Something Completely Different

(https://i.postimg.cc/L8tPpHFQ/covid1c.jpg)

This is, sadly, something everyone knows about. I can't, and don't intend to, as is my usual modus operandi, attempt to display my superior knowledge of the subject (mostly, it has to be said, gained through reading other people's works) or tell you much you don't already know. Everyone has lived through the Covid-19 pandemic, and continues to do so. Many have, very sadly, lost loved ones or friends or relations, or had or knows of someone who has had a bad case of the Coronavirus, and many families are, to put it in the words of President-elect at the time Joe Biden, looking at an empty chair at the table. No single event in human history, since probably the Second World War, has changed our lives so dramatically and so drastically. It could be compared, perhaps, to the 9/11 terror attacks on New York, but when all is said and done, though thousands lost their lives tragically and should never be forgotten or brushed aside, and though the way the world worked changed fundamentally after the attacks, it continued on, in some form. Nobody ever forgot, but we went on with life.
(https://c8.alamy.com/zooms/9/cade46c20bf8450f88ec7adb4e674cfa/2cdgper.jpg)
In contrast, the Covid-19 pandemic literally brought the world to a standstill. With lockdowns and travel bans, industry itself ground to a halt and people spent often months inside their houses, unable to leave due to government health regulations. Mental health suffered, and daily we watched the figures on both cases and deaths spiral out of control. We were, to put it bluntly, terrified. And finally a vaccine was found, soon joined by others, and we could think in terms of being able to manage, if not defeat, the virus. Of course, after the main waves came new variants, and we're still living with those today. But nobody who lived through that initial first year of the pandemic will forget it, or be able to. It's an insidious influence that's touched us all, whether we've been lucky enough to avoid serious illness or deaths in our families, or whether we've watched those we love succumb to the virus. It's been, almost to quote Star Trek Voyager, a year of Hell.
(https://image.shutterstock.com/image-vector/lockdown-logo-symbol-global-corona-600w-1674740959.jpg)
But then, it's been two years of Hell, and now heading for the third. With sort of no real indication that it will ever be gone. Variants keep popping up, mostly due to those who, for various and mostly unfounded reasons refuse to take the vaccine, allowing it to propagate and develop and mutate, deftly trying to counter our vaccines. We may be living with Coronavirus in one shape or another for a very long time, maybe even forever. It may, in time, become so commonplace that we no longer fear it, our vaccines completely effective against it as are the ones against measles and polio, and we may listen with boredom to the announcement of yet a new variant having been discovered, safe in the knowledge that we are protected.

Or we may not.

Perhaps there's a killer strain of the virus out there, just waiting for its chance to mutate into something that will skillfully avoid all our vaccines, and bring more death and misery to us. But I get ahead of myself. Nobody knows the future, and we have to hope that eventually the virus will be brought under some sort of control, where we have a vaccine or vaccines that can handle any new variant and stop it dead in its tracks. Perhaps we will get Covid booster shots the same way we now get flu shots. Perhaps our kids (well, yours: I ain't having any!) will read the history books and wonder how we could get so worked up over a virus which is by their time so easily controlled, the same way we roll our eyes at how previous generations feared smallpox, or tuberculosis, or the Black Death.

Perhaps. Let's hope so.

But that's in the future, and in this journal I want to look to the past. Not the distant past, as I often do, but only three years (at the time of writing) back, to 2019, when the virus initially known only as the Coronavirus first began to make its presence known. While I usually/always write journals about subjects that interest me, subjects I wish to share with others, this one is different. This is almost the journal that had to be written. Yes, we're all sick of social distancing and washing hands, and variant this and variant that, but I still think it's important that some sort of an attempt at an actual record of the worst natural global disaster to hit planet Earth in over a hundred years should be made, and so I'm making it.

