The year the world stood still ...
An updated version of this blog is available at my updated blog site over at www.sailingsouth.org. You can find the blog article here.
2020 is a year that will never be forgotten. This is a personal memory of what happened, others have had much worse experiences of this year and I do not mean to belittle them, we should all remember our experiences of that hopefully unique time.
In films over the years much has been made of disasters, plagues and invasions destroying the human existence. And yet, even just a few months before 2020 none of us could have envisioned the chaos and turmoil the whole human race would be thrown into.
In reality, it only took something microscopic to paralyse the world, but it took humanity to perpetuate and exacerbate the problem.
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| Empty streets in 2020 Photo by Joe Stubbs on Unsplash |
Some people said it was a government conspiracy (a conspiracy that shut down the whole world, crippled tourism and world sport, bankrupted 1000's of businesses as well as effectively bankrupting a few countries) in order for governments (on all sides, a few of whom hated each other, some were even at war) to allow a retired software developer (Bill Gates) to inject the worlds population with computer microchips so that people could be tracked. Like we are not tracked with our bank cards, credit cards, mobile phones, store cards, rewards cards, CCTV and passports already!
In thirty odd years of mental health nursing I have detained and forced strong, sedative medication on people for much less bizarre and disturbed beliefs than these!
Shops had restricted opening times and limited the amount of
people allowed in at once to encourage social distancing. Restaurants, cafes and bars were closed all together. They even had to limit
people from buying excessive amounts of things like toilet roll because the
selfish and stupid that make up a part of humanity had to buy every last sheet
of the stuff in case they all got a big case of the shits, or for some other
idiotic reason that even people with degrees in psychology couldn’t fathom.
There were stories doing the rounds of people who had filled their baths with
toilet rolls “just in case”, only for their toddler children to turn the taps
on and fill the baths with mounds of pulped tissue …. Oh how the sane ones
sniggered at such peoples “misfortune”!
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| Shops closed and the streets deserted Photo by Gary Butterfield on Unsplash |
The Olympics and every sporting event on the planet was cancelled. Even the most popular sport on the planet, football, came to a
grinding halt. Yes my American friends I do mean football, not the American
version that doesn’t have the skill of the football played by the rest of the
world, or the class of rugby, American football’s closer but much much tougher
cousin. If a worldwide sport that probably involves more money than any single
industry on the planet could come to such a grinding halt, why did the few still
think they knew better than the scientists and the medical community and the grieving families of every single country on the planet?
Humans sometimes leave a lot to be desired!
Having said that, governments did not do themselves too many favours. One story that stuck in my mind was the man in the USA who was attacked by an alligator and died. Because he'd had positive covid test a few weeks before he was counted as a covid death. Things like that do not give people a lot of faith in government statistics.
Just as we thought we were coming out the other end of the whole situation some people still couldn't, or wouldn't, grasp what was happening. A hundred thousand people on a beach, pub gardens so full of people you had to barge your way through, protests in the street about infringing peoples rights and freedoms ... all of these things led to the second wave of the virus and an increase in the people who were killed by the virus. Society would try to blame governments for these deaths, and for "cancelling Christmas", but then humanity has a habit of not being able to take responsibility for its own actions.
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| Crowds on the beaches as the public decides they know better than scientists and health professionals. Thousands more would die as a result. |
People even tried to claim that it was "no worse than a bad flu season". In the UK the average flu season kills around 15,000 people each year, in 2020 the outbreak of Covid-19 killed over 73,500 people in the UK alone, possibly much more when you look at how many extra deaths there were over and above the yearly average. 1.8 million people were confirmed as having died of Covid 19 worldwide. And at the end of December 2020 these figures were still rising, we were still in the grip of a second wave of the virus and vaccines were only just becoming available.
The upshot of all this for me personally was a long delay to, well … everything really! The replacement engine that should have been in at the beginning of the season was delayed, but then the season didn’t start when it should have anyway. The move to the Hamble was still on, but kept getting postponed.
Of course working as a nurse some things never stopped, but that year was quite a surreal experience. I may not have been on the front line of the fight against Covid-19, but the hapless, and all to often clueless, middle management of the NHS all seemed to be reading different paragraphs of the same document and making that days rules up as they went along. Driving to work at first was earie and travel time was halved with few vehicles on the road, but when people did return it seemed like they had forgotten how to drive!
I just worked as many
night shifts as I could to hibernate through the dark times.
I kept myself away from my family as they isolated themselves and I was still working, there was no way I was going to put my family at risk of the virus, especially my mother in her 80's. It was a hard year, but the protection worked, and we're all still here. I know friends who have lost family, some of them several members of their family. To make matters worse it was difficult to say goodbye to loved ones as the numbers allowed to even attend funerals was restricted. A desperately sad year all round.
As the year ended we were all still under restrictions but the vaccines were beginning to be rolled out, and there was a sense that some form of normal service would be resumed as the year went by. But first we had to get past the surge in cases bought on by the idiots who ignored the advice and had their big Christmas parties and get togethers. Yet again the many were penalised because of the actions of the selfish few.
So, with the world wide covid pandemic, the UK leaving the European Union and changing the Economic, Political and Travel landscape in that part of the world forever, and a certain Mr Donald Trump spitting his dummy out because the American people got wise to his Narcissistic self beliefs, 2020 is definitely a year that will go down in history. Can we have a few settled, quiet years please?
