COVID DIARY DAY 9130

It’s been 5 years since the lockdown. The human world was virtually under house arrest. The natural world 🌎 took a sigh of relief. Dolphins were spotted swimming in the Bosphorus, deer and mountain goats were seen roaming the streets of Britain and nature reserves saw a boom in animal populations. Introverts were supremely happy and extroverts were depressed.

Now, everything has gone back to normal. Even the home-working era seems to be coming to an end. Company bosses are forcing their workers to come into offices, claiming (without convincing evidence) that productivity is higher when working in the office. Even the face-masks are now virtually gone, except for the occasional mysophobe. I work in the education sector and for a number of years following the lockdowns, there were bottles of sanitizer and hygiene wipes in every classroom. Now, even that is a rare sight. You would think that COVID-19 is no more. You would be wrong.

As of February 2025, the WHO have identified over 26 significant variants of the coronovirus, including Alpha, Beta, Delta and Omicron and all their variants. XEC, a subvariant of Omicron, is the the most dominant to its transmissibility (yalemedicine.org). However, no one even tests themselves to see if the sniffles they have is COVID or not. This is despite the face that over 7 million deaths have been attributed to COVID-19 (The Guardian). According to a study published in The Lancet, the number is likely way higher. They recorded 18.2 million deaths associated with COVID just from Jan 2020 to Dec 2021.

March 2025 saw the first reflection events in Britain marking that period of our lives and remembering the 227,000 deaths. These days of reflection are to become an annual thing now. Individual towns and local authorities have held their own events with Bracknell Forest commemorating a bench for the occasion. However, there is no national memorial as yet for the medical practitioners and key workers that lost their lives during those initial years.

There are lessons we should have learned from this experience. We are one species, one human race, that are inter-connected regardless of our geographies and politics. Yet the world marches ever towards nationalism, racism, and individual greed. This global event should have brought us closer together, instead wars continue to be fought, poverty continues to spread and climate change continues to devastate the poorest countries in the world.

Take a minutes silence, or offer up a prayer, for all those who gave their lives so that the rest of us would live on. I hope that one day their sacrifice will be remembered in the way that it should and that the harsh lessons of those years helps us become better as a species.