Coronavirus: Brexit’s divide, the virus . . . then things got really bad

It was lockdown day 43 when the really bad news — even worse than the oppressive stay-at-home-or-you-will-die hysteria — hit home.

They say such events come in threes and it started with news my father-in-law had been taken from his rural English home in an ambulance. His illness wasn’t coronavirus, but the government’s strict “shielding operation’’ of people over 70 had not helped.

No daily afternoon catch-up at the centuries-old Smugglers Inn, no swinging of the golf club at a royal course where the tides often cut off the road, making the 19th hole a welcome refuge, and even deliveries of the papers were cut.

For weeks now he has been very ill with a kidney issue and upset in a hospital bed, being treated by anonymous people in head-to-toe protective equipment, unable to have any visitors. That has left my mother-in-law alone at home dealing with life-changing events, unable to receive a consoling hug, or visits from us or any of her friends. All the while her ­husband is high-risk and in the one place where coronavirus continues to flourish.

We are grateful that he is getting medical care at all.

In one of the most egregious government decisions, the lauded National Health Service has devoted almost exclusive priority to coronavirus. Excluding other considerations was always going to impact severely on other patients, and it has been borne out.

In the second jolt, a friend who had had some suspicious growths removed in January was told a check-up scan in March wasn’t necessary. Most cancer treatment, even chemotherapy for breast cancer, was cancelled to clear hospital­ clinics for an expected influx of coronavirus patients. Early this month she was finally able to get checked and the news was utterl­y devastating. Doctors have found cancer in her stomach and her lungs. Again, no one can visit to distract her from such dark days.

Cancer doctors say the delay of cancer treatments and screenings will cost hundreds of thousands of lives in the next five years. All the while, the NHS system has not, at any point, been overrun.

On the same day as that upsetting news, my best friend rang, distraught that her fit, sports-playing husband had suffered a stroke.

He has subsequently been one of the few people to get tested for coronavirus antibodies, as doctors believe that even asymptomatic sufferers might have lingering effects­ from the disease. For others­, the personal price being paid is even higher. British charity Samaritans says low-income, ­middle-aged men are most at risk of suicide and it is receiving 7000 calls a day for help from highly stressed and anxious ­people.

For the 67 days since March 23, Britons have had to stay home. Unlike lockdown in Australia, there have been no quick visits to the hairdressers or dental check-ups, nor podiatrists or chiropractors or a daily coffee fix. Even essential work that could have continued, such as construction, was abruptly halted amid a sudden supply-chain crisis and fear of the virus which whipped through ­London in February and March.

The registration of newborns has halted. New mothers have had to give birth alone, without partners.

Small food shops and post offic­es remain shuttered. My local butchers can’t open because the staff are older than 70 and they have to shelter for a full 12 weeks. Queues at the remaining supermarkets, all shoppers standing the requisite 2m apart, go around the block.

In this fine weather — London has had almost no rain for two months — it is still grim: in the middle of a grey, drizzling London day it would be near intolerable.

After 3½ years of being split down the middle by Brexit, Britain finds itself polarised afresh by the pandemic. On the one side are the advocates of permanent lockdown, refusing to emerge from their bubble-wrapped living rooms until either a vaccine is found or the government forces them. And on the other are a restless band of libertarians and desperate self-employed people and entrepreneurs, united by their fear of the financial cataclysm to come.

In the middle is the Tory governme­nt, throwing away all of its political capital through blind loyalty to Dominic Cummings, an unelected chief adviser — one who has been controversial from the start — but who guided Boris Johnson’s Leave campaign, his momentum for the prime ministership and then the resounding election victory just last December.

This week’s furore about Cummings and his 430km journey to his parents’ property in the midst of the stay-at-home government order has coalesced into an easy target of the public’s anger and frustration here.

Perhaps it was no coincidence that Johnson announced a surprise­ easing of the measures, allowin­g up to six people to meet — with 2m distancing — from Monday, which has taken some heat out of the Cummings crisis.

For the past fortnight we could go outside only to parks and beaches and meet up with one ­parent (not both) in an open space. For many, it presented a conun­drum of which parent to choose?

Yet even with this mood-lifting anticipation of a barbecue and ­social chat for next week, the underlying tensions are palpable.

Britain is grappling with adjusting to life with the virus — a vaccine­ may not eventuate — and there is a political hesitancy to get the country moving.

Councils have stencilled the pavements, ordering the public to stay 2m apart. Some have closed little-used country paths, backed up by threatening fines, because one dog walker might pass another­.

While we are allowed to ride bikes, some of the large open spaces­ are shut off. Nearby Richmond Park is closed because too many cyclists want to use the roads and officials claim the cyclist­s would be riding too close together and breach social distancin­g guidelines. Crazy? Yes, but these are crazy times.

It has become clear that when shops open, forecast to occur halfway through next month, and perhaps­ pubs, a couple of months down the track, the social distancing rules will be as onerous as the lockdown ones and people may find it all too unpleasant. Dramatic economic consequences are foreshadowed.

The generous 80 per cent furlough scheme that has kept workers’ wages flowing is being scaled back and many fear their jobs won’t exist any longer with a possibl­e deep recession exacerbated by a Brexit contraction. Families are bunkering down.

In concert with this climate of concern is a deteriorating trust in politicians, who couch each marking­-time phase as “according to the science’’, already pre-empting­ an inevitable national inquir­y into what could be a disprop­ortionate handling of the disaster.

Johnson and his cabinet have continued to highlight daily corona­virus deaths, without much publicity to the extraordinary 23,000 “excess non-coronavirus deaths’’, attributed to suicides and the elderly losing the will to live because of isolation. Additionally, thousands of other deaths are happening­ because people are too frightened to go to hospital when suffering a heart attack. So far the official coronavirus death tally is more than 37,000, yet the societal tally is immeasurable.

According to the data, the virus reached its peak in the country on April 8, yet just as the leaders were too slow in implementing some social­ distancing in early March; they are ponderously skirting the edges at the back end to reopen.

Where the Bundesliga is back in Germany, without crowds, in Britain there is knuckle-gnashing over whether Premier League players can even train together ­before a mid-June restart. School students are unlikely to have meaningful and full-time face-to-face teaching before September.

The civil libertarians, of which the Prime Minister was one until he caught the virus and dissolved into a shell of his optimistic self, can only shake their heads. Those advocating near-permanent lockdown are still in the majority here.