Thank God yes. The doctor wasn’t very reassuring. First, it was a nightmare to even get anyone to answer the phone (understandable) and this one actually picked it up , thinking she was talking to someone else and nearly, as we say here, put the heart crossways on me when she started talking about operations and infections and things. Then she answered my nervous query as to if the ward had any Covid cases with, “Ah not now, but sure it could happen any time!” Thanks a lot doc! Great bedside manner, and way to reassure a jittery brother!
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Around this time (early March) China, where the whole thing had kicked off, seemed to have reached critical mass and was now holding steady at around 80,000 cases. It was still the largest number of cases and deaths in the world (though it would soon be surpassed) but given that case numbers were hardly increasing at all, the government now began to turn worldwide quarantine policy on its head, and began screening any travellers into the country, in case foreigners were bringing new cases into China. Quite a turnaround, really, in less than five months. Meanwhile we began preparing for a full lockdown, with all bars and restaurants told to close permanently from midnight on March 15. Allah wasn’t protecting his people either, as the Grand Ayatollah of Iran, Hashem Bathaie Golpayenagi, died from the virus. Ireland’s cases topped 200.
People continued to ignore or resist health advice, putting personal and religious freedoms ahead of their safety and that of others. In Malaysia, a religious festival where thousands gathered saw a spike of over 125 cases, bringing the country’s total to over 500. Celebrities began to be hit: Tom Hanks, Idris Elba and Rita Wilson were all confirmed as positive for Coronavirus. While Spain, Italy and Ireland shut down - a mandated lockdown; no suggestions or advice, just do it - the UK took a more nuanced, some might say cowardly approach that might absolve them of the blame which would later be attached to countries who had forced their citizens to stay indoors and out of work for their own safety.
Johnson told his people they “should” stay at home, wash their hands, work from home if possible, and avoid pubs, restaurants and night clubs, while still allowing those facilities to remain open. Schools were not closed, and nobody was forced to stay at home, leading to a great percentage of the British public either shrugging and going in to work anyway, or being told by their bosses there was no support for them working from home and they had better haul their backsides into work or be fired. Once again, leadership was weak and most people were thinking in terms of their pocket and not their health, especially employers, who seemed to look upon the whole “stay-at-home” thing as unnecessary and over the top.
Further confusing things, the British government closed all theatres and cinemas, and advised anyone who had a cough or a high temperature to stay at home - isolation, another word we would become horribly intimate with - away from everyone. If this happened in a setting of more than two people, then everyone had to isolate. The virus had now been generally confirmed to be attacking two types of people: the old and those with what were termed “underlying medical conditions”, which as you can imagine scared the shit out of me, with Karen having MS. Initial reports of the deaths in Ireland confirmed this; almost every time we read of one it was someone in their eighties or nineties, and/or who had an existing condition. That’s how it was, until suddenly it wasn’t.
New issues began to come to the fore, particularly for Britain, later for Ireland and the USA. The first was the scarcity of ICU beds. Intensive Care Units had traditionally only been needed for the very sick, or for those recovering from a major operation. It’s in the name: when you’re there you get intensive care - round-the-clock surveillance, meds as you need them, constant observation and the best the hospital can offer. Coma patients might be in ICU, car crash victims, those suffering from cancer. Generally speaking, they tended not to be used as much as “normal” wards, with most people admitted into hospital there for a short time or maybe a long stay, but nothing that would require that sort of care, at least not constantly. Covid changed all that.
Because it attacks the respiratory system, the lungs, those contracting it find it hard to breathe. Therefore they must be provided oxygen through what are known as ventilators, and this cannot stop while the person is sick. There’s no such thing as moving a critically-ill person with Covid to another ward and out of ICU. They would die, and in fact, sadly, so many people would die in ICU wards across the world that they would begin to resemble battlezones, as if these were soldiers fighting in some horrible war they could not win, and kept dying. But more of that later. Right now, I just want to use this as a way to illustrate - if it needs to be - how desperate hospitals were for ICU beds.
And ventilators.
Not a terrible amount of point having an ICU ward without ventilators, and supply of these was running out as demand rose exponentially and to a level never before expected, or provided for. This would soon become a crisis, as companies in other industries would be asked to turn their manufacturing efforts towards making more ventilators as the world cried out for oxygen. And then there was the other side of the ICU equation. What about the people who needed intensive care, but who did not have Covid? What about the heart attack patients, the cancer patients, those with other respiratory conditions? How would they be looked after if their beds, as it were, were occupied by people suffering from Covid?
Interestingly, Boris Johnson had just been handed a memo from Oxford Imperial College, bemoaning the response of his government to the pandemic so far, and warning that if things did not change, if proper action was not taken, up to half a million people could be expected to die from the disease.
Finally, months after allowing people to travel from country to country spreading the virus, a worldwide travel ban was put in place. Sport suffered another setback as the Euro 2020 Football Tournament, which involves, or can involve, most of Europe, was postponed, not cancelled, but would not take place until the following year. Even in lockdown, Ireland’s cases kept multiplying, giving us by the middle of March a total of nearly 400, with, thankfully, only two deaths at this point. Italy, leading the field, was heading for the 40,000 mark with cases and now had almost as many deaths from Covid as had perished in the 9/11 attacks on America. Speaking of the Land of the Free, they were climbing towards 10,000 cases with 150 deaths. Trump continued to ignore the emergency. He played a lot of golf.
On March 18 schools closed in Scotland and Wales, but not in England. People began to worry about losing their jobs as businesses, shops and offices closed, nobody able to say for sure when they would be able to open again, nobody certain of getting their job back if and when they did. The stock markets began to crash, as the world hurtled towards an economic depression, just to add fuel to the already-blazing fire. On March 19, though following the example of Scotland and Wales - albeit later - in closing schools, Johnson confidently declared that “London will never be locked down.” I think a lot of people in the UK now realised this man is an idiot, a dangerous one, and that they couldn’t trust a thing he said. Still, he was in power and there was no way around that, so they had to bite the bullet and do as they were told.
Around this point President Trump started talking about the benefits of Hydroxychloroquine, which seems to be some sort of drug used to treat malaria. He also considered the possibility of people drinking bleach to “clean out the virus”. However we won’t be going into his possibly insane response to the pandemic here, as we will be going country-by-country in later chapters and you can bet that America will take up a few! For now, it seemed Italy had risen to the top of the dungheap and been awarded the first prize gold medal nobody wanted: deaths in Italy now outstripped even those of China, though for now it had only half the amount of cases, around 40,000. Despite being ostensibly on lockdown since early in the month, it was revealed that a visiting doctor from China saw people walking around, going into shops, eating in restaurants in Milan, and could not believe it. One reason for the high volume of cases in Italy was advanced as their population being so old, with the second-oldest population in the world. As the majority of people succumbing to the virus were over 70, that certainly made sense. The other point might have been to have actually observed the fucking lockdown, guys!
Speaking of which, Johnson finally grasped the nettle and ordered businesses to close. No suggestions, no advice, no requests, it’s a Nike thing. Just do it. He still seemed to think that Britain could beat the virus in three months. I get the feeling (though at the time I wasn’t following British response to the pandemic, having enough to do to keep monitoring our own) that he thought this was his chance to be Churchillian, to treat the threat of the pandemic as a kind of twenty-first century blitz and rally the people behind him against the menace. The problem there is that the virus is not a sentient thing, not a country, not a state, not a dictator, not even an idea. It didn’t care what mentality the British had, because it was and is incapable of caring. It has no free will, or will of any kind. It’s a bunch of cells that destroys other cells and replicates itself, and that’s all it does. It doesn’t stop to consider how good or bad you are, whether you’ve followed the advice or willfully ignored it. It doesn’t care. It never did. It never could. So Churchillian speeches and a “stiff upper lip” meant nothing to it.
