COVID-19 Report from London 5 April

By Michael Berlin, Phd. 

Yesterday was the warmest day of the year. London experienced achingly beautiful cloudless skies, trees in blossom and the air full of bird song. Over six hundred people died in one day of COVID-19, including a 9-year old child, the highest daily count so far. It is just over two weeks since British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, who has himself succumbed and is in quarantine at Number 10 Downing Street with his pregnant partner, announced a national emergency. Britons are slowing trying to adjust to the absurdities and anxieties of the new situation.

 Like America, the health care system, the National Healthcare Service, once thought of as one of the best in the world, is being overwhelmed. Ten years of government-imposed cut backs and failed attempts at market driven reforms have resulted in woeful lack of basic safety equipment. Just as the UK was on the verge of supposedly regaining its independence via Brexit, people have come to realise how dependent we all are on immigrants who care for our sick. The underlying xenophobia of Brexiteers is shamed into silence by the first deaths of NHS doctors and nurses, Nigerian, Sudanese, Pakistani, who have served selflessly alongside their British colleagues. In the popular imagination, the NHS has become the equivalent of the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain. Attempts at piecemeal dismantling of the NHS by the [conservative] Tories have been put back decades. But invocations of a wartime Blitz spirit, of a plucky island nation withstanding the onslaught of new unseen attempted invasion are wide off the mark. The pandemic has come here not like an armed force but like a slow-motion tidal wave. At first far off in the horizon, now about to break with full force. As the shoreline wavelets recede just as the big surge begins, all sorts of hidden working parts of society have been revealed.

The first weeks of the crisis saw panic buying of toilet paper, pasta and rice. But the chain stores, fast food joints and pubs that dominate the high street remained open. At first the government recommended that the public avoid public places and mass gatherings. All travel was to be limited to work journeys only. Fewer London [mass transit] tubes ran and stations were closed. There then followed a gloriously sunny spring weekend and people flocked to the parks and beauty spots. The Monday morning rush hour saw tube trains packed with commuters rushing to work in offices. Up to that point the government had adopted a laissez faire policy of allowing the virus to ‘wash through’ the population and, in some weird Darwinian experiment, allow the population to develop ‘herd immunity’. But new projections of mass deaths led  Boris Johnson to make a dramatic televised announcement of a new series of restrictions with legislation giving police and local authorities to clamp down on all public movement. It was when the government reluctantly ordered the pubs to close that we knew the emergency had started. The pubs hadn’t even closed during the Second World War. Now only shops selling food and drug stores (“chemists”) are open. Movement outside the home is restricted to shopping for food or medicine and one daily act of exercise. Gatherings of three or more, except by members of the same household are banned. In the city parks, where playgrounds and outdoor exercise machines are locked, groups of young people furtively try to socialise. The situation is particularly for families with children who live in the big blocks of flats that dominate parts of Britain’s inner cities. The supermarkets have instigated social distancing, with tape lines at two metre intervals and limited entry. The British used to queue patiently for most things and this fine old tradition has been revived, though it is difficult to engage in the banter at six-foot intervals. The food suppliers have said that shortages of Eastern European labour (Brexit again) means that the crops may rot in the fields. The restrictions have turned everyone into a nation of troglodytic consumers. We watch, listen, read clean, eat. New invented traditions have spring up of online drinks parties, video conferenced yoga sessions, mask sewing bees and virtual pub quizzes. We make endless lists of favourite films, albums, tourist views, artworks and share them online.

The emergency has bought out the best and the worst in people. In some places the police have been accused of over-reacting. In one beauty spot in the mountainous Peak District a local force used drones to harry dog walkers. There have been some weird and troubling incidents of anti-social behaviour.  Eight ambulances at an NHS depot in Kent were vandalised, their tires drilled through. There have also been the almost inevitable spate of racist attacks on Chinese and other Asian Britons. A Vietnamese art curator was dropped as an assistant for an exhibit of contemporary fine art by an art dealer  who explained the presence of a Vietnamese curator “would unfortunately create hesitation on the part of the audience to enter the exhibition space”. A particularly troubling and bizarre series of incidents have arisen around the installation of the new 5G cell phone network. Telecoms engineers have been attacked after rumours circulated on the internet that the new network was somehow linked to the spread of the virus. In one instance a new relay tower was deliberately burned. As the weather improves people are beginning to chafe at the restrictions. Some London parks have been closed due to crowding.  There is some fear of social unrest if the restrictions are enforced strictly through the summer.  

Neighbours have formed mutual aid groups which buy and deliver food supplies for the vulnerable. Half a million people volunteered in 48 hours to work for the NHS. People are looking out for each other, trying to crack jokes and keep spirits up. Children have taken to drawing rainbows and putting them up in windows. Each week on a Thursday at 8:00 PM for the past fortnight we stand at our windows and doorways clapping hands and beating pots and pans in salute to the NHS, a somewhat cacaphonic imitation of the beautiful Italian balcony singing. London and other cities have never seemed so beautiful in the spring sunshine. The air is fresh and clear and there are birds and foxes and other wildlife. A herd of wild goats has invaded a Welsh sea-side town. We are living through a great social experiment and no one is sure how it will turn out.

 Michael Berlin Phd from Oxford and is a Lecturer in history at Birkbeck, University of London and a former Los Angeles  resident.