Week 1

The Government texts me to tell me to stay at home, save lives, protect the NHS. I laugh at the irony. We’ve been asking it to do the latter for a decade but I don’t think it’s the kind of message you can reply to.

A Human Rights lawyer I know sends me an email listing the fights they have on their hands at the moment. Among them, trying to make sure we don’t make the same mistakes we did with the Anti-Terrorism Act and that legislation being rushed through parliament now doesn’t lead us blindly into a cage we built to cope with an emergency situation, then managed to close and lock behind us.

I also begin to see some of my friends struggle with the isolation and I think about the impact long term quarantine will have on people’s mental health. So I write this…

My hopeful tone shifts a few days later as the previous week’s promises of financial aid need to become cold hard ready cash and there are long wait times in phone queues, people who don’t qualify for things, and no clear instructions from HMRC or Rishi Sunak on how to actually access this pledged Tory gold. And okay, I get it, things happened fast. But disasters often do. They don’t let you catch your breath or sing Happy Birthday all the way to the end. This is why we had a plan in place making us the second most prepared country in the world for a pandemic…oh, except there were some missteps implementing that plan and oh, ah, Jeremy Hunt said that stockpiling extra goggles would be too expensive so we just didn’t do it. James Macavoy pays for them instead, as Doctors Mona Barzin and Salaj Masand, Mr. Ravi Visagen and Mr. Rav Kumar set up a crowdfunder to get frontline NHS workers essential PPE.

Suddenly the Conservative government has to concede that perhaps a welfare state is there to protect people from unforeseen hardship and disaster, that perhaps all those ‘necessary’ cuts to the NHS may have hollowed it out to the point of collapse and that austerity was a really fucking bad idea.

The UK Covid-19 response that doesn’t involve talking about money is still a shambles. Home tests are promised but no mass testing is being done. There’s a Guardian headline that states ‘infection rate in UK may be slowing’ (from 30/03/2020) and I can’t help thinking ‘HOW DO YOU KNOW?’ In Germany they are testing half a million people a week and although their infection rate is one of the highest, their current death rate one of the lowest, as if by knowing who is sick you can isolate them effectively and track the people who may have been infected. A chapter in a book from the NCBI entitled Pandemics: Risks, Impacts and Mitigation has the whole scenario including all the potential gaps mapped out. It’s like people actually knew this was going to happen or something.

Once a pandemic has started, a coordinated response should be implemented focusing on maintenance of situational awareness, public health messaging, reduction of transmission, and care for and treatment of the ill.

I want Boris Johnson to get this tattooed onto his face so he remembers every time he looks in the mirror. I imagine he is vain and that happens often.

Then, just after I publish the previous comic, BoJo the Yellow Clown is diagnosed and slowly everyone around him is too, including Dominic Cummings and although a lot of people find this hilarious Karma I’m overcome with a kind of anguished rage I can’t quite place. The selfish, recklessness of it. Who else has he infected? Who else, through his inaction and incompetence, will die?

By the end of the week I’m overcome with the grief that I think a lot of people are feeling. The slow knowledge that this is going to go on for months. The thick, low pulse of anxiety of what’s to come, months from now but also tomorrow. The sheer helplessness if inaction coupled with the siren wail of the 24 hour news cycle leaves me unable to do anything.

And then there is the creeping devastation at the loss of casual human interaction.

I sleep badly, dreaming of incarceration. And I can’t write anymore comics for now.

The full chapter on Pandemics is here and it’s a great read, especially if you are perhaps in charge of a country:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK525302/

The crowdfunding page raising money for PPE is here:
https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/masks4nhsheroes

Information on Germany’s testing came form this Al Jazeera video:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/03/covid-19-germany-sees-fatalities-high-infection-rate-200328091912752.html

And as ever, the Johns Hopkins Map is a constant source of anxious fun:
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
It is interesting to note that last week the data plotted on the graph in the bottom right hand corner changed from showing the infection and recovery rate in china compared to the infection rate of the rest of the world, and now just shows exponential orange horror.