At this point, it would be unfair and inaccurate to say Italy stood alone, but it was the top hot-spot for the virus, and its hospital systems were collapsing in on themselves. News reports from that country made it look as if there had been some natural disaster or a thousand bombs had gone off all over the city. It looked like a warzone. Terrified of the escalating crisis, the government tightened up restrictions, confining all people to their houses regardless. The most scary thing about this scene, as we watched it on Tv and listened, as it were, to the silence, saw the ghostly, empty streets haunted by only the spectre of the Coronavirus and with no living human to be seen, was that it was something which would, inevitably, and quite soon, be heading in our own direction. As Kent Brockman once said about “giant alien ants”, one thing was sure: there was no stopping it. The virus would soon be here.
Chapter II: My Country, Wrong or Right -
Individual Nations Respond to the Pandemic
I’ve spent a good deal of time outlining what happened at the start of this pandemic, how it grew from a few infected Chinese in some town nobody heard of or cared about (let’s be brutally honest) to an event of concern and finally to a worldwide panic as a danger we had never experienced in our lives (SARS? Hardly touched us. Foot and Mouth? We got through it. Bird Flu? Pah!) descended on our comfortable way of life and gleefully began ripping it apart like a pride of lions chasing gazelle across the Serengeti, or something. This was something completely new to us, which might to some extent explain why we were all so slow to react to it. I personally feel - as I felt at the time - that we were all kind of in denial. Nobody wanted to believe this was going to be as bad as it got, and so nobody did. We all adopted the equivalent position of someone sitting on the floor, hands over their ears screaming no no no!
But we couldn’t stop it, and our denials were useless. It was coming, and we had no choice but to try to prepare ourselves as best we could to weather the storm.
In this next chapter I’m going to look at how individual countries reacted to the news. How they prepared, how they informed, or didn’t, their citizenry, what help if any they offered and how many countries basically self-isolated while others tried to assist their neighbours. The pandemic has, as I said earlier, brought both the best and the worst out of humanity, and here I’ll be looking at how that attitude was distributed across the countries of the world. As we’re pretty much only talking about the outbreak here, I won’t be cataloguing each country’s total response to the pandemic, but just the first few months, usually comprising their first lockdown (if they had any), and generally up to a half-arbitrary date of June 2020.
In the case of the USA it’s a different, and far more complex matter. Originally I had intended to do America by state, as some states never did anything about the virus, while others locked down. Some, such as Texas and Florida, actually made the situation worse by legislating against mask and vaccine mandates, and encouraging their people to resist the efforts by the CDC and the government to protect them. But apart from the sheer, mind-numbing boredom of researching and writing (and for you, reading about) essentially the same response, or lack of, throughout the States, with a few tweaks here and there, I’ve decided to fold it all in to the third chapter, where I’ll be taking a very deep and searching look into how this pandemic fed in to conspiracy theories, the response of a president who desperately wanted the virus to just disappear and stop annoying him, and the inexorable rise of the far right.
As for this chapter, well I won’t of course be doing every country, but will be concentrating, inasmuch as I can, on those that had the biggest cases, those which entered lockdown first, those which had the most deaths and of course those who ignored, or tried to ignore it. This won’t be done alphabetically, but I think I will try to do it chronologically, as cases grew and deaths began to be reported. That being said, I am going to start with the three countries - or at least, with respect to smaller nations, the three significant countries - who decided to implement lockdowns first.
Before I start, a few notes, which pertain to asterisks shown in the data sheets to follow:
- Refers to the first lockdown, if there were subsequent ones
** At time of writing here refers literally to when I wrote this, not when I posted it. Sadly, as cases continue to mount, even with vaccines, this figure may already have increased by the time I post this, never mind by the time you get around to reading it. The same caveat applies to vaccine uptake and current status.
*** Each country is scored, by me, on a scale of 1 to 100. 1 is a country whose people and/or government not only did not listen to the advice but went against it and which is now in a worse state because of it (and probably has the highest cases/deaths and lowest vaccine uptake) while 100 is a shining example of how to get through this with as little deaths as possible.
++ refers only to the party in power when the pandemic hit, ie from 2020, if the government changed during that time.
+++ Reaction level is based on how the public, generally, reacted to the lockdown. Were they supportive, resistant? Did they abide by it? Did it spark protests and/or violence? The level goes from 1 to 10, with 10 being total agreement and compliance and 1 being total anarchy and revolt.
Current Status: This is on a sliding scale and indicated by a letter, with a country “back to normal”, in as much as any can be after two years of this pandemic, going into three, with industry back up and running, schools open, travel re-established and the population all or mostly vaccinated being ranked as A, down to a country still battling the ravages of Covid, probably not still under lockdown (as I don’t think anywhere is now) but definitely struggling to recover. Letter not yet decided, possibly D or E.
Score is out of 100, and takes into account both the amount of cases/deaths, what the initial response was from government, and how the country is now.
Country: Italy
Continent: Europe (Western)
Governing Party:++ Coalition of M5M and Lega
Political affiliation: Unitary (don’t ask me: I’ve tried to figure it out - is this a left, right leaning or centrist, or other government? Dunno).
Main crisis leaders: Guiseppe Conte, Prime Minister
Status of country: Republic
Cases (at time of lockdown):* 9,172
Deaths (at time of lockdown) 463
Cases (at time of writing):** Over 18 million
Deaths (at time of writing): over 168,000
Date of first lockdown: March 9 2020
Duration: 70 days
Lockdown type: Full
Number of lockdowns (to date): Two
Result of lockdown(s): Initially pretty useless till they were finally enforced. By then, of course, that horse was already galloping across the fields and out of sight. Nobody took it seriously. Italy resembled a warzone. Eventually the government was forced to implement the strictest lockdown outside of China.
Reaction level: +++ 8
Vaccine uptake (at time of writing): 80 - 90 %
Current status (at time of writing): A
Score:*** 60
There’s probably a case, unfortunately, to point to Italy as a prime example of the belief that lockdowns don’t work. The first major country to instigate such measures, they still ended up racing to the top of the charts, so to speak, overtaking even China in the number of deaths in the country and easily taking second place with amount of cases until the USA caught up and overtook everyone. But the story of the road taken to the Italian lockdown might explain that in some part. It began in February, which you would think was pretty early, and it was; however the staggered approach may have been a problem. As everyone knows by now, and can remember, the main trouble spot in Italy was the area of Lombardy, in the northwest. Cases were spiking here and hospitals were coming under increasing pressure.
Like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel, the Italian government under Giuseppe Conte proclaimed Red Zones and Yellow Zones in the north of the country. Red Zones were under quarantine, and there were penalties for moving from them to the safer Yellow Zones, though there was no restriction within the actual Red Zones. This looks to me (and I haven’t fully researched it) like all the government were doing was putting a bunch of people together who might have been infected, or going to be, and keeping them away from everyone else. Of course, that’s the very idea of a quarantine, but while this would save anyone outside of, say, Lombardy or Veneto’s Red Zones from being infected, it didn’t do much to help those inside the zones who were, or would be. The Italian military were called in to patrol the Red Zones, and these people must have felt a little like they were being forced into or contained within a ghetto.
Within the Red Zones, schools were closed, public events cancelled and church services curtailed. For an intensely religious and Catholic country such as Italy, the very heart of the Catholic Church, that must have hurt. Train and bus services were halted, and even outside of the Red Zones, within these municipalities, sporting events were now called off too. The closing days of the Carnival of Venice were cancelled, and anyone exhibiting symptoms of Covid was told not to go to hospital but to phone a special emergency number. Famous tourists attractions such as the Milan Cathedral and St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice closed. Italy was heading towards full lockdown.
