There are 24 letters in the Greek alphabet. So far with Covid-19, we’ve had four of them: Alpha for the Kent variant, Beta for the South African strain, Gamma is the Brazil type and Delta, the Indian variety.
Lord knows what state we’ll be in by the time we reach the last, Omega. Then what do we do, start again?
More to the point, where will our bars, restaurants and venues be? Already many of them are boarded up and shuttered. Those that are open frequently have a tired, struggling air. A lick of paint would do them good and closer examination reveals they’ve got long out of date notices on their boards. The other day I was in a coffee bar and it was still displaying a sign for the local Christmas fair, in June. In London’s theatreland there are faded posters advertising shows from March 2020.
Everywhere you look, though, there are gleaming, forbidding signs and Perspex, lots of Perspex. The old man who lives near me walks along with a stick held out in front of him, waving it from side to side. It’s not white, he’s not blind. It’s two metres in length and he shouts, ordering his fellow pedestrians to get back, to keep their distance.
This morning, in the stifling heat, a woman was in Sainsbury’s wearing a full-face cover – you could barely make out her mouth, nose and eyes. She darted around, jumping back whenever she got close to a fellow shopper. Her entire being was overcome by fear – no matter that everyone was sanitising, wearing masks and we had to walk round one way and the masked staff remained behind their barriers.
By now, we were told, we’d be through all this. The second jabs would be rolling out, the vulnerable over-50s would be protected and life would return to normal.
It’s not. There is no discernible double vaccine dividend. Instead, we lurch along on Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock’s roller-coaster of terror. Today, it’s Delta causing the worry. Tomorrow, it could be Epsilon’s turn.
All the attention is heaped towards “protect the NHS, save lives” but what about our economy? How on earth can any manager make plans and order supplies and hire people with any degree of certainty? One moment, 21 June is “Freedom Day”. Now it’s pushed back.
Within government, among scientists, advisors, officials and ministers, who know what they will be paid next month and the one after that and the following months, who can say with certainty what they will receive next year, imposing a delay is not such a major deal. It’s “just a bit longer.”
Imagine, however, if their livelihoods actually depended upon it, if they had contracts that demanded honouring – what then? Would they lean so heavily towards safeguarding the few or ensuring the prosperity (and mental health) of the many?
What the government’s approach to this crisis smacks of, certainly latterly, is a lack of understanding of commercial realities. There are medical and scientific experts galore in the discussions and on the end of submissions, but where are the business leaders?
The only voice from the financial side that I can discern is that of Rishi Sunak, but he is the Chancellor, charged with balancing the books. He’s not coming from “out there”, he does not know what it is like to try and keep an enterprise afloat in these stop-start (or should that be “stop, hang on a while and start a bit, no, wait!”) conditions.
The health and wellbeing of the nation is critical, of course it is. But there is another phrase often used in relation to small, and medium-sized enterprises, that these SMEs are the “life blood” of the country. Not where this government is concerned.
Unfortunately, on his high-vis factory photo ops (yellow jacket is mandatory), Boris Johnson only hears the good stuff. The boss does not tell him what it’s really like. Heaven forfend if they should, their remarks will be brushed aside. Which is how I suspect it is in the Downing Street meetings when lifting restrictions is mooted. The horror of full and overflowing hospital wards is allowed to dominate, rather than rising company liquidations and lengthening dole queues.
Never mind that the hospitals never did collapse, not even when the virus was doing its worst and vaccines were a pipedream. We didn’t need the temporary Nightingales and their extra beds then. Never mind, too, that waiting lists of patients suffering from cancer and other serious illnesses requiring treatment and surgery keep steadily climbing. Everything but everything, must give way to Covid-19.
What Johnson is hearing constantly is worst-case predictions. This quality of forecasting would not pass muster in the business world. If a company chose to deploy similar methodology it would be decried and deserted by investors and suspended by the Stock Exchange.
My worry is that stasis has set in, that the government is gripped by fear – fear of change. It’s much easier, 15 months in, to stay where we are than to order a wholesale shift. Let’s face it, we’ve got used to it. Wearing a mask, scanning a QR code, sanitising, going in through one door and leaving via another, a waiter bringing you drinks on a tray but not handing them to you – they’ve all become second nature.
The other day I changed trains at Clapham Junction. I counted 15 people in pink tops all standing around, doing absolutely nothing. They are there, workers apparently, to maintain social distancing, to check that the Covid-19 protocols are being observed. Similarly, there is a woman who stands by the bus stop at the bottom of our road every weekday morning. She’s also wearing a high-vis jacket (I wish I had shares in the manufacturers – they, unlike the rest of us, have never had it so good). Her job, as far as I can tell, is to count school children onto buses. Presumably, the driver can’t do that. In between buses, she goes back to attending to her Sudoku puzzle book.
They don’t want this to end, the high-vis brigade and their controllers. Meanwhile, businesses are complaining about staff shortages. I’ve a solution, minister, which is to carry on doing what you’re doing, because very soon they won’t be needing any at all.