We probably all know where we were the day the first case(s) was or were announced in our country, or state, and we've all watched the news reports and (I hope) followed the health advice in order to keep ourselves and those dear to us safe. So I can't tell you much you don't already know, and I won't really try. Although this will be essentially the usual history of this or that, in this case the pandemic that swept across the world in the first years of the third decade of the twenty-first century, it will take more the form of a diary, an actual journal for once, using the most common format that pertains to that word. An account, a retelling of how Covid began and how it came into our very houses, how the world shook and trembled, how deaths skyrocketed and how eventually we began to get it somewhat under control.

But the men and women who do that, apart from the tireless scientists, doctors and other medical professionals, researchers, experimenters and pharmaceutical companies, are the governments of the world. In order for the virus to be contained as best we could manage, those in authority had to order us to remain behind closed doors for a specific time. They had to relay the advice of the CDC (Centre for Disease Control) on social distancing, mask wearing and hand washing, as well as other points of health and safety. Most countries did this, with varying degrees of competence resulting in varying degrees of success, but some ignored their responsibility to their citizens, willfully going against the advice and putting their people in danger. Some of these were countries you might expect to go that way, the autocracy that is Russia, the right-wing South American countries, especially Brazil, and, to a slightly lesser extent, Britain.
(https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41ieszpFUfL._AC_.jpg)
But the country whose government has, unfortunately, gone so far out of its way to demonise this virus and "take a stand" against "vaccine terrorism" is the United States. It's due to them, mostly, or to the ones who refuse to mask up and get vaccinated, that these variants continue not only to appear but to thrive, for as long as there is a breeding ground for this virus it will continue to exist, it will threaten our lives and those of the ones we love, and it will never be gone, never cease to be a threat.

The resistance to Covid-19, the blind, stupid, ignorant and deliberate attempt to pretend it wasn't there centre of course on the last years of the Trump administration, and so we will also be examining that in some detail. Under a president who cared more about getting re-elected - and failed to do so - than protecting the people he swore to serve, right-wing conspiracy nuts such as QAnon have sprung up (or rather, sprung out, as they were always there, just previously lurking like vampires in the shadows, afraid to come out into the light) and fascist militias such as the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys have risen to unprecedented levels of power and acceptance, as the dark, ugly side of America, hidden from view mostly for the last decade or so, showed itself in all its twisted horror as the final months, weeks and days of the Trump administration wound sulkily and angrily down.

I welcome any comments, stories you may have, corrections or offers of cash incentives as usual. I can only relate my own experience and that of those I read about - I certainly have amassed a few books on the subject to help me with my research, though oddly enough there do not seem to be that many, so I will be mostly relying on the timeline provided by Wiki - but those of you who have another view, who have seen things unfold on the ground where you are, who know the things that may not be printed in books, who have lived through it perhaps in the most tumultuous era of the most divided country since the Civil Rights era, are welcome to share your stories here.

Just make sure you all have your shots before you come in, and nobody gets in without a mask.

(https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/bird-view-at-wuhan-china-picture-id598805746?k=20&m=598805746&s=612x612&w=0&h=PBlF9_olB0v8jXXOP-IjZ-tru_nSeUy_E6V2-qGOwuU=)
Chapter I: Dark Genie: Pandora's Box Opens

I: Once Upon a Time in Wuhan

Timeline: mid-November - Dec 31 2019

Various factors make it all but impossible to know exactly when and why and how the Covid-19 virus first escaped. The fact that it began without question in China, one of the countries most noted for its suppression of the media and the truth, and always ready to make itself look good at any cost, means we will probably never know the real story. The original idea was that the virus had been carried on horseshoe bats and that it jumped from animals to humans, in a process called zoonosis. However, it's also theorised that there may have been an intermediate species which interacted with the bats and then passed the strain on to humans. Nobody knows for sure and investigations into the origin of Covid are ongoing. Recently, the team from the WHO (not quite sure what Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend have to do with... oh) revised their conclusion that the virus could not have escaped from a laboratory, citing pressure from the Chinese government, and now supporting that theory as possible, even "likely". Nobody though is suggesting it was a deliberate act, rather a tragic accident possibly due to inadequate safety procedures.

