Covid - Five Years On
My reflections on the Covid pandemic as seen through my work as a Common Weal policy-maker.
Image Credit: Unsplash
My memories of this time five years ago remain stark. I remember the conversations with folk in the office about getting increasingly worried that the government wasn’t taking things as seriously as they should. Watching the number of Covid cases in Scotland rise (though we would find out later that it had arrived in Scotland some weeks earlier than we were told then but the Government chose to cover that information up). And I remember on the morning of Thursday 12th March deciding that I, personally, didn’t want to risk travelling into the office that day. I never returned to that room for work – the “no non-essential contact” order went out on Monday 16th and by then I was already set up to work from home (I recognise the privilege that my partner and I both had in that both of our jobs could be worked from home AND we both had homes that could be worked from, even if trying to avoid simultaneous Zoom calls from the same living room was a challenge). I was next back in our by then closed office almost a year later to recover the corpses of some plants and to pack up the remaining office supplies I had left there.
My partner and I played things as safe as we thought we could. I remember one last shopping trip around the 20th of March deliberately buying non-perishables because I could feel the lockdown coming. That was a harrowing trip. Crowds of panicking shoppers coughing over each other and doing almost the opposite of following any kind of then non-binding government advice.
I’m pretty sure it was that trip that exposed me to Covid for the first time as I didn’t leave the house between then and falling ill. I started feeling the symptoms on the 25th of March, just two days after the first full lockdown. Of course while my symptoms matched those of that first wave almost perfectly (the only one I didn’t get was the fever) I’ll never know if I actually had Covid. We weren’t testing people unless they were sick enough to go to hospital. Testing others, we would be told a week later, was a “distraction”.
“I have been saying and advising the First Minister and the Cabinet Secretary for several weeks now about the distraction that I think the focus on testing may become.”
I probably should have gone to hospital. For almost a week I could barely breathe. Several times we got to the “if this gets any worse, I’m making the call” stage. Without testing or an oxygen monitor in the house I’ll never know if I actually passed that stage. I’ll never know how close I came to crashing and dying on my sofa, though I suspect it was closer than I would like.
Not that any of you would have noticed this from our work output. Shortly after that first infection, I published my first policy paper on the pandemic. The “testing is a distraction” comment made me livid. It flew in the face not just of the science of previous pandemics but the emerging evidence of that one too. We’ve seen time and time again that the ONLY way to properly control a pandemic prior to vaccination is a rigorous and comprehensive scheme of proactive and preventative testing alongside forward and backward contact tracing to break the chains of infection. Lockdowns, border controls and quarantines serve a very important purpose but that purpose is to slow the spread to allow for limited resources to keep up with an exponentially growing problem. So even though I was still recovering from Covid and even though the effort of writing the paper put me back in bed for a week, we published Ending Lockdown which mapped out the kind of scale of resources we thought would need to be brought to bear to tackle the problem but also how much it would save in terms of lives and an economy free from the virus. The plan we eventually got took longer, cost more and was far less effective.
This marked the pattern of how things went throughout the pandemic. I should stress that we never really wanted to be in the position of commenting on public health. We’re not a medical think tank. My doctorate is in laser physics, not epidemiology. But I do understand exponential growth apparently better than the Government did. In late June 2020 when the First Minister declared that Scotland was “not far away” from eliminating the virus, I told the team here that cases were rising exponentially again and that if we followed the logic of the first lockdown, we’d be in a second one by the end of August. We got a regional lockdown in Aberdeen in early August. The number of people in hospital due to Covid in Scotland exceeded the level seen at the outset of the first lockdown in late August but we didn’t get the full national lockdown until late September when cases were around ten times higher than they were during the first peak. Again, too slow, too late with more lives disrupted or lost as a result of the delay.
“Suppressing the virus, driving it as far as we can towards total elimination, has to be our overriding priority.
We have made exceptional progress over the past three months, and the figures today highlight that. ”
The third repeat of the pattern came in the Autumn. By this point we were at the limits of our frustration with the Government announcing that they were talking to representatives in countries who were controlling the pandemic better than we were but then refusing to do what they were doing. So I gathered together the best examples from those and other nations and put them together into a pandemic control strategy we called “Warning Lights”. It was raised in Holyrood at which the Government flatly refused to follow the advice in Parliament. I still have the video of that moment.
And yet, just a few months later Scotland did end up adopting most of the recommendations, including the regional and border control systems as well as the quarantine hotels that we were told were “illegal” or otherwise outwith the powers of devolution (it turns out that they weren’t). Again though, the measures were only brought in partially, late and weren’t properly enforced.
I don’t mind saying now, five years on, that all of this took its toll. By which I mean beyond the toll of the lockdowns, the illness, the loss of friends and family and all of the other traumas that I’ve joined so many people in sharing. I mean specifically here a very individual and personal weight of responsibility that landed on me throughout that year of policy-making and lobbying. The feeling that, as inadequate as my expertise was, I was one of the few in Scotland who was commenting on things that many more should have been commenting on. The feeling that because of that inadequacy, my voice wasn’t being heard by Government. As a long time activist, I’m used to losing political campaigns but because this one had actual lives on the line I felt deeply that wasn’t doing enough. I carried a dark burden of survivor guilt for years. It’s only in the last year that I’ve been able to talk about it and to come to terms with the dark cloud that hung over me from that time. In particular, I reconciled that it’s not a sign of “not doing enough” if someone cannot be persuaded to do something that they don’t want to do and certainly not if they’re being told it by someone who isn’t loyal or beholden to them. Sometimes it’s not that the government is doing something but failing. Sometimes, they’re just “successfully” not doing the thing at all.
Some productive news came out of the experience however. It was the work of Nick Kempe and his investigation into the failure to keep the infection out of care homes that directly led to the formation of our Care Reform Group and to calls for a National Care Service (though that campaign has similarly crashed into the Cyanean Rocks of a Government stubbornly resistant to adopting the advice it asked for). And Common Weal as a whole is still here, still pushing for a country that puts All of Us First and is even less afraid of campaigning against the odds to win it.
I do want to finish by thanking everyone who has supported Common Weal in our work over the years not just through the pandemic but since our inception. And I want to thank everyone who has helped me personally in those years through my own struggles. As much as we might look back on the campaigns we lost, we also must look at the ones where we’ve succeeded too. I’m extremely proud of the work I’ve been able to do for Common Weal and I can see the impact I’ve personally had on Scotland as a nation.
Is that “enough”? Five years on from the experiences of the Covid pandemic, I think I can now honestly tell myself “Yes”. Or perhaps more correctly, I can say “Yes...and here’s what we should do next.”
