London | On a rainy August morning at a campsite on England’s east coast last year, I was sitting outside my tent making coffee when my phone rang. It was my stepmother, from Sydney, with news: my 73-year-old father had a ruptured spleen and was going into hospital for emergency surgery.

During the anxious hours and days that followed, I made the calculation properly for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic began: if things went badly wrong, could I get back in time to see him? And if not, could I get back at all, to grieve with my family? The answer to both questions was probably no.