AFTER THE PANDEMIC

I got the train into Barcelona the other day. That’s un­usual for me, as I nor­mally choose the quicker and cheaper op­tion of going on my mo­tor­bike. But as I have one of those free travel passes that the Span­ish gov­ern­ment re­cently in­tro­duced for Renfe com­muters, going by train - de­spite the in­evitable de­lays - now makes sense.

It’s been so long since I’ve taken the train that I’d for­got­ten that you’re still re­quired to wear a face mask on pub­lic trans­port. In the past few months I’ve got so used to not wear­ing a mask any­where that I never re­mem­ber to take one with me any more. It was an hon­est mis­take, but come on, who’s going to be­lieve that?

Stand­ing on the plat­form feel­ing con­spic­u­ous with my naked face I admit I was a bit wor­ried and began to have vi­sions of being beaten to the floor of the car­riage by baton wield­ing Renfe se­cu­rity cards, and then being clapped in hand­cuffs to be handed over to Mossos d’Es­quadra of­fi­cers wait­ing at the next sta­tion to ar­rest me and throw me in a cell.

As it was, I needn’t have wor­ried, as most of the dozen or so pas­sen­gers in the train car­riage weren’t wear­ing face masks ei­ther, and the two se­cu­rity guards who passed through did not give me a sec­ond glance. I breathed a sigh of re­lief, but it did make me won­der: does this mean the pan­demic is over?

It’s a gen­uine ques­tion, as I am a bit con­fused. Not so long we weren’t al­lowed to go any­where with­out a mask and we were be­gin­ning to re­sem­ble pin cush­ions after so many vac­cine jabs. Fail­ing to fol­low the health rules - like I did so cav­a­lierly the other day on the train - was seen as putting lives at risk! But now? The few health re­stric­tions that re­main are barely ad­hered to, al­most no one seems to talk about Covid much any more, and every­one I know has had the dis­ease at least once but - for­tu­nately - with­out any­one suf­fer­ing over­much and with­out any lin­ger­ing prob­lems. I re­alise that’s not the case for every­one, but to go from red alert to noth­ing to worry about in a mat­ter of months is con­fus­ing. So, does it mean the pan­demic is over?

At times like this, I turn to the or­a­cle of the mod­ern age: Google. Yet googling “Is the pan­demic over?” doesn’t help much; it seems that opin­ion is split. One ar­ti­cle says it’s only the over-65s and the obese who now need to be con­cerned. I’m nei­ther of those, al­though I’m get­ting there. A few days ago, US pres­i­dent Joe Biden said the pan­demic is over but then asked for 10 bil­lion dol­lars in fund­ing to fight Covid (mind you, I’ve also seen him try to shake the hand of some­one who wasn’t there). The pan­demic will be over when the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion de­clares it to be over, says an­other ar­ti­cle, but their next meet­ing is not until April and it seems that it is un­likely to re­sult in any such de­c­la­ra­tion.

In this issue of the mag­a­zine, on pages 14 to 39, we re­view the past 12 months and for the first time in a cou­ple of years Covid takes a back seat. Like most media out­lets, we often qual­ify re­port­ing cur­rent af­fairs with state­ments like “For the first time since the pan­demic began…” or “Com­pared with fig­ures from 2019 be­fore the pan­demic…” but let’s hope we can soon leave such con­vo­luted for­mu­las be­hind. Ob­vi­ously, we have a whole win­ter ahead of us and the threat of an­other wave of Covid, but the de­sire to get back to some­thing ap­proach­ing nor­mal­ity is clear and I hope that when we com­pile the re­view of 2023 we will hardly have to give Covid a men­tion at all.

Opin­ion