What we do know without question is that the virus quickly contaminated the tiny town of Wuhan, which is a word everyone is familiar with today, but which before this nobody even knew existed. From there it quickly spread till all of China was infected.

Covid, the COronaVIrus Disease, or Coronavirus 2019, is a SARS virus (SARS: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and related to the almost-pandemic which threatened the world in 2002/2003. Its scientific name is SARS-CoV-2, and it has also been described as a Novel Coronavirus, I guess because at the time it was a new strain. Mostly though it's just referred to around the world now as Covid-19 or more often just Covid, though President Trump, while in power, tried to stoke anti-Chinese feeling in the USA by calling it "the China Plague" and, completely inaccurately and stupidly, the "Hong Kong Flu", presumably to pull at the memories of those of us who remember the cartoon kung-fu practicing dog, Hong Kong Phooey. Yeah.
(https://c.tenor.com/3LGzB2UnMBsAAAAC/donald-trump-talking.gif)
So nobody can say with absolute certainty how the virus started. That's where the conspiracy nuts come in. Well, you'd expect that wouldn't you? Nuts gonna conspiracy. But usually that's all they are: nuts who are largely ignored, often ridiculed and seldom believed by anyone but fellow nuts. But Trump changed all that. When QAnon came out into the open, it should have been sent scurrying back into the shadows with its tail between its legs to the sound of jeers and scornful laughter. But when the then-President of the United States starts retweeting these completely baseless, false and made-up so-called theories, unfortunately, people take notice. And so rumours began about Covid being, I don't know, developed in secret labs by the Chinese with the help of Hunter and Joe Biden and ZOG and a cabal of blood-drinking, paedophile Hollywood A-Listers and George Soros and insert whatever conspiracy figure you like.

And people started believing.

Which is why we are where we are now. But I'll be going deeper into all that later. Right now I'm just using it to illustrate the fact that what seems to have been a natural occurrence, tragic yes but involving no human agenda, has now been bumped up to be a massive worldwide conspiracy, resulting in over half of America refusing to take the vaccine shot, and actively - and very stupidly and with zero success - fighting against the virus, or I should say fighting with the virus, as their intransigence and "refusal to comply" has exacerbated what was already a terrible situation, and it's not likely to get any better any soon.

Unaware of this, uncaring since it is in fact not sentient and doesn't give two shits whether we believe in it or not, Covid ran rampant across China. Beginning, at best guess (due to the Chinese government's typical denials and refusal to provide records and details) in the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, in Hubei Province, several people have been offered as  the actual "patient zero", but nobody can confirm this. Market sellers or people working in the Wuhan Virology Laboratory, accountants... there's no real way to figure it out, and in the end it matters little. The horse has bolted and we're all being trampled by it, while madly trying to hammer back the stable door onto creaking hinges, as other horses - new variants - also make their escape.
(https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/http%3A%2F%2Fcom.ft.imagepublish.upp-prod-eu.s3.amazonaws.com%2F0addf44e-4edb-11ea-95a0-43d18ec715f5?fit=scale-down&source=next&width=700)
It's also been reported that, while whomever was the actual patient zero (we can at least be all but certain it was a Chinese resident) there are good reasons to believe that Covid had already made its way to such far-flung shores as Brazil, France and Italy by late November (the first actual case only being reported, or caught, in the first days of December in China). By December 8, one week after the first case had been reported, over forty people had been confirmed as positive with the new Coronavirus. By the end of December, as more patients began pouring in to the Wuhan Central Hospital and experts in infectious diseases were called in, the Chinese CDC was advised of the seriousness of the situation.

