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Monday 8 February 2021

Coronavirus Update: A UK-dwelling Kiwi faces his mistakes

It is just over a year since the severity of Covid became undeniable: China began its strict lockdown on January 23. Remember that? An unprecedented measure that we were told would be unthinkable anywhere else. In some ways it was: the worst of the transmission was stamped out in six weeks, by early March, just as other governments were scrambling to prepare their "we were taken by surprise" excuse.

I was faraway in Rome, but on January 31 two Chinese tourists tested positive at a hotel. We already knew that it took seven to ten days for symptoms to show, so we anxiously watched for signs of further infections a week later. After two weeks there was still nothing, besides reassuring photos of Spallanzani hospital in a state of over-the-top precaution. Crisis averted. 

On February 7 my family left Rome for the Venice Carnivale. While we jostled with the crowds at the Cannaregio canal on the first night, a TV reporter told us that in fact attendance was lower than normal. "Lots of Chinese cancelled their trips," she told us, as if it had nothing to do with the Italian government cancelling their flights. The camera was turned on me and I was asked if I had been worried about the virus. Somewhere out in the vast wastes of the internet there is a local Italian TV website with footage of me exuberantly crying, "Ha ha! There is no coronavirus in Venice!" If anyone ever finds it, I'll claim it was a Trump impersonation. 

That was the least of my mistakes. Within a month Italy had transformed into the scariest place in Europe, and obviously my big mistake had been to leave the UK. But two months after that, reality had convulsed again, and while British nurses were still using bin bags as PPE, I was allowed to explore the Sistine Chapel alone. And I could find a parking space outside.  

It was several more months before I understood my real mistake had been decades earlier: I should not have left New Zealand. 

Who would have thought? Sure, I was always told that New Zealand was a beacon of hope and leadership admired throughout the world, but when I visited the world, it turned out that no-one had heard of New Zealand until it featured in a fantasy film. 

Now it feels like a fantasy to me, too. Each morning I can visit the Radio New Zealand website and read that, once again, there were no cases of community transmission. Which is less comprehensible: that New Zealand pulled this off, or that no-one else repeated it? 

There are plenty of experts available to explain this to me. New Zealand had many weeks of advance warning. By the time they went into lockdown, so had everyone else. It's a bunch of islands. They have a small population. 

These all sound like good points, but... just a minute. What's this? Australia has done it, too? Seriously? They suffered over 900 deaths before October, and only five since. If there's one thing that growing up in New Zealand taught me: if Australians can do it, anyone can do it. 

Before someone sarcastically asks how many land borders Australia has, I will admit that here in the UK, whence I masochistically returned during the tantalising infection lull of July, we would never be able to close the borders. After all, think of those thousands of trucks that arrive every day through the channel tunnel. 

But when the world-beating UK variant turned Britain into Plague Island, it was suddenly discovered that, if it was really necessary, then the trucks could be parked on an abandoned airstrip until we worked out what to do, and the forsaken drivers could dig themselves latrines in a nearby field. Gosh -- couldn't someone have thought of that back in March? And, after six? eight? ten? months of scoffing, we've discovered that quarantine hotels for airline arrivals are, in fact, possible.

Was this really a surprise? After all, has there been a single piece of bold and successful UK government policy this century

It was a brilliantly comic exercise in political satire. Every one of their excuses was ridiculed by reality. Sometimes you had to wait months for the punchline, and sometimes the rake swung into their face the moment they spoke... and sometimes they walked into the same gag over and over again, like Homer Simpson. But what genre of comedy was this? It was not quite slapstick, where the joke is in how deliciously the morons are punished for their stupidity. In this edgy macabre variant, Boris Johnson steps on a banana and a thousand people slip into an ICU. Then with perfect comic timing he turns to the camera and quips, "We did all we could." That must be what they call "deadpan".

For months the British could wallow in the comforting familiarity of their national self-image as long-suffering bunglers -- until all of the competent and organised neighbours screwed up as well. Even without paying people to pack into restaurants and cough on each other!

What was wrong with them all? It's supposed to be simple. The infection rate is either rising, or falling. That is the one golden rule, and it is impervious to excuses. Even third-rate hack leaders are capable of understanding it -- look at Scott Morrison's Australia. You are either working to eliminate the virus, or you are forever extending the y-axis of your log-graph of deaths, while you wait for a vaccine. 

And now there is a vaccine! Hooray! What a happy surprise! Although, of course, not a surprise for people in my profession. It's only in the movies that some burly action hero saves the day. In the real world it is us scientists. Allow me to bask in the smug glory that my people richly deserve. (Yes, my people. Black-hole physicist, virologist, same thing. As I will explain further in an upcoming grant application.) And while I'm at it, I will congratulate myself for living in the right place after all. The UK vaccine roll-out is among the fastest in the world, and on the exact day that I write this, Wales is the fastest in the UK. 

New Zealanders enduring January with fortitude.

Ha ha! Those suckers in New Zealand! Now the laugh is on them. 

When you have good fortune like this, you have to make the most of it. 

I called up my brother in Auckland to gloat. 

He refused to listen. "I can't talk now. I'm on my way out to a dinner party. Can I call you later?"

I waited a few hours, but I couldn't contain my excitement, so I phoned an old school friend in Wellington. 

"Sorry, mate, I can't hear you over the noise of this concert."

I was beginning to think that they were in denial. I made one last attempt. I emailed a fellow scientist to arrange a zoom call. 

"Zoom? I deleted that back in July."

What a bunch of sore losers! Some people just cannot face the truth. 


My Roman Viral Sojourn

March 10, 2020: Rome Goes Viral
March 18, 2020: Locked down, and going out
March 27, 2020: Lockdown for Dummies
April 7, 2020: The Water Carrier
April 17, 2020: Numbers
April 30, 2020: Liberation Day
May 25, 2020: While the future hides behind a mask


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