FOI requests I made to the NHS seem pretty conclusive evidence to me. And it is clear that there have been deliberate efforts to suppress any evidence that doesn’t support the official line. On the other hand, almost all the official so-called ‘evidence’ is nothing of the sort. It is mere assertion and includes direct lies that when challenged are never backed up but simply repeated as nauseam. So before making patronising comments, I recommend actually presenting some evidence that lockdowns, masking, so-called vaccines were on balance safe or effective. I cannot find any evidence they were.

        1. Paddy Farrington says:

          “I cannot find any evidence” you say. Here’s some; there is plenty more out there.

          Lockdowns: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7268966/
          Note: the primary purpose of a lockdown is not to end a pandemic (which it can’t do) but short-term to avoid collapse of a health system.

          Masks: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069
          Note: masks work best as community interventions.

          Vaccines: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD015477/full
          Note: many COVID-19 vaccines exist, and some work better than others.

          1. Antoine Bisset says:

            “Note: masks work best as community interventions.” I would respond that masks work best for bank robbers. Any mask that will prevent a virus moving through it, will prevent air moving through it. Usually a bad idea. Check out the size of a virus and the size of the holes in PPE.
            Healthy people who have been vaccinated are dropping dead, for no known reason. We do know that the testing of vaccines was so cursory as to be meaningless, although all the vaccinated test mice died, apparently. The implications and legacy of these vaccines is unknown, but surely not good. Thalidomide was a good idea, until it wasn’t.
            At this point, indeed at any point, is the government to be believed?
            I hold no truck with people who say, “lessons will be learned”. It is nonsense, an excuse, a diversion. Who wants people in charge who will get it right next time?
            The only people who should be offering advice, passing regulations and enforcing them with prison sentences are totalitarian monsters. Can anyone spot the difference between what happened in the UK in the last three years, and what happened in any totalitarian state of your choice?

          2. John Wood says:

            Thanks for sharing these articles. They are interesting but hardly ‘evidence’ of safety and efficacy. As someone with an academic background myself, I have to say I’m unimpressed.

      2. Peter Havelock says:

        You talk about “lack of evidence” but the experience of places like Sweden, which had no lockdown at all, and Florida, which had minimal lockdown, is the loudest and clearest evidence we could ever have.

        Let’s be clear, Sweden had ABSOLUTELY NO lockdown but had no more deaths per 100,000 than us and the rest of Europe.

        It shows lockdowns were futile. Worse than that they did far more harm than good- missed operations, a mental health epidemic and wrecked livelihoods.

        Lockdowns were purely a way for governments to be seen “doing something”. Sadly what they did was a terrible mistake and all of us paid the price. We are still doing so.

  3. Chris Ballance says:

    Just wait till Gaia unleashes a virus with the infectiveness of Covid, the long incubation period of Aids and the death rate of ebola.
    Happy New Year folks! Always the optimist, me…

  4. Paddy Farrington says:

    What a depressing slew of tedious conspiracy theories this article seems to have generated.

    Returning to Jamie’s article: I think we need to be careful with simplistic statements like ‘our political leaders have yet to account for the mistakes they made’. Some of those mistakes were the result of scientific advice that turned out to be wrong, others were the result of bad calls made in situations where the right call was not at all clear at the time. What’s needed above all is to learn from the experience so that it is not repeated. This means being open about what went wrong and why, at all levels from academics and public health experts up to the decision-makers. I’m not sure a blame game is ever going to help, especially here in Scotland where every issue is overdetermined by the constitutional question.

    Where serious holding to account of political leadership is indeed needed, though, is in the huge waste of resources and the corrupt procurement practices which led to billions of pounds being wasted or misappropriated, which gets no mention from Jamie. The longer-term consequence of Covid is the running-down of the public NHS in England through the extension of private practice within the NHS by NHS trusts, which would lead to a 2-tier health service and the effective demise of the NHS.

    1. John Wood says:

      I disagree. I am seeing more and more of these sorts of. comments, blaming the ‘science’ , or ‘incompetence’ or anyone or anything, rather than accept responsibility as this continues to unravel and the reckoning starts. Too many people ‘just followed orders’, or were ‘misled’, or whatever. If you were implicated in this Big Lie but afraid to speak out for any reason, no you need to say so..

      This was a crime against people and planet, and those responsible must be, and will be, held to account. To label people ‘conspiracy theorists’ or whatever, says more about you than the people you point at. A ‘Conspiracy theorist’ is simply anyone who dares suggest that there might be anything to answer for. It is merely the new term for anyone the authorities wish to ‘other’. Because the very suggestion that a crime might have been committed is just too terrifying to face up to. It is the new name for a ‘heretic’, a ‘witch’, a ‘red under the bed’, a dangerous dissident who does not accept the infallibility of Fauci’s doctrine of so-called ‘science’.

      It’s time for the boot to move to the other foot. This is not just about Westminster. It’s about the Scottish and other governments, and regulators, academics, all bought and sold for the oligarchs’ gold, a parcel of rogues indeed – who have all been far too willing to assume that this ‘4th Industrial Revolution’, this ‘Great Reset’ is ‘inevitable’. No-one sought our approval for all this. We were cautioned to surrender or be isolated socially and psychologically, and deprived of our basic human needs.

      I do not consent. In fact, I will do my best to see that those responsible for this greatest of all crimes against the planet and its people are brought to justice as soon as possible. They are the real threat to all our futures.

      I and a growing number of other people simply will not tolerate this conspiracy of silence any longer.

    2. Cathie Lloyd says:

      I agree with Paddy, who is in a position to make considered and rational judgment. I’ll add to his comment about the privatisation by stealth of nhs England the simple point that Barnett consequentials arising from privatisation will impoverish nhs Scotland. He’s right in advising that we try to avoid polarisation of the political debate too. Last week Macron announced a debate in France designed to tackle many of the problems we see in the different parts of the U.K. Jamie Maxwells point about collective amnesia about the pandemic is preventing us from tackling it’s consequences.

    3. Quite agree Paddy. So depressing to see so many people descend into conspiracy madness. The irony is there are real people with real abuses of power that need confronted and unearthed and overthrown.

  5. James Mills says:

    Not to worry !
    When the next pandemic hits us the Government will have learned its lesson and will have masses of PPE available , the NHS will have been completely revamped and upgraded to deal with any number of emergency patients , the media will be four-square behind all measures to protect the public , and Baroness Mone will be leading the fight against corruption in Public Office !

    1. John Wood says:

      Well, I read it. I’m sorry that Private Eye has sunk to this level. I used to have respect for that organ.

      “a largely discredited new book”. and suchlike comments are not journalism, just unsupported assertions that discredit the article itself.

      Anyway, let’s see what emerges over the next few months. Meanwhile, I recommend Robert Kennedy’s book ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’. Very well researched and presented.

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