On December 30, mistakenly believing they were dealing with cases of "infectious pneumonia", all linked to the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission sent a series of directives, one of which was to have tragic and far-reaching consequences, not only for China but for the rest of the world. It forbade doctors from spreading information about the medical treatment being given, without official authorisation. In effect, China can be accused of hushing up and covering up the whole thing, which I suppose in fairness you might expect from just about any country. Nobody wants to be seen as the springboard for a worldwide pandemic, and again to be fair, nobody wants to spread panic unnecessarily. But again, this is China, where information is tightly controlled and the government takes responsibility for nothing unless it is to their advantage.

By the next day the Chinese public were being advised to watch for symptoms of "flu" and "high fever", and to seek hospital admission in this case. People were advised to wear face masks in public, not the first time China had had to do this, so it was something they were used to and probably didn't cause the kind of immediate panic such an instruction would engender over this side of the world.

So far, no deaths had been reported.

Outside of Hubei, Hong Kong was the first to respond, placing thermal sensors at their ports and airports to monitor the body temperature of incoming passengers, and also advising the wearing of face masks. They also provided detailed information on how to wash hands properly. Anyone who had been in Wuhan fourteen days before the outbreak and who presented with symptoms of this "fever" would be put into isolation. The WHO office in China relayed the information on to its counterpart in the South Pacific, which in turn advised the CDC. Taiwan began tightening security measures on flights or ships from Wuhan.

As we all celebrated the arrival of 2020, nobody had the faintest clue what we were heading into. Those few of us who kept up with the news (myself not among them) had some vague idea of a virus outbreak in China somewhere, but that was thousands of miles away, and could never affect us, could it? We were safe.

(https://i0.wp.com/www.newwaysministry.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/sssh.jpg?ssl=1)
II: Secrets and Lies

Timeline: January 1 - 14 2020

The first days of 2020 saw the Chinese government finally break their silence and advise the American CDC about the outbreak. It was now characterised as such, with 47 patients believed to be affected, eleven seriously ill, and over 100 "close contacts", a phrase unheard till then but which the whole world would soon come to recognise and fear, all being monitored. The National Institute of Viral Disease Control Prevention was busily ruling out several variants of influenza, as the disease had first been suspected being, and certain other common respiratory viruses. Genetic testing and sequencing revealed the virus to be a strain of coronavirus, which they named 2019-nCov. Having alerted the USA to the bare bones of the outbreak, the Chinese National Health Commission issued instructions prohibiting the release of any information on the virus. The shutters, having lifted the tiniest bit, were slamming back down again, and while the world would soon learn the true meaning of the word lockdown, China was executing its own informational one. No data got out of the country, nobody else was advised, no warnings were sent and no information shared. China's pathological need to control everything about its people and its country would help to undo the entire globe.

And the new year was yet only three days old.

There was, however, one "whistleblower" in the country, and he did what he could to try to alert everyone. Naturally, he was repressed, punished and threatened for daring to speak the truth and look beyond party loyalty.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e6/Li_Wen_Liang.jpg)
Dr. Li Wenliang

An ophthalmologist by profession, Li had worked at the Eye Centre of Xiamen University until 2014, when he transferred to the Wuhan Central Hospital. On December 30 2019 he shared information his colleagues had that seemed to indicate the virus was a SARS-coronavirus, and pretty immediately he was summoned by the hospital board, accused of spreading "false information", after which the police arrested him as part of their investigation into his claims, censured him and warned him to retract his statement and make no more on pain of actual charges being brought against him. Having done so, on his return to the hospital Li contracted the virus himself, and on January 31, 23 days after falling ill, he published details of his interview with, and threat by the police on social media. The post quickly went viral, as people began to ask why the hospital had tried to silence him?

He was not the only one to be reprimanded, but the Chinese Supreme Court took a more sympathetic view, noting that  "It might have been a fortunate thing if the public had believed the 'rumors' then and started to wear masks and carry out sanitization measures, and avoid the wild animal market."

