• U-turn on compulsory jabs for NHS staff
• New Zealand reopens international borders
• Queen returns to light engagements
• cases soar in Hong Kong's 'fifth wave'
• Western Australia reopens its borders
• anti-inflammatory can help to treat virus
• Wales to end restrictions at end of month
• cases rising sharply in Scotland
• Ireland removes all travel restrictions
Worldwide deaths: 5,940,000 → 6,000,000 Worldwide cases: 434,000,000 → 445,000,000 UK deaths: 161,224 → 162,008 UK cases: 18,804,765 → 19,119,181 1st/2nd/3rd vaccinations: 52.7m/49.1m/38.3m FTSE: down 7% (7489 → 6987)
• ...and that's where I'll leave it
I started these weekly summaries in the week beginning 8th March 2020,
so ending them in the week ending 6th March 2022 feels appropriate.
It's been a very long two years.
It feels like a natural place to break. All restrictions have recently been ended, at least here in England, and a fresh nightmare is dominating the news cycle.
The pandemic's not really over. I know of at least two friends currently laid low with the virus, and the wider repercussions of lockdown and other restrictions will be with us for many years. But it is now possible to approach everyday life with a reasonable amount of normality - health conditions depending - and to make future plans again with some degree of confidence.
This time two years ago we were just about to tip over into an unknown world.
Here's how that first summary looked in the second week of March 2020.
20 things that happened this week #coronavirus
• "highly likely" virus will spread in a “significant way”
• worldwide recession anticipated
• country-wide quarantine in Italy
• new cases start to decline in China
• WHO says COVID-19 outbreak now a pandemic
• UK Health Minister diagnosed with virus
• Budget: £12bn stimulus in response to virus
• interest rates cut from 0.75% to 0.25%
• Trump suspends Europe → USA travel for 30 days
• UK strategy moves from 'containment' to 'delay'
• "Many more families are going to lose loved ones" (PM)
• schools/universities closed in many countries (not UK)
• panic buying of toilet roll/pasta/tinned food/etc
• continuous cough + fever = self-isolate for 7 days
• UK strategy is to "build up herd immunity"
• local elections postponed for 1 year
• professional football suspended until April 3
• London Marathon postponed until October
• several European countries close borders to visitors
• Spain and US declare state of emergency
Worldwide deaths: 3500 → 5500 Worldwide cases: 103,000 → 150,000 UK deaths: 2 → 21 UK cases: 206 → 1140 FTSE: down 17% (6463 → 5366)
That first bullet point proved to be a massive understatement.
The following week came the PM's request to end "non-essential travel", the next week legal restrictions and an enforced lockdown. The pandemic rollercoaster was well underway, although nobody knew how steep the drop would be nor how long we'd be on the ride. Two years, as it turned out, and perhaps it was best for morale that all they told us at the beginning was "at least three weeks".
I've recorded just over 100 weeks of #coronavirus summaries, which is well over 1000 bullet points, in an attempt to keep a record for posterity. Look, there's "herd immunity" getting a mention in my first dispatch, just to confirm that someone important really did say it. I've transcribed all of 2020's summaries onto a single page for historians here, and might one day get round to doing the same for 2021 and even 2022.
It's also morbidly fascinating to see the statistics tick up.
Here are the figures for 8th March 2020, 7th March 2021 and 6th March 2022.
Worldwide deaths: 3500 → 2,580,000 → 6,000,000
I've been using the dashboard at John Hopkins University to keep track of the 'official' death toll, which was relatively tiny back then and is massive right now. It's also undoubtedly an underestimate... but still below the number of fatalities caused by the Black Death, Spanish Flu and the HIV pandemic. The figures suggest more people have died in the last twelve months than in the first twelve months (but more likely we weren't recording deaths very accurately to start with).
Worldwide cases: 103,000 → 116,000,000 → 445,000,000
Cases have increased even faster than deaths, and to a much higher total. 445 million cases is greater than the entire population of the USA, so a phenomenal number of people, but again a massive underestimate because millions will have had the virus without being tested. It can't be the case that as little as 6% of the world's population have had the virus, which just shows the danger of taking statistics at face value. It's also worth saying that this total is currently rising by 11 million cases a week, so globally the pandemic is very much not over.
UK deaths: 2 → 124,419 → 162,008
Two years ago we'd only had two deaths and had no idea what we were in for. The first year saw 124,000 more, and reassuringly the last year has only seen a quarter of that number. It's still an appalling total, approximately equivalent to the UK's annual number of deaths from cancer or from heart disease, and a massive number of lives cut unexpectedly short. You could argue that 162,008 deaths is less than 0.25% of the UK's population so what's the problem, but only if you were a coldhearted selfish bastard so best not.
UK cases: 206 → 4,213,343 → 19,119,181
By contrast the number of cases in the second year has been significantly more than in the first. This reflects improvements in the testing system whereby initially hardly anyone could access one and now anyone can, as well as the rollout of vaccines meaning illness is now usually less severe. The data suggests that one-third of the UK's population has tested positive at least once, which again must be an underestimate but we may never know for sure.
UK 1st vaccinations: 0 → 21.8m → 52.7m
Back when all this started a successful vaccine was thought to be at least 18 months away (if it was even possible). Today 92% of all those aged 12 and over have had at least one dose, which is a spectacular public health success (and puts paid to the whining lie that "there isn't enough data"). But for second doses the tally is only 85% and for the booster jab just 67%, so the vaccine rollout has definitely faltered, and most recently slowed to a minimal crawl.
FTSE: 6463 → 6630 → 6987
I started tracking share prices in that first week because the FTSE had just suffered its largest weekly fall since 2008. The index bottomed out at 4993 on the day of lockdown, which was 25% down since the start of March, but steadily recovered afterwards and peaked at 7661 as recently as last month. The crisis in Ukraine has dragged it down again and will likely drag it lower, indeed we may well be into another tumultuous economic cycle. Pray we're still in the 6000s this time next year.
The world's in a bad place again, so it might be tempting to start up another weekly feature called 20 things that happened this week and focus on aggressive warfare, humanitarian disaster, rising energy prices, the cost of living crisis and climate change, but best not. After two years let's pretend it's still possible to go back to normal.
