Chuck came round the other night. Yeah. Exactly. At least it was after dark, so only he saw.
He turned up on my doorstep seeking sanctuary. Jailbreak.
It’s not the first time but the period is getting shorter. Chuck lives in a tiny flat with Mrs C and their lad. They’ve all been working from home since Lockdown. Only one of them has won the prize for geography essay in that time.
Chuck’s been a home worker for a week longer than Lockdown. The global corporation he works for is located at Kings X. The top management there, knowing what the word “pandemic” meant and realising they were next to one of the largest transport hubs in the world, didn’t want their HQ staff breathing the air exhaled by virus carriers so they sent them to work from home. VPN’s all round.
I let him in and, keeping an anti-social distance, prepared the route to the kitchen for him to decontaminate. Doors have to be blocked open and the sink tap turned on. Then I wait with the bottle of Fairy Liquid to squirt soap on his hands, after which I can leave him to it. He washes himself and anything he’s brought with him.
I open the balcony door so’s we get a good circulation of air. I too live in a tiny flat. The balcony is no bigger than a railing.
So we sat and talked. The family are all well, neither of us know anyone afflicted. He tells me, apart from the necessary shopping interactions, he hasn’t seen anyone outside but me.
He tells me “The Govt are incompetent. They’ve known since the end of January there was an epidemic on the way.”
I point out, yet again, that no one voted for the present lot because they thought they were smart. That wasn’t what the election was about. Parliament had spent the previous two years choking us with their incapability.
He thinks they’ll restart the schools soon. “When the lad goes back to school, I’ll have to stop coming to visit you.”
“You realise that may mean for a decade ??”
He blinked.
If the lad stays at home; school, uni and a postgrad is ten years.
Doing the simple maths, with my simple understanding, the plague is highly contagious. Two days after contracting it, you become infectious. It may take a week before symptoms show. The pupil takes it from home and infects the school before symptoms show at home. The infected school kids take it home with them etc etc ....
School is transmission central.
I felt he was missing a link. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do to protect yourelves when the lad comes home from school every day ??”
The answer, obviously, was “No”. It’s unthinkable because there’s nothing you can do.
There’s also the question of how you are going to protect the teachers facing the simple maths.
There’s no way to cover the schools’ risk until there’s a mass vaccination programme and that will be two years away. Assuming that immunity is possible, we don’t yet know.
Anyway, the core function of school is not to teach the “three R’s”, it’s to learn how to communicate with your social peers. Hence the continued existence of public schools.
We turned to the near future. I think suppression is necessary and that means a minimum of three months Lockdown. My guess on the economic hit with that, and the ensuing unemployment costs, will knock out at least a quarter of annual GDP. How to pay for it ?? Print money and /or borrow it. It took 60yrs to repay our WWII loans, why be pussy now.
Chuck thinks there’ll be a second wave in the autumn, I think the way they’re going it’ll be sooner. We agree that public transport is a problem. Apart from the crush, buses, tubes, trains all have air conditioning, recirculating air. It’s guessed that’s why bus drivers have proved vulnerable.
I figure the sooner they get people going back to work, the sooner the infection rate is going to go up. The risk on public transport, and for office workers, is increased in an environment with recirculating air conditioning.
He also said, if he goes back to work the environment is going to be so weird. His colleagues are going to be looking at him like he’s come to poison them. And he’s going to be looking at them as though they’ve come to poison him.
I think it’s likely that Lockdown will break down soon. He’s sat on my sofa, allotments are suddenly popular with former pub regulars, and the girls I pass on the street have a look in their eye that says “It’s Spring”.
