Review of the Year 2020: I. Covid

 A year unlike any other I have lived through. As my father, who survived the invasion of Poland in 1939, Nazi occupation, the Warsaw Uprising and prisoner-of-war camps, you can get used to anything. And so I have, lockdown, inability to travel, to socialise, to shop normally; I've got used to it by now. SARS-Cov-2 is still ripping through the global population, helped by dithering politicians, slack populations and complacency.

It didn't have to be like this, but it is.

Imagine an early lockdown in mid-March, all over the world. Swift, sharp and rigidly enforced. Fourteen days at home with just a handful of life-or-death exceptions permitted. Fourteen days later - Covid-19 is over; the virus dead - extinguished. The virus just died off, unable to infect new victims. Yes, there would have been a human cost to such a draconian lockdown - collateral damage - but by early April life could have returned to normal. The human cost would have been a drop in the ocean compared to what we are seeing around us today because the number of cases of Covid-19 in mid-March was a tiny fraction of what it is now. The global economy would have quickly rebounded, there would have been no new mutations to worry about, the death toll from Covid-19 would have fallen to zero before the end of May. Everything would have been back to normal by the summer of 2020.

Impossible, you say.

But this is exactly what has happened in communist China. One-fifth of mankind lives there; the last death from Covid-19 was reported on 17 May, the last of 4,634 deaths. In the third quarter of this year, China's economy grew by 4.6% compared to the same quarter of 2019. Back to work, no worries. [OK, communist leaders lie, but even if they were lying by a factor of ten, it's still impressive.]

Meanwhile, in the West, individualists declare their right not to wear masks, they deny a pandemic, they compare it to flu, they protest in the streets against lockdowns, carry on doing their own thing - and we're seeing new cases surging. 

As I wrote in early November, Poland, which had had an early and effective lockdown in mid-March, got complacent at the end of the summer holidays, schools and universities reopened and cases soared - in effect Poland's first wave - and deaths per million have since reached comparable levels to what the UK had suffered in April.

Our World in Data has great comparable graphs.

I'm keeping myself away from town (not having been in the office since 2 October). In the summer, it was almost back to normal; one week I visited the office three times, open-air dining was OK, I went on long motorbike rides. But from early October, it was evident that the good times were over. I stayed on my działka in Jakubowizna, overnighting as long as possible, weather-wise, before the cold and the dark set in. Compared to infection rates in Warsaw, gmina Chynów was a safer place to be.

Today, Poland is facing a pick-up in new cases after a slow-down in reporting over Christmas, while in the UK, the number of new cases per million is two-and-half times that in Poland. The only real hope is with the vaccines; how quickly they will be delivered is a test of the efficiency of a country's systems. This is the time when party politics, ideology and worldview (światopogląd) need to get out of the way. 

In the meanwhile, life goes on... Shopping at Lidl between 10 and 12 (for the over 60s only - after a visit from the police, the sight of younger shoppers there has become rarer), a daily walk avoiding people (especially the maskless) and no trips to town. Journeys to Jakubowizna by train are low-risk as I head away from town in the mornings and towards town in the evenings, so there's never more than a handful of people in the carriage. I wear two masks; a surgical mask over my nose and mouth, and a 'kominek' (snood) covering the mask. This hooks over my ears and covers my face and neck. (Wearing this, I was actually asked in Lidl whether I was indeed over 60 - I thanked the young asystenka for the compliment.)

Suitably attired - summer selfie, July 2020.

My first Christmas in Warsaw for many years... 17? I missed not seeing my brother and his family at their Derbyshire house, where I've spent Christmas Day certainly every year since starting this blog if not earlier. But we did manage a two-hour-long Zoom call. A partial answer to travel bans.

I can't say I long to travel right now. Rather, I long for summer, for long, hot, sunny days under a blue sky, borders open, and the ability to move about the continent as was once the case.

This time last year:
Last night in Ealing, twenty-teens

This time two years ago:
The Day the World Didn't End

This time five years ago:
Hybrid driving - the verdict

This time seven years ago:
Pitshanger Lane in the sun

This time 11 years ago:
Miserable, grey, wet London

This time 12 years ago:
Parrots in Ealing

This time 13 years ago:
Heathrow to Okęcie