I am also gloomy and am sorry to see so many others are as well. This is so relentless. I hate all the talk about the second wave but I think, you know what, if there will be one, let us live now. Let us have some fun. I find winters unbearable anyway, I can't go into one without having had lots of time outdoors doing lovely things. It's not natural living like this. I am solitary and introverted and I still need my occasional trips to cafes or art courses or short holidays. I need to have the choice to see people.
I saw someone else write somewhere 'the restrictions might be hard but we are in the middle of a pandemic.'
And I sat there and thought, are we? The major newspapers have had weeks now of writing 'this might happen, that might happen, the government failed in this way.' That's the bulk of the stories. It we were truly in the middle of a pandemic, there would be little space for any headlines other than, '2000 died today,' '5,000 died in London in the last week,' 'morgues set up in carparks, mass graves being dug' etc. This was an unpleasant virus which has taken many lives but it was got under control and it is disappearing. We aren't in the middle of anything. We are drifting, waiting for the government to have some balls. There is no crisis. We anticipated a crisis, we got ourselves into a state of terror, many hospitals got unpleasantly busy, the problem passed.
Oh, except, cue Ferguson going 'twenty bajillion could have died if we hadn't locked down.'
Ok then. So how come Spain had a hard lockdown and lost more than other countries where there was no lockdown? Where are all Japan's dead?
We will have a shock if a pandemic truly strikes in our lifetimes.