The one thing I would do differently during Covid.

It's been a while but that just means this post is going to be like aged wine.

I did something rather foolish recently. I travelled from my cosy home in London to Sydney at the height of the omicron variant of covid. In the UK we have gotten used to the number of daily cases starting with 1 and having 5 other numbers follow it. But these numbers have not been seen in Australia before so when it did happen things were pretty crazy. The highest number of new cases in the state of New South Wales was 90,000, but you have to remember that there are only 6 million people in the state. So if you adjust to the 60 million people in the UK, that is the equivalent to 900,000 cases. In the US it would be equivalent to 4.5 million cases in one day.

The real juxtaposition of the last 18 month covid journey could be found in my home state of Tasmania. Unlike Sydney who have dealt with waves of covid and lockdowns before, or Melbourne who have the title of the most locked-down city in the world; Tasmania dealt with the virus for the first 4 months and then practically had no cases for well over a year. Tassie (as the locals call it) is an island state - like Hawaii but with significantly downgraded weather. So they were in a unique position to lock down their state and stay covid free. They have quite a large ageing population  - like Florida, but with significantly downgraded weather. So they did what they could to try and protect their people. But they decided to open up in December and I got to visit the state shortly after that decision was made. It was a strange and eye-opening experience.

Whereas I had been dealing with masks, check-in systems, social distancing etc for 18 months, they had only been doing it for 2 weeks. What was old to me was new to them and the discussions about covid reminded me of when I had to confront living with this virus. I felt like a foreigner who grew up on a fault line, and had encountered people who had just experienced their first tremor. Sure they had heard about earthquakes on the news but it wasn't until it hit home they had to truly deal with it.

The people I encountered all seemed to be making wise choices but I noticed some of them were doing something that I also did at the start, that I now realise is a mistake. They stopped making plans.

I mean what is the point right - Covid is here, people are dropping like flies and isolated at home, events are getting cancelled left right and centre. It's not worth the disappointment of having plans cancelled right? Yet I would like to argue that that is wrong.

I encountered a dear friend who went down this line of thinking. After an event that they were really looking forward to was cancelled they felt like they couldn't organise anything else. They desperately wanted to spend time with family but couldn't seem to bring it up as it all seemed too complicated, plus no one wanted to go through the disappointment of having plans cancelled again.

But speaking as someone who has had their plans cancelled so many times in the last 18 months...from having amazing tickets to the theatre, babysitter in place, all dressed up and about to walk out the door, and then getting a text saying the show is cancelled as most of the cast are positive...to travelling 16,000 miles to go to a summer camp only to have to miss it because your friend who you have been hanging out with comes down with covid and the local policy states that you need to isolate...It is always better to make plans and hold them lightly than to never hold them at all. Yes it is choosing uncertainty which is not fun but the other option is powerlessness.

If you still don't believe me, let me bring in the big guns as I leave you with a quote from C.S. Lewis (shout out to Tim for sharing this quote with me). He was talking about how to live with the threat of the atomic bomb but we can easily substitute that with Covid-19.

“In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: Why, as you would have lived in the 16th century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land & cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.’

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, you & all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: & quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways.

We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anaesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering & drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful & premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances…in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made; & the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible & human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint & a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”

See I was right, now go make some plans and hold them lightly.