The Ocean Viking, carrying migrants to the country, was quarantined for two weeks in Sicily, and people began panic buying, emptying the shelves at the local supermarkets. Tom Cruise’s latest Mission: Impossible instalment fulfilled the promise of its own title, and was cancelled, having been filming in Venice. Those who could, worked from home. Schools and universities began to close, as did the courts. In the Red Zone, under medical advice, people no longer shook hands or kissed each other on the cheek, which for Italians was surely as hard as not being able to go to mass, but would become common practice as we learned how Covid spread through droplets and human skin contact. At the same time, a report by the DW.Com website said that very few people in the Red Zones wore or believed they needed to wear masks. This might partially have been due to the scarcity, and thus the higher price, of such items.
Despite being supposedly quarantined though, it seemed, according to the same report, that police officers who were meant to be enforcing the thing were letting just about anyone through, if they had “a good story”. Clearly, at this early point in the unfolding saga of the virus, few people were taking it seriously enough; almost everyone thought the government was being heavy-handed and bemoaned the closing of public events and the lack of football. With the churches all closed, funerals were a problem, as would become the case certainly throughout Europe if not the world; one resident noted with horror that a victim of the virus could not have their funeral and their coffin had to be carried directly to the cemetery.
The tourist industry took a big hit as some events were cancelled and ones previously booked were now unable to gain permission to go ahead. Fairs, exhibitions, expositions, all were cancelled or postponed. On March 4 all schools and universities in Italy were ordered to close, and all sporting events to take place behind closed doors (without spectators) until April 3. March 8 the measures in the Red Zones were dramatically tightened and the next day all of Italy went on complete lockdown. It was the first national lockdown in Europe.
The sad thing was that it kind of wouldn’t matter: the damage had been done. At the time the lockdown was imposed Italy had a total of 9,172 cases and 463 deaths. The very day after the cases pushed through the 10,000 mark and deaths rose to over 600. By the end of the first week after lockdown cases figures had doubled to over 20,000 and deaths had more than tripled to over 2,000. Perhaps if the people in the Red Zones had taken things seriously enough and not wandered from zone to zone as if this was some annoying inconvenience instead of their lives they were risking, and the lives of others, case numbers might have been easier to control. I know, I know: Captain Hindsight. But when you read the accounts of Italians living in the quarantined zones now, over a year later, you just feel like shaking them and saying “wake the fuck up! Your country is about to become all but a national cemetery!”
There were riots in the prisons as conjugal visits were prohibited, and several prisoners in various jails died. Others took advantage of the confusion to escape, apparently. Realising that people who can’t work because everything is closed down by their orders, the government introduced the world’s first “pandemic payments” system, which they called the Curia. It consisted of “funds to strengthen the Italian health care system and civil protection (€3.2 billion); measures to preserve jobs and support income of laid-off workers and self-employed (€10.3 billion); other measures to support businesses, including tax deferrals and postponement of utility bill payments in most affected municipalities (€6.4 billion); as well as measures to support credit supply (€5.1 billion).”
Many other countries would find they would have to follow suit. A grim development on March 19 saw the army come out on the streets, not to maintain order or enforce lockdown, but to get the bodies of the dead to the crematoria. There were just too many to be handled by normal means: by now Italy was the country with the most deaths from the virus in the world, surpassing even China with 3,405, and dealing with over 40,000 cases. The next day, exercise was strictly limited to one person alone rather than groups and only within a short distance of one’s own home. Industry began to shut down across Italy, and heavy fines - and even threatened prison sentences (which sort of made little sense, as the prisons were in a hell of a state, but they probably meant after the lockdown) - were imposed on anyone breaking the lockdown regulations. This was deadly serious, and there would be no more tipping the wink to a guard and slipping out of your house to visit a mate, or go for a walk. The only thing walking the Italian streets now was Death. (Yes, yes, very poetic, Trollheart, give it a rest…)
On April 1 the lockdown was officially extended to April 13, with all ports and airports closed on April 8, and two days later Conte extended the lockdown into May, with a hopeful gradual restart set for May 4. By now the country’s death toll had climbed almost to 20,000, with cases now reaching a record 150,000. Only the USA surpassed this, with over half a million cases and a comparable number of deaths to Italy. Worldwide, the coronavirus was responsible for close to 107,000 deaths with 2 million cases. Italy’s medical community was being hit hard, with the death of 100 doctors announced.
Schools were to stay closed until September, but industry could begin a slow comeback from May 18, with people allowed to move freely, but only within their own region. On June 3 the first lockdown officially ended. By now the country had suffered over 30,000 deaths and had in excess of 220,000 cases. A second lockdown would begin in October as the second wave of the virus hit.
Country: Spain
Continent: Europe
Governing Party:++ PSOE (Spanish Socialists’ Workers Party)
Political affiliation: Democratic/Socialist
Main crisis leaders:++ Pedro Sánchez
Status of country: Kingdom
Cases (at time of lockdown:* 5,232
Deaths (at time of lockdown) + 1,000
Cases (at time of writing):** 12,890,002
Deaths (at time of writing): 108.259
Date of first lockdown: March 15 2020
Duration: 98 days
Lockdown type: Gradual, from “state of alarm” (March 13) to full lockdown (March 15) to gradual re-opening of services through de-escalation in certain areas and for certain services.
Number of lockdowns (to date): 2
Result of lockdown(s): First one lifted too soon, as once this was done the infection rate skyrocketed, making Spain the country in Europe with the highest total of cases.
Reaction level:+++ 6
Vaccine uptake (at time of writing): 79%
Current status (at time of writing): Back to normal, as it were
Score:*** 64
Spain was another country whose name would become synonymous with Covid, and find its tourist industry decimated by the sheer volume of cases it would deal with over the next two years. Initially slow to restrict travel from China, the government believed this to be “xenophobic and reactionary”, possibly in part because the measure was called for by the opposition. Unlike Italy though, Spain’s first case did not occur on the mainland but in the Canary Islands, when a German tourist was tested and came back positive for the virus on January 31. The second was also on an island, this time Palma de Mallorca, and this time a British tourist who had had contact with a French infected person. This was February 9, and three days later Barcelona cancelled its lucrative Mobile World Congress. The following day Spain recorded its first death.
The spectre of the horror unfolding to the northeast in Italy came with a vengeance to Spain on February 24, when a doctor from Lombardy who had been on holiday in Tenerife tested positive. The hotel he had been staying at was placed under lockdown. This was the first real action Spain took in relation to lockdowns, although it was very local and specific. Over the next week, Italians in Spain began testing positive and the caseload went up. By the end of the month there were 58 cases in Spain, one of which was responsible for the first case in Ecuador, a woman returning from holiday in Spain bringing the virus to the South American country. On March 8, as the government dithered and the opposition fumed, a planned march for International Women’s Day went ahead and a big football game was not called off. After this, Spain’s figures doubled, with 1,231 cases and 32 deaths the very next day (not that much in one day I mean, just that the previous day cases had stood at 616 and deaths at 17, so basically, whether it was to do with the two events - which surely it must have been - there were another 615 cases and another 15 deaths announced).
Regional governors such as the Catalan began suspending events, but still there was no lockdown nor any travel restrictions. Schools shut down from March 12, but again this seems to have been an independent decision by the establishments, not an order received from the government. This came, more or less, the next day in the announcement of a “state of alarm” (basically a watered-down version of a state of emergency; I suppose to some extent you could call it a state of mild worry?) and then at last a national lockdown from March 15 was imposed. By now Spain was heading for the 10,000 mark in cases and had recorded over 300 deaths. Like Italy before it, Spain announced a support package for those who would be out of work due to the lockdown, theirs comprising 200 billion Euro. A moratorium was put on mortgage payments, signed into law by the King of Spain, Juan Carlos, and efforts begun to research to find a vaccine.
