'Second lockdown feels like a simple failure to watch the road ahead'

The other day I had a conversation for the first time in ages with a frontline worker based in the town centre.

We talked about the anxiety of the everyday; people we’ve been shielding from, activities we’ve been setting aside, occupations and hobbies that just aren’t possible, and working practices that can’t be sustained mean that every footstep we take seems to need a risk assessment.

As I write this column, my general question of how long we can continue this deliberate and laboured existence is being answered in a prime ministerial broadcast.

During this– as predicted in various leaks that came with such persistence that they ought to have had a Red Flood Warning attached to them – we’re being told we are going to go back into lockdown.

There are those who, pointing to the first wave, think the prophets of doom and gloom are mistaken about the severity of what could be around the corner.

They forget, however, the intense disruption we endured between March and May, exemplified by the fact that Covid-related deaths continued to fall until the summer, while other causes rose alarmingly.

Avoiding healthcare so that it could stay functional had a significant benefit, but no compromising measure is without resulting problems elsewhere.

More common, however, is the view that this renewed lockdown may have come too late.

Jonathan Van-Tam, the deputy chief medical officer, suggested last month that it might have been most effective back in September, before we knew that there wasn’t much we could do to prevent coronavirus spreading from characteristically younger and healthier age groups, into those more susceptible to the virus in its life-changing, or life-threatening form.

For much of the summer the messaging, firm and simple as ever, was about control and care in order to ‘avoid a second wave’.

As the second wave started to threaten, the package and variation of measures all rushed through different parts of the country, with little scrutiny or accountability but retrospective legislation that coldly confirmed that ‘this is the way’.

Even so, the second wave has come, in the eyes of some, like a thief in the night or like empty tummies among our schoolchildren during half-term; to some painfully, excruciatingly obvious, but to others an otherworld happening for which the only solutions are late and therefore efficaciously limited.

What is this reluctance that makes prompt action so unthinkable to economic hawks, and yet becomes so economically ruinous because they have to run for so much longer?

Who doesn’t start a school term without an eye on what they might do in the holidays?

Who, asks Jesus in St Luke’s gospel, when building a tower “does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it?”

Day by day, it feels less that what is happening is a disappointment to those who have planned and worked so carefully, and more a simple failure to watch the road ahead.

Perhaps it’s time for another trip to Barnard Castle.