On the last day of 2007 I posted a review of the year focusing on all the terrible things that hadn't happened. Life on Earth was not wiped out by a passing meteorite, I wrote. The UK was not beset by a string of terrorist atrocities. The atmosphere was not stripped away by rampant global warming. And then there was this.
Alas 2020 has been different. The year we expected has been ripped away and replaced by a global medical emergency, economic collapse and enforced isolation. Plans have been extinguished and futures changed. A fast-evolving response has been overseen by governments of varying ineptitude. Our fellow citizens have shown themselves to be determined selfless heroes and blinkered reckless idiots. Learning to cope with the fallout has been a dizzying and damaging balancing act.
'Pandemic' has been top of the national risk register for years, and for very good reason. But we didn't get the anticipated influenza, we got something novel that spreads without symptoms and clogs up hospitals for weeks. We're going to be a very different society by the time a miracle vaccine finally regains control.
Although the virus rapidly became the defining issue of 2020, it's called COVID-19 because it was first notified to the WHO on New Year's Eve last year. Watch the news today, and as 2021 unfolds, because the next smoking gun could emerge at any time. Normality can go very wrong, very suddenly, and very occasionally it does.