On March 22 the lockdown was extended into April, and, a grim reminder of how many deaths there were - over 1,000 now - one of the ice rinks in Madrid was converted into a temporary morgue. This was a sight we would see in other countries too, a harrowing visual representation of the threat the virus posed, and a reminder to those who dismissed Covid as “a small flu.” As more and more medical staff were found to be positive and unable to work, and the hospitals and care homes began to creak at the seams, a horrible discovery was made. Old people left abandoned in retirement homes, left, presumably, to die while their so-called carers saved their own skins. Like I said, the pandemic showed us the best and the worst of humanity, and this was certainly a bitter example of the latter.
Spain’s head of the Centre for Health Emergencies, Fernando Simon, tested positive on March 30. Simon was the face of the daily coronavirus briefings, so I imagine it would be as if Dr. Faucci had caught the virus. At this point there were over 64,000 cases in Spain, and over 4,000 deaths. The lockdown was again extended, this time to the end of April. Finally, from the beginning of April cases began to slow down, and the peak of the first wave seemed to have been reached. As case numbers dropped, Spain began partially re-opening, from April 13, with a phased de-escalation in four sections resulting in the country coming fully out of lockdown on midsummer’s day, June 21. Case numbers had risen to over 220,000 and deaths to over 25,000. For a country whose government confidently predicted that there would only be a “handful” of cases - not deaths now, cases - this was a stunning shock and probably seen as hubris by the Spanish government. Mind you, as we’ll see, and as we know, very few countries took this pandemic as seriously as they should, so we can’t be too hard on Spain. They were only saying what every other government was saying.
As would be the case almost always after lockdown was eased, people went mad with their freedoms restored, and inevitably the case numbers, and deaths, began to climb again, leading in Spain’s case to a reinstitution of lockdown from October.
All governments are more concerned with the health of the economy not that of the voters.
Well that’s not strictly true now is it? If they’re not concerned about their voters they may not be voted back in. So even if they think they’re all a bunch of useless arseholes who will be first against the wall when the revolution comes, they’d still rather they were the kind of useless arseholes who would vote them back into power. Before they become first against the wall and the revolution comes. Maybe. Perhaps it might be more accurate to say they are concerned not so much with the voters but with their votes.
You’ve been reading Douglas Adams ? 
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Interesting blog Trollheart.
2020 was an awful time. I was so unwell from April until well into 2021. The worst thing is that I didn’t even realise I’d had Covid when I contracted it. I didn’t have the cough which at the time was the only symptom they were taking seriously. I guess I am “lucky” that it wasn’t worse. Long covid after effects were horrible. Having always been super energetic and physically active to be unable to even walk down the stairs in a normal way without struggling. My muscles were shot through but not in a normal way. My feet developed some sort of disgusting skin condition. I couldn’t do any exercise without feeling as though I was sticking razor blades in my muscles and tendons. The worst moment was thinking I would be trapped in the bath. I even had some sort of eye condition where my eyelid swelled up painfully. Even abdominal/pancreatic issues (from tests). I can no longer eat much in the way of carbs. The whole year was like trying to walk through treacle. Never mind lockdown I didn’t want to socialise the way I felt. Just going to a festival in 2021 was so much hard word. But now I’m sort of fine. Muscles starting to feel good again. You really appreciate your muscles feeling just normal when you have missed that feeling for two years.
I did expect it to die down after 2 years because that is what happened with Sars. Pandemics always tend to run their course like a wildfire. We like to think we are in control but we do share the planet with other life forms and sometimes they bite back because they find our weak spots.
Adams? A mere abacus! Mention him not in my presence!
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Very sorry to hear that, Annie. Glad you’re beginning to get over it. It was a horrifying time. Really did feel like the world was coming to an end, didn’t it? I was particularly worried because, though I’m relatively healthy, my sister is bed-bound with MS since 2006 and would be like a paper bag in a hurricane if Covid got near her. Luckily she’s fine (not counting the MS of course).
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Sorry about your sister’s condition. MS is such a cruel disease, but particularly when it’s the aggressive form.
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It’s a terrible thing.Our GP told us that it can effect any part of the body and make usually trivial complaints very serious.
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Thank you both. You’re not kidding. The simplest things are beyond her: feeding herself, controlling her bowels/bladder, washing herself, reading, even talking coherently. We call it the disease that just keeps on giving, because each time you think it’s the worst it can get, it has something new to throw at you. I have to feed her and constantly see her choking, I read to her because she can’t see properly anymore, and of course I have to do all the nasty little things, like change her, clean her nose, brush her teeth (surprising how yucky that can be), cut her fingernails and so on. Lots of fun. Still, she keeps a pretty good attitude about it and I’ve created a whole world for her with her teddies and soft toys who all talk to her. She even has her own personal TV channel which I created for her, introduced by her toy cat Millie. Takes about a week to prepare - all her favourite programmes and movies - and last about a month at a time, so it’s a lot of work but worth it.
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And you have to keep fit and healthy for the both of you.No pressure there then.
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Country: Denmark
Continent: Scandinavia, Northern Europe
Governing Party:++ Social Democrats
Political affiliation: Left I guess
Main crisis leaders:++ Mette Frederiksen (Prime Minister), Queen Margrethe II
Status of country: Kingdom
Cases (at time of lockdown:* 674
Deaths (at time of lockdown) 1
Cases (at time of writing):** 2,519,057
Deaths (at time of writing): 4,250
Date of first lockdown: March 12
Duration: 33 days
Number of lockdowns (to date): 2
Reaction level+++: 90
Vaccine uptake (at time of writing): 82%
Score:*** 95
When Covid first popped its ugly head into our world, and we began to learn about - and later to fear - it, the initial contacts were always from China, where the whole thing had kicked off. But as you read above in its entry, China was pretty soon superseded by Italy as the go-to place for infections, and so anyone coming from there was liable to carry the virus on its travels. Such was the case for Denmark, where the first two cases came, not only from Italy but from Lombardy, the very first major hot-spot in terms of the virus. Denmark might have been somewhat isolated, being up there in the far north and kind of removed from the rest of Europe, but once one of its citizens decided “You know what? I fancy a skiing holiday. Wonder where I’ll go? Oh, Italy looks nice!” they were screwed. Dragged down into the morass with the rest of us, Denmark recorded its first case pretty early, at the end of February. A third case resulted from a conference held in Germany, and Denmark was well on its way.
Iran had also by now become quite the place to go if you yearned for Covid in your life, and so it came to pass that the country’s tenth case in all (seven more from Italy had already been found) had been to the Islamic Republic, and as March got going the Danish authorities were not that bothered, only ensuring anyone infected (ten up to now, as I said) self-isolated at home. Of course it wouldn’t stay that way, and twelve days into the new month the country would be on lockdown. Prior to that though, they must have thought there was hope, as their “Patient Zero” recovered fully. Meanwhile, Danish - and, by association, Dutch - sport began to be affected, as a player for one of the national teams was infected, leading to his teammates and those in the teams that had played them recently having to quarantine. Ajax (pronounced eye-yax) from Holland had been involved, so also had to isolate. As the country entered lockdown on March 12, whether she wished to evoke a “blitz mentality” or whether she really believed this to be the worst crisis her country had faced since then, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen invoked the words used by her predecessor at the onset of World War II, calling for samfundssind, or a sense of community spirit, to get the country through this difficult time.
Like most countries, the level and speed of escalation was frightening. From a “mere” 53 cases on March 9 the figure had jumped to a massive 674 in just three days as the country entered lockdown. On this same day, Thomas Kahlenberg, the footballer who had originally tested positive, recovered, but on the other side of the scales, Denmark registered what could have been its first death. I say could have, because the man in question did exhibit symptoms, and died of a heart attack, but the link between the two could not be proven. He might have had his heart attack and died anyway. He was eighty when he died, and had had a history of heart problems. Another man died in similar circumstances on March 14, almost the same age.
