178. Covid-19 becomes more real

If it were possible for this pandemic to become more real, then now it is. I’ve tracked its progress with vague interest, railing against the government and NHS England for not recognising the value of the Covid-19 symptom tracker and all its data. I’ve sent an email link to most of my address book yet, when I speak to people, they seem unaware of it. In other words, they haven’t signed up for it. Oh dear. Does that include you?

I wrote a letter to the i (not published of course), at the end of which I suggested it was something for them to look into. That was Tuesday. On Saturday, they wrote an article about it. Yesterday and today, more articles. Yesterday’s was about how probable it was that as many as 350,000 people are still exhibiting symptoms of the virus.

Today it’s 328,700 so it’s still dropping from the peak of over 2 million on 1 April! Though the figures seem high, as a proportion of a population facing a pandemic we don’t understand, it’s actually reassuring and seeing the % of population affected in Leeds drop from close to 3% to 0.9% is even more reassuring. Better than seeing the daily hospital cases and mortality statistics which are frightening but pretty meaningless without a context such as age, underlying condition etc.

Today’s article was about the genetic link that makes some more vulnerable than others, based on ethnicity data, and the significance of underlying health conditions (which we already knew - hence the shielding policy).

This has now drawn a lot of the major health charities to endorse it. The number of people reporting to the database has exceeded 2.5 million which is a very good sample for data analysis but they need more, healthy or not, and particularly those over 70. Leeds seems to have more people signed up (over 14,000) than other places I’ve checked, maybe because the council included it in one of its news roundups and urged everyone to join. Doesn’t look as though many did, considering the population of Leeds though. It’s such a small contribution to make.

But as usual, I digress. Why has coronavirus become more real? First was the realisation yesterday evening of what I already suspected - that vulnerable people are not going to be part of the gentle wave of freedom granted to the population as lockdown is lifted. I watched a medical professional and a politician, in two different interviews, pause, then evade the question whether vulnerable people will be free to leave their homes with talk about remote possibilities like a vaccine... so it’s house arrest for the rest of the YEAR???

Second was the news that a former colleague of mine has died from covid-19. She can’t have been much older than Dennis and me but I always thought of her as older because her husband taught Dennis accountancy at university and lecturers were always ‘old.’ She arrived at Parklands as a temporary replacement for a PE teacher who had a nervous breakdown. This was at the time that grammar schools like Parklands had become comprehensives and opened their doors to the best and worst of the girls in the locality and it wasn’t unusual for teachers to be off with stress as they weren’t experienced and equipped with the skills to teach such girls, who could be ‘challenging.’ Joan was in her element. She was a breath of fresh air and very popular with the girls. She stayed on when the vacancy became permanent. Eventually she felt too old for PE teaching, despite being a very active member of her local tennis club in all the years I knew her. She’d owned a grand holiday caravan in France and went there as often as she could with her family and so she retrained as a French teacher and swapped roles.

She was funny without knowing it and often thought we were crazy when we laughed at things she said. She would rant about her nightmare mother-in-law. She brought her two sons into school when childcare wasn’t available and it never registered that the Head’s eventual ban on children in the staffroom was down to her two brats. That caused a bit of a ruckus as teachers had got used to emergency childcare in our staffroom! I think there was a certain naivety about her - she’d come from working-class Northumberland and married into affluent middle-class Yorkshire and adopted an implicit snobbery we picked up on but she was oblivious to. Once she said “We have a tramp in Wakefield” when we were discussing the problem of homelessness in Leeds. After that, one of us would make a reference to the Wakefield Tramp and she never got the ‘joke.’ Unkind? I don't think so. More gentle and affectionate teasing, if teasing can ever be benign. I’m not sure on that one. Whatever the case, Joan took it in good part and sometimes gave back as good as she got. So I’m raising a glass to Joan.I know she had underlying health conditions, but this is not the way to go, lost in the anonymity of hospitals under lockdown and funerals no one can attend. I’m sorry for this, Joan. Bless you, wherever you are now.