In other words, the Supreme Court was either defending the whistle-blowers or possibly reprimanding the hospital, and through it, the party for trying to silence voices that were trying to alert China to the seriousness of the developing situation. Tragically, as Li returned to work and contracted the virus, he fell very ill and had to be hospitalised. He died on February 6, less than a month after contracting Covid. Chinese state media tried to cover their arses, pretending he was still alive when his heartbeat had already stopped, finally admitting that he was dead eight hours later.
(https://i1.wp.com/www.comicsbeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Superman.png)
The Pandemic is filled with the work of heroes, most of whom remain unsung and unknown, a few of which have received the honour they deserve. A phrase developed over the last two years: not all superheroes wear capes. It's true: mostly they wear white or blue coats, masks and face shields, hi-viz jackets and other uniforms of the front-line staff who gave their lives on the line, and in some countries continue to do so, for the people they try to save. If Dr. Li was the first true victim, the first of millions of deaths from Covid-19, his death would be a harbinger for a pattern that would replicate itself across the globe as medical health professionals, care workers and staff in hospitals braved the dangers of the Pandemic in order to provide comfort and care to those who needed it most at such a time. So many would lose their lives that it would become nothing short of a scandal, fingers pointing to governments who skimped on essential protective equipment for their medical and healthcare staff.

Dr. Li's death was not in vain, nor was he alone in succumbing early to the virus. Six more doctors died by June, and the internet was alive with expressions of sympathy for Li, and anger at the intransigence and arrogance of the Wuhan Hospital and the Chinese government, neither of whom offered any apology for how the doctor was treated, though they did pay tribute to him. A protest campaign began to gather momentum across China under the hashtag #WeWantFreedomOfSpeech, with two million views accumulated before the ever-repressive censor removed it. But like they say, once something goes up on the internet it's there forever, and removing the hashtag did nothing to dampen the demand of Chinese people - and those outside the country too - for the truth behind the Coronavirus and its dangers. Academicians began to speak out, and a small protest was held in New York's Central Park.

Finally, in April, Li was honoured as a Chinese martyr, the highest honour the country can award. Fortune magazine awarded him top spot in a list of World's Greatest Leaders: 25 Heroes of the Pandemic.

Back to January though. On January 4 the United Nations activated their incident response team, the World Health Organisation (WHO) stood ready and the US CDC offered to send representatives to Wuhan to investigate the outbreak. Given the state of relations between the two countries, to say nothing of President Trump's ultra-militant stance against China's trade agreements, this was never likely to be an offer that would be accepted. Across the mainland, Hong Kong geared up for tight restrictions, its own University's Centre for Infection warning that it was "highly likely" the virus was jumping from human to human. With Chinese New Year just over the horizon, they worried about a sudden surge in cases as people mixed and mingled. Though many might wear masks, not enough was known about the virus yet to indicate that this would be enough protection.

On that same day, Singapore was notified of its first possible case, a three-year-old girl from China who had been in Wuhan. On January 7 the CDC in America issued their first travel notice, warning (but not banning) people against travelling to Wuhan city. The next day South Korea seemed to have identified their first case, a middle-aged woman, again from China and again from Wuhan. She was placed in isolation and underwent observation.
(https://image.shutterstock.com/image-vector/vector-3d-golden-number-01-260nw-1849020145.jpg)
The Virus Claims its First Victim

January 8 marked the first death - or at least, the first recorded/reported death - from the virus that was to take millions and make tens of millions sick over the next two years. A man who was a regular at the Huanan Market, and who also had what we came to be used to hearing of as "underlying medical conditions" - in his case, chronic liver disease - died of heart failure and pneumonia. The agent of his death was traced as the Coronavirus, at this time still called 2019-nCov, known by medical professionals to be a coronavirus but still seen as a "mystery virus" by the world at large. In some circles it earned the name of the "Wuhan Virus" (a variant of which name would later be jumped on by the Trump administration and widened to take in all of China) and was also known generally and referred to as the novel coronavirus.