Denmark, like most of its neighbours, recognised the vulnerability of the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions to the virus, and so grandparents were asked to stay away from their grandchildren, and as we all had to do, they self isolated. Schools were closed (I’m sure, like here, the hurrahs soon faded as the kids realised they couldn’t go outside to play) and the order to work from home where possible was instated. A sight soon to be familiar to us all, large and then smaller gatherings of people were banned, shops, restaurants and night clubs were closed, leaving only essential outlets such as groceries and pharmacies open, and sporting events were cancelled. On March 14 Denmark closed its borders, and only commercial vehicles delivering vital supplies were allowed on the roads, along with a few other specific exceptions, such as people returning home to Denmark, which any Dane abroad was advised/instructed to do without delay.
This seems odd to me. I suppose nobody wanted to trap or hold anyone in the country, but the government allowed any non-Dane to leave, and at this point their country had over 600 cases. True, there had not been many deaths, but still, you’re talking about letting someone leave a country which has infections, potentially allowing them to spread the virus to wherever they lived, which might at that time have been a Covid-free zone. Just seems a little irresponsible to me, but then, many countries would of course put their own interests first as the pandemic grew and spread across the world, and everyone looked to their own safety. The idea, too, of Danes being allowed to come home? Did they check where they were coming from? Was it likely they were returning from Italy, Iran, Spain? China? Was anyone tested on re-entering the country?
I don’t have those answers.
Look, we were all learning about this damned virus, and it’s not fair to, nor will I, place the blame for poor information or guidance on one health authority in one country - the CDC kept changing tack, and so did the WHO, and these are two biggest health authorities on the planet, so what chance had Demark got? Nevertheless, they did get it wrong, they said on April 10, when they agreed with the general consensus around the world that asymptomatic cases (those not showing any symptoms at first) could also transmit the virus, where before they had said there was no danger from this. In effect, this led to workers continuing in jobs - particularly in nursing homes and medical facilities - who turned out to be positive but originally asymptomatic, with the resultant transmission of the virus to those they came in contact with.
And then, there was that touch of mink.
We all read about how mink on a farm in Jutland were found to be infected by a mutated form of the virus, and had already transmitted the new variant to humans, so the mink were culled. Rich women everyone must have gasped in shock, as no doubt did animal rights groups. A new lockdown was instigated for Jutland, beginning November 6, the national one having been lifted April 13. On Christmas Day Denmark would enter its second lockdown, which would last three months into the new year, however this year they became the first country, not only in Europe but in the world to suspend their vaccination programme, so they must now be doing all right.
Country: Ireland
Continent: None; island, but politically part of Europe
Governing Party:++ Coalition of Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and various independents (hey, it’s Ireland, y’know?)
Political affiliation: God knows! Left I guess. Maybe
Main crisis leaders:++ Leo Varadkar and then Michael Martin (Taoiseach) Simon Harris and then Stephen Donnelly (Minister for Health) Dr. Tony Holohan (CMO)
Status of country: Republic
Cases (at time of lockdown:* 97
Deaths (at time of lockdown) 1
Cases (at time of writing):** 1,615,426
Deaths (at time of writing): 7,573
Date of first lockdown: March 12
Duration: 67 days
Number of lockdowns (to date): 3
Reaction level+++: 60
Vaccine uptake (at time of writing): 81%
Score:*** 80
And so we come to my home country. No vanity involved, I do assure you: I’m trying, as I said, to process these chronologically, in the order they occurred, and based on the date of the first official lockdowns. I seem to have pre-empted Spain a little, by about two days, but let’s not quarrel about that. To show (as if you care) that I’m not trying to push Ireland to the front, I concentrated on Denmark before this, as they had their first lockdown on the same day as Ireland. But now here we are, and while as usual I’ll be referring to Wiki for details, data and confirmation of figures and dates, this I can write almost freehand, as I literally lived through it.
Like most people, I assume, I watched the stories of the spread of what was known at the time as the Coronavirus with little real worry (and, it has to be said, little sympathy either), never dreaming it would visit our shores. But of course it did, and Covid arrived in Ireland at the end of February. Our government at the time had already set up the NPHET - the National Public Health Emergency Team, an acronym we would all become exhaustingly familiar with over the next two years - to monitor the progress of the virus before it ever reached Ireland, or even Europe, so you might say we were well prepared, but of course we were not. Nobody knew what we were facing, and this wasn’t because other countries wouldn’t share their knowledge, it was just that everyone was in the same boat. We were learning as we went along, adjusting and adapting to a new virus, a whole new way of thinking and endeavouring to battle an opponent we had never even heard of before, never mind fought.
Like most countries in Europe, our point of contact for the first cases was Italy, with one case being detected over the border in Northern Ireland as a woman returned from Northern Italy, and then one in our own Republic, same thing, except this victim was male. This was February 27 and 29 respectively, taking us into March with one case in the Republic of Ireland. Of course, it wouldn’t remain that way for long, and in fact we chalked up our first death eleven days into the new month. Like many, indeed most fatalities linked to Covid in the early days, this was an old person, who had died at a hospital. Lockdowns swiftly followed.
At the time, our taoiseach (pronounced tee-shock, and basically our Prime Minister, the head of the government, other than our President, itself largely a figurehead) at the time, Leo Varadkar, who would later become I think the only leader of the country to take a lower level job in the government - he’s now the tanaiste (tawn-ish-ta, second-in-command) ordered first the closure of all schools, colleges and childcare facilities on March 12, followed by all pubs and bars the next day. By March 27 we were instructed to “remain at home” with strict limits on where we could go (no more than 2 km from our home, for exercise or vital shopping, doctor’s appointments, that kind of thing), the order being shown on the TV: “Fan abhaile” (fon a-wall-ya) - Stay at home. This first lockdown would be our longest, and would instil the most fear into people, as we had never in our lifetimes experienced anything like this at all, and everyone was on edge.
As case numbers - and deaths - climbed steadily, and medical advice changed on almost a weekly basis, the hospitals began to creak at the seams. No country’s hospital system had ever been designed to take this sort of pressure, and in addition to Covid patients it must also be remembered that people were getting sick and hurt for other reasons, as they always have done: car accidents, heart attacks, domestic accidents, trips and falls, shortness of breath - all the usual stuff emergency departments deal with on a daily basis, but now they had also to contend with hundreds or more of patients who needed urgent isolation and accommodation in the ICUs, and beds, never at a premium in Irish hospitals, were more scarce than ever. In addition, people feared coming to hospital, worried they would catch Covid, doctors and nurses feared they would bring it in (and maybe go back and transmit it around) and the government advised all sick people to stay away from hospitals altogether. If you thought you were coming down with the virus, they said, ring - do NOT visit! - your GP and do NOT attend the Emergency Room.
For my part, I was forced to do my shopping early in the morning. Having witnessed with shock the huge queues of people waiting to get into Tesco (and once in, finding almost everything out of stock anyway) I had to take advantage of the special shopping hours set up for the elderly, the vulnerable and carers, which meant being at the doors originally at 7am, later changed to 8. This period only ran up to 9am though, so you had to get in and out quickly, and back safely home. We had of course been advised to wear face masks and to socially distance, and to wash our hands thoroughly, which naturally I did. I’ve described elsewhere the eerie feeling of quiet on the deserted roads, the fear of going out, even for a short while, and the way the lockdowns, especially the first one, impacted on us, so I won’t go into that again. Suffice to say that, like everyone, we were scared and nobody had any idea where this was going or how it was going to end.
One of our most important events, and one of the biggest tourist attractions Ireland can offer, the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, was cancelled amid fears it would become what was later termed as a “super-spreader” event, and we would be responsible not only for increasing the number of cases - and probably deaths too - in Ireland, but also for others taking the virus back to their own countries and propagating it there. So, amid general disappointment but, it must be said, agreement and understanding, the event was cancelled. Sporting events soon followed, as well as the likes of the Rose of Tralee Festival and the All-Ireland Championships, and school examinations such as the Leaving Certificate were postponed.
But in a country so famed for its welcome, and so religious, two other aspects of Covid hit harder than most. The first was the idea that nobody should or could shake hands or hug any more, as this was known to be a way to pass on, or contract, the virus. Even for me, it became hard not to give in to second nature and extend the hand or reach for the shoulders of loved ones. Irish people have always been a very “touchy-feely” people, if you like, and we love contact, so to suddenly have to cut that off was very hard. But necessary. I’m not entirely certain many in Ireland adopted the rather silly “elbow bump” that places like the UK did; we just kind of touched without touching. Saying goodnight, I would make the motion of kissing Karen’s forehead but not touch it, and so on.
More to the point for Ireland was the closure of churches. Nobody needs to be told how strong and vital a part religion plays in Ireland - the whole Troubles period was based, after all, on differences between Protestant and Catholic, and we here in the Republic have always been a Catholic country, well over a thousand years back, if not more, maybe nearly two. So when churches were closed people were worried and concerned. The clergy, to their credit, saw the sense of it, unlike, as we will see later, certain religious figures across the Atlantic, and did what they could to help their parishioners, holding “virtual masses”, transmitting over radio, absolving Catholics from their need or duty (perceived I imagine, as nobody is required) to attend mass and doing all they could to minister to the needs of the soul without being physically present.
Of course, this raised another issue. Most priests in Ireland are quite old, which immediately placed them in the “vulnerable” bracket, and even if they weren’t, most of their parishioners were, so you had the sort of “double whammy” of an old priest not being able to attend an old parishioner, lest one (or both) give the other the virus. For old people this of course made things even worse. One thing Irish people - older ones certainly - could always rely on was a visit from the local priest, some of them even receiving Holy Communion at their home, as did my aunt, when she was too old and infirm to make it to the church. That stopped, of course, as such visits were no longer safe, nor permitted. I remember phoning our priest when Karen was depressed and wanted to talk to him, and he sheepishly apologising; he was “cocooning” himself and could not attend. Cocooning was the phrase used to refer to older or more vulnerable people self-isolating, not because they had the virus, but in case they got it. A sort of protective custody by themselves.
Funerals were another thing. As the dead piled up, it became impossible to allow people to attend funerals, at least in the kind of numbers you would normally expect. With social distancing important, and the virus basically airborne and carried by droplets (and how many of them in a tear, and where do people cry the most?) the idea of a large crowd of people mourning the deceased - and, like as not, crowding into a pub or house afterwards - could not be condoned, and so sadly many of the dead went to their rest attended only by a priest and a few select family members. Sad times. Certain groups - travellers, mostly (knackers/pikies/gypsies/whatever you’re having yourself) openly flouted the restrictions, having their usual huge gatherings, to the extent that the Gardai (police) had to break some up, and even stop a planned wedding going ahead in County Wexford. Travellers have always considered themselves apart from the law, living on the fringes of society, so I suppose they either thought the law didn’t apply to them or wanted to give the finger to the authorities, but both funerals surely acted as super-spreaders, as would the wedding, had it gone ahead.
Hospitals basically closed their doors to visitors. Even those who were sick and possibly dying could not be visited, as the hospitals had by now been forced to implement a strict and zero-tolerance “no visitors” policy, as again related by me elsewhere in respect of Karen’s visit. This obviously put additional pressure on hospital staff, as they tried to comfort dying patients and also fielded angry calls from their loved ones. A lot of medical staff naturally got infected and the staffing levels went down as nurses, doctors and other staff had to self-isolate, leaving their colleagues trying to make up the shortfall. Meanwhile the ICUs were still filling up, and like most other countries we were running low on respirators and beds. PPE gear was also in short supply, and until the vaccine arrived it must have been a daily source of fear to have to go into work and face all those sick people. You have to just stand in awe of people who did this, day in, day out, with little to no concern for their own health.
Ireland may not have been alone in this, but it’s the only country I know of so far which instigated a five-level status in the time of Covid, with level 1 being basically all is well and level 5 meaning a full lockdown. Over the course of the pandemic this was applied separately and at different levels to different counties, as case numbers spiked there. In particular, Offaly, Laois and Kildare would all find themselves at a higher level than the rest of the country until their case numbers slowed. At best, I suppose this could be compared to the way certain states in the USA were under lockdown while others threw caution to the wind. Not really though. I think they did something similar in the UK, which we’ll check out in due course.
Oh, and don’t we Irish just love a good pilgrimage! When you’re getting too pleased with yourself, or you just need a good soul scourging, a barefoot walk over hard rock up Croagh Patrick was just the thing to bring you back down to earth (not, hopefully, literally!) and knock some of that heathen pride out of ya! But not this year, me auld segoshas! This year the event was cancelled; I mean, it made sense. Who wants to suddenly start feeling peaky (sorry) up the side of a bloody mountain in their bare feet, and from where would the rescue come, with the damn country on lockdown too? Hey, maybe God would understand and forgive you just this once, yeah?
But even more than ripping our soles (for the benefit of our souls) to shreds on stabby rocks in the cold morning air, we Irish love our pint, and if anything was going to push us to riot it was the closure of our beloved pubs. It didn’t. Irish people seldom riot. Though to be fair, that’s usually because we’re in the pubs, and this was one time we couldn’t be. In the pubs, that is. But if there was one complaint I heard more during the lockdown and rolled my eyes at, it was when were the fucking pubs going to be open again? To be fair, it was hard on the publicans, who lost money hand over fist, so much so that some never reopened, and the government did not help, dangling the hope of reopening and then changing their mind (not their fault; they were being guided by the NPHET), engendering frustration, anger and despair in the hearts of the hard-pressed vintners. Restaurants were the same; closed with no way to pay staff and no idea when they’d be opening again, times were hard.
Times were indeed hard, and to their credit the government instigated the hilariously-named PUP, the Pandemic Unemployment Payment, to be paid to anyone who was out of work due to Covid restrictions. Naturally, there were some who took advantage of this, claiming the payment while working, or having been on the dole, and so on, but overall the instances were not that high. There was also a corresponding payment to employers, to help get them over the hump and also to encourage them to have as many as possible of their staff working from home. When pubs were eventually allowed to reopen it was under strict guidelines, not all of which were adhered to by every establishment, and the Gardai did close down many, the owners of which were fined. Social distancing at houses, though mandated/advised, proved impossible to enforce, as Gardai had not the power (nor, I think, did they want it) to enter homes to confirm such guidelines were being followed, with the result that many house parties took place which featured no form of restriction at all. I imagine many new cases, and, sadly but inevitably, deaths arose from this irresponsible behaviour.
Ireland would go through two more lockdowns, both of which would be largely ignored, with the vaccine available, the rollout of which would be praised as the best in the world, which is certainly something. Like other countries, there was some hesitancy and some outright opposition to vaccines, and some right wing groups even organised demonstrations against the government and, um, Covid. There was sporadic violence, but nothing like rioting, looting or clashes with the police. Even so, thankfully those days are now long behind us. Nevertheless, Ireland is perhaps an example or cautionary tale of getting too complacent; as we basically shrugged at Covid, and largely still do, case numbers are growing again, though with the vaccines the amount of deaths had seriously dropped, one reason I suppose why most people don’t take the virus too seriously now, and consider it something that happened, back then.
It was done with, in the past.
But of course it isn’t.