At this point it should be noted that, Dr. Li and his six associates aside, no other healthcare provider had been infected, or at least, reported as being so. But the Chinese must have known: if Dr. Li had contracted it from a patient, then surely the virus was jumping from one human body to another? Easy to be Captain Hindsight of course: at this point in our lives we were all pretty much blissfully unaware of the threat posed by the virus, and how soon, in relative terms, it would be crossing our own borders and knocking at our doors.

On January 10 Dr. Li contracted the virus and immediately isolated himself, hoping to save his family, though his parents caught it too. They recovered and survived while he was not so lucky. As close contacts began to be monitored, rising to 700 in all, what we would grow to see as usual began to happen: hospital ICUs in Wuhan began to fill up and overflow, with patients being turned away as there was no capacity to look after them. The WHO, acting on information released by the Chinese government, advised that there was no evidence that the virus travelled from person to person. This may have been caution, an educated guess or an outright lie, there's no way to know. But one thing is certain: China was not in any way sharing all it knew, and people would die as a result.

But let's be clear here. I'm not condoning what they did, in fact I'm condemning them for it. They concealed information, downplayed the seriousness of the outbreak and threatened those who were ready to tell the truth. All horrible, reprehensible actions, and all very much in line with what we would expect of China. And as I said in the above paragraph, because of this, people died, and many more would die. But can we really put our hands on our hearts and say that had this broken out in another country that they would not have done the same? Russia? They certainly would have buried the information, and probably literally anyone who spoke of it or even tried to lift a whistle, never mind blow one. North Korea? Would surely have even denied such a thing could occur in their country and would never take responsibility for what they had let loose on the world. And America? Well, possibly under any other administration - Clinton, Obama, Biden, hell, even the Bushes, either one - you would hope, at least, that they would have done the right thing.

But we don't have to speculate about how the Trump administration would have handled it, because we saw it. When the virus finally arrived in America, Trump and his party played it down, all but pretended it didn't exist, then that it was going away. They ignored science and demonised those who spoke the language of health and safety, and eventually weaponised the pandemic against their own countrymen. So no, had this broken out in the USA at the time it did, with the Oval Office occupied by who it was then, I know for almost a fact that it would have been hushed up, shoved under the carpet, denied and ignored. Britain, run by a sort of Trump-lite, probably would have followed a similar path.

Sure, there are some countries you would imagine might have been more forthcoming, though really, in such a situation there's no telling what politicians might do. They always consider their career, their re-election prospects and their future first, and that of the country second, so it might have been the same no matter where this virus broke out. So while we can definitely condemn and castigate China for its lack of responsibility and its failure in its duty of care to the wider world, we can't be surprised and we can't say it would not have happened anywhere else.

At any rate, it did happen and by now the virus seemed to have spread for the first time outside China, as a woman in Thailand was reported to be displaying the same symptoms. But so far, this was still Asia, and a long way away from us here in Europe, the UK and America. It still seemed like "their" problem.

It wouldn't take long before it was everyone's problem.

(https://assets.weforum.org/editor/KW2OKqVDPZ4AvmdcSj-1Jp4yjUpBnNtXKq5yZpU6kvY.gif)
III: Calling Out Around the World: The Virus Goes On Tour

On January 15 2020 what the world had feared came to pass: the virus appeared in the west. The first case turned up in the USA, in Washington, where a patient who had travelled from Wuhan to Washington was found to be suffering from the symptoms and was isolated. The very next day Japan reported their first case, a man from China who, though he had not been to the market, was believed to have been a close contact of someone who was. However by this time cases had levelled off in Wuhan and the stringent restrictions were lifted. Meanwhile Thailand reported another case and in China a second death was recorded, and America began screening passengers coming in from Wuhan, although as yet no travel ban was put in place.

On January 18 a team of specialist epidemiologists arrived in Wuhan from Beijing to investigate the virus, meanwhile the city held a "super-spreader event" (another phrase 2020 brought us, and one with which we were to become tragically acquainted) for the Chinese New Year celebrations. Whether this was in defiance of the rising number