Country: Netherlands
Continent: Europe (Western)
Governing Party:++ People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD)
Political affiliation: Left
Main crisis leaders:++ Jaap Van Dissel (Outbreak Management Team), Mark Butte (Prime Minister)
Status of country: Kingdom
Cases (at time of lockdown:* 1,135 (or possibly as high as 6,000)
Deaths (at time of lockdown) 1
Cases (at time of writing):** 8,264,406
Deaths (at time of writing): 22,496
Date of first lockdown: March 15
Duration: 22 days
Number of lockdowns (to date): 3
Reaction level+++: 50
Vaccine uptake (at time of writing): 69%
Score:*** 40
You would think a relatively forward-looking, progressive country as the Netherlands would have had an equally progressive reaction to the virus and lockdowns, wouldn’t you? Yeah. Read on. Two major blunders characterise Netherlands’ initial response to the virus. The first was that Schiphol Airport, one of the busiest in Europe, took no special precautions, citing the lack of direct flights from there to Wuhan, but somehow forgetting about connecting flights, and the second was the contention of their version of the CDC, RIVM, that the virus was “not highly contagious” and therefore posed little risk. Where they came to this conclusion is beyond me, but it certainly set the scene for the kind of deaths the Netherlands would see, probably the most since World War II. In this atmosphere of unconcern, people were allowed to head to Italy at the end of February for skiing holidays, so I expect I’ll find as I read on that many of the cases originated from there.
Four days later, February 26, the government, probably in the light of Italy’s Own escalating problems with the virus, thought better of it and advised - but did not prevent - people against going to the affected areas of Italy. The next day the Netherlands had its first case, and yes, as expected, it was a present from Italy. Numbers quickly rose, standing at 82 by March 5, more than double the previous day. The next day the Netherlands registered its first death, and cases were soon quadrupled. On March 13 flights began to be suspended to countries already on other no-fly lists, the likes of China, Iran, South Korea and, oh yeah, Italy. Although the statistics show that the Netherlands began their first lockdown two days later, I read that the Prime Minister was not doing this, and was instead trusting in herd immunity. Universities were closed but schools remained open (wait, what?) while cafes and restaurants, night clubs and, um, sex clubs had to close. Schools were eventually included, as well as childcare centres.
Hold on here, let’s back up a little. The no-fly order still allowed aircraft coming from the virus hot-spots to land if they had taken off before 18:00, when the announcement was made? How was that supposed to work? Anyone who had left Italy, Iran etc before 6pm was magically not infected, but anyone after that was? How ludicrous! About as crazy as waiting for enough people to get sick and die that immunity would be achieved. By the end of the month the country’s caseload had climbed to 10,000, one month after that the figure had tripled and the death total was at just over 3,500. The first of many demonstrations took place in June, though this one was not against Covid restrictions or vaccines, but was in support of those decrying the senseless death of American George Floyd. Nonetheless, over 5,000 people gathered with little consideration given to social distancing, a possible super-spreader event.
It would not be the last.
As I intimated in the introduction, the Netherlands was one of the countries in Europe where the harshest backlash erupted against the restrictions imposed by the government in an attempt to control the spread of Covid-19. The main bone of contention seemed to be the imposition of a curfew, from mid-January, prohibiting the presence of the public on the streets after 9pm. Violent protests broke out against this on January 21 in Eindhoven and Amsterdam, and a Covid-19 testing site was even set on fire. You have to wonder about the mentality of these people: how dare you try to ensure we’re safe? Take that! Burn, you bastard! The demonstrations - which quickly descended into rioting and looting - were helped along by right-wing and anti-lockdown groups and conspiracy theorists, with the aid of our good friend social media, and then of course the police responded, and all hell broke loose. Property was damaged, people injured, arrests made, special January sales deals were worked out without the troubling detail of money changing hands.
And the riots continued for the next several days, spilling over into other cities and districts as the whole anti-lockdown/anti-curfew/anti-everything movement grew and spread like the very virus its opponents were trying to protect them from. It should in fairness though be pointed out that not everyone took part in or supported these actions; in certain towns, groups of individuals, like in one, a sports team, came out to defend their city or towns and turn back the rioters, most of whom did not even come from there.
Country: Iran
Continent: Asia
Governing Party:++ None, so far as I can see: all ministers serve under the Supreme Leader and the President
Political affiliation: I guess you’d say right wing?
Main crisis leaders:++ Ali Khamenei (Supreme Leader), Ebrahim Raisi (President), Mohammad Mokhber (Vice President)
Status of country: Islamist Theocracy
Cases (at time of lockdown:* 9,000 or 100,000
Deaths (at time of lockdown) 34 or 210
Cases (at time of writing):** 7,251,429
Deaths (at time of writing): 141,44 or 270,898 depending on source
Date of first lockdown: March 14
Duration: 37 days
Number of lockdowns (to date): 2
Reaction level+++: 60
Vaccine uptake (at time of writing): 69%
Score:*** 25
How do you think the virus got on in an Islamist state? Yeah, if you want real, hardline, uncompromising, stuck-in-the-eighteenth-century good old blood and guts Islamic fundamentalist fire, Iran is the place to go. As I note above, the system of government is hard for me to work out, given only the most cursory look at how it works, but I don’t think there are any political parties and even the President is very much subservient to the Supreme Leader, who basically seems to rule more or less like an absolute monarch. His word is law, and even presidents can be dismissed or - presumably - imprisoned or maybe even executed on his orders.
So it will come as a shock to absolutely nobody that Iran followed the “Chinese approach” when it came to outbreaks in its country, which is to say, they told everyone who knew about it to keep it buttoned unless they fancied losing various important parts of their anatomy. Iran has never been that forthcoming anyway (remember the nuclear facilities back in the 2000s?) and tends to forcibly isolate itself from the west, and from most of the rest of the world too, so they were hardly going to be sharing information were they? As a result, early reports of cases there are hard to verify, but it looks like some medical professionals, worried about the coming crisis and braver than most, spoke to a reporter for the west on condition of anonymity, being quite attached to all their bodily parts. From their data it seems the first case in Iran may have been as early as December of 2019, almost just as the Chinese were realising they had a big problem on their hands. Not only were they told to shut up, but in a move so massively arrogant as to all but defy logic, they were told not to wear protective gear, for fear of causing a panic if anyone saw them. Oh yeah, that’s cool: risk your life for the State. If you die, the Prophet will be pleased, but he may ask you to wear a mask before you’re admitted into Paradise. As for those seventy-two virgins, well, you just remember the social distancing rule, buddy, all right? Last thing we need up here is a fucking outbreak of Covid-19!
I have to admit, I’m staggered. I mean, I knew the Americans were crazy (some of them anyway) and would risk their lives and those of others to apparently prove a point, or be the alpha dog, but though mask mandates were only ordered in a few states, I feel sure that even in the reddest of the red states the doctors were not discouraged from wearing masks and PPE, much less forbidden to do so. On February 19 - not quite sure why, but they must have been forced into it - the government announced the first death. This surely came as a surprise, as up to then the public had been kept in the dark about Covid, and with presumably little or no access to western media, would likely have known nothing about the plague that was already in their country wreaking havoc. As one of the doctors reportedly said, “We reported the first death before we reported the first case.” Surely a unique situation.
Showing the difference between official case/death counts and actual ones, a graphic on Wiki shows that on February 19 two deaths were reported, but the anonymous doctors barked bitterly to the reporter that there were already so many dead that a bulldozer had to be hired by a local cemetery in order to bury them. The airline controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Mahan Air, stubbornly continued flying into China, indeed into Wuhan, long after other countries had stopped services to the Asian continent. As cases, and deaths, spiralled out of control, the Revolutionary Guard were detailed to visit hospitals and seize death counts before they could be released to the media. Iran would become a focus of the virus, but would do its best to remain the tightest-lipped and least cooperative of all countries in reporting its progress.
It was of course, as it ever has been, all about control. If the people, who were supposed to look to the Supreme Leader as a kind of god figure (not really, but the representative of the Prophet on Earth, so maybe a far more powerful and active Pope?) realised that there was something Khamenei had lost control over, his power might come into question, and that would never do. Can’t wait to see how North Korea approached this! They think their guy IS a god! Anyway, back in Iran the idea of Covid being used as a tool of suppression, a sort of Covid conspiracy theory before there were Covid conspiracy theories, was spread around, as the government blamed the USA for over-hyping the virus in order to, get this, disrupt Iran’s elections! Oh yeah. America was already battling its own president’s refusal to even acknowledge the existence of Covid-19, but had time to sneakily interfere in Iran’s internal politics! Right.
The regime also vowed to take action against anyone who tried to find out, tell or otherwise fuck with the truth. Iran didn’t need the truth. Iran couldn’t handle the truth. No truth handler, it! Bah! I deride its truth-handling abilities, and so on. In fact, it could handle it, it just didn’t want to, or to be more accurate, it didn’t want it getting out. So the usual heavy-handedness went on while the virus, unconcerned about Allah or Mohammed or Ali fucking Khamenei, went about its business. Look, I know, and you know that the virus is not sentient, so this is just for artistic purposes, but Covid must have considered an extended stay in Iran. So nice: the people ignore you, there are no precautions at all, you can kill at will - why would you want to leave?
And it didn’t. Iran would become another of the huge hot-spots where cases, and deaths, would absolutely go through the roof. So much, then, for Allah’s divine protection.
As is usually the case though, one rule for them and one for us. The parliamentary session held on February 29 required all members to submit to body temperature readings (the closest they would allow to Covid testing I guess) and when three members were found to be in the range which would indicate a positive test they were asked not to attend. Fuck you, all three said, and went anyway. How Trumpian of you, guys. By March they had at least admitted publicly to the outbreak, and a committee was set up to tackle it. Old enmities and rivalries surfaced when Iran (having previously called them a “tool of the western hegemony”) asked the IMF for money to help them combat the spread of the disease, and Trump said “I’ll be buggered by a Democrat before I let those filthy muslim bastards have any of our money!” Or words to that effect, possibly those exact words, who knows? Basically, the US said no, so the IMF spread its hands and said, sorry guys. No cash for you. No doubt muttering about capitalist infidels and pulling out those plans for an attack on a US embassy somewhere, the Supreme Leader fumed but could do nothing. In fairness, had this somehow been reversed, do you think old Ali would have helped out brother Donald? As if.
With the news now out in the open, and terrible retribution and punishment no longer on the tabel (well, not from the government anyway; the virus was about to hand out its own terrible form of poetic justice) one of the premier colleges in Iran published a study which gave three, more or less equally bleak, scenarios: if people cooperated with health guidelines, the Republic could expect to see in the region of 12,000 deaths before this thing blew itself out. If there was a more moderate response, the deaths would climb to 110,000, and if nobody cooperated the death toll would be in excess of three million. That of course did not stop Iran screaming about western influences, and the doctors from Medecins Sans Frontieres were kicked out, accused of being spies. Talk about cutting your nose off to spite your face!
Trump madness reached into Iran, as over 700 people died as a result of drinking Methanol, believing, somehow, that it was protection against the virus. Might as well have been drinking bleach. Oh. Wait. Never mind. Not at all to anyone’s surprise, at least outside of Iran, many prominent politicians and public figures, including those in the Health Ministry, were infected and quite a few died. I’m not going to go writing all their long bloody names here, but suffice to say Iran’s first ambassador to the Vatican found himself unexpectedly closer to Allah than he had intended, a member of the Supreme Leader’s Expediency Council shuffled off too, as did a commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, a former ayatollah and a film director. A whole lot more got sick. Typically, Iran blamed the USA in a conspiracy whereby the “Great Satan” had engineered the virus, or a version of it, to specifically target Iranians. Sounds familiar, don’t it? And where the USA is, can Israel be far behind? Natch, the Jews got pulled into the conspiracy, another one without of course a shred of proof.
Crackdowns continued. Anyone who was seen to be promoting or disseminating “false” information (ie, true) was arrested and charged, and eventually in a Hitlerian move, all newspapers were shut down. To date, Iran is said to have arrested over 3,500 people on charges of, well, whatever they want to charge them with I guess. Probably sedition, or spreading information deemed to be harmful to the regime, or god knows what. Iranians were not allowed take part in vaccine testing by “foreign” companies (I doubt they had their own vaccine developed, as surely Allah wanted them to die, so to oppose his will… you know how it goes). Prisoners were released - up to 70,000 - and others didn’t wait, breaking out or rioting - and then breaking out - as chaos erupted across the state as it headed for its first lockdown, despite the assurances given only weeks before that there would be none.
Unlike western democracies - and even Saudi Arabia - where pandemic payments were made available to the public, in Iran these were seen as loans, and to be repaid with four percent interest. Nice. A phrase that really echoes in just about any country rang true here too: with the lifting of restrictions, the number of new cases rose. It’s staggering to me how people just did not get it. When we do France, I’ll be remarking on how Parisians, released from lockdown, immediately - and I mean immediately - ran out into the streets and mingled with not a care for social distancing, masks or any other precautions. Children being let out of school, with about as much sense of responsibility. And of course, very quickly cases spiked again. But it happened everywhere, especially here. You can of course understand people’s frustration and the need to get back to normal, but you know, the virus don’t care about normal, and it was just waiting to inflict further death and illness once restrictions allowed it to get in range of people again. And they helped.
Although Iran made Remdesivir locally, this is not a vaccine but a treatment, and they were eventually constrained to bow to the inevitable and import vaccines from the USA, despite opposition by the friendly old Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who probably feared the Great Satan was trying to turn all Iranians into Christians or something. Given the lack of any sort of precaution, lockdown or even information about the virus up to four months after the first case may have been detected there, Iran became another Italy or Spain, spreading the tentacles of Covid far and wide. Cases resulted from contact with Iran in places as far apart as Canada, Norway, New Zealand, Qatar and even Thailand. Spread the love, that’s what I say! I’m sure Mohammed would have approved.
Nevertheless, the EU provided 20 million Euro to Iran to help them combat the outbreak - a long long way from the five billion it wanted from the IMF, but I guess something is better than nothing - and various aid agencies sent workers and supplies to the stricken state. Trump grinned he would be willing to help “if they asked”. He’d probably like that request on bended knee, the Supreme Leader kissing a Bible. His sanctions against the country for their nuclear ambitions had of course made it doubly difficult for efforts to combat the virus to work, but Trump just grinned while one of his lobby buddies snarled that no aid of any kind should be allowed get through to Iran, effectively I guess making the - completely ludicrous - case that they should all be left to die.
Speaking of death - and with the Coronavirus, when are we not? - many accusations were levelled at the Iranian government that they underreported cases and especially deaths (quelle surprise, huh?) with some sources claiming the figures could be as much as five times higher than were officially reported. One source (possibly the reporter that spoke to the doctors at the beginning of the pandemic, referred to above, or someone who used his data) claimed that when the government reported 34 deaths on February 28 there had been in fact 210, while cases of 9,000 just before lockdown were widely believed to be more in the 100,000 range. Even the First Deputy Minister of the Parliament agreed that the figures released were “not real”. Leaked records from the Iranian government, obtained by the BBC in March, showed that cases and deaths were being underreported by a factor of three-to-one, in other words three times as many were being infected/dying as were being admitted to officially. Satellite images of huge freshly-dug mass graves backed up the doctors’ contention that far more were dying initially than had been reported, and that more were expected to die.
One opposition group, now in exile and dedicated to the overthrow of the current government (therefore I guess what the Supreme Leader referred to as “counter-revolutionaries”), estimated the death toll to be as high as TWENTY times that reported. Needless to say, the official position was to deny any allegations or accusations of suppressing of numbers of cases and deaths by the government of Iran. In July of 2020 the US Department of State accused Iranian state officials of embezzling money from the fund of over one billion Euro, meant to combat the outbreak, and of hoarding masks, PPE and other medical supplies for sale on the black market.
Clearly, the virus is still slicing its way through the populace; as recently as February of this year (2022) a quarter of the Iranian parliament have contracted the Omicron strain, and death figures continue to mount, though what the true picture is I guess we will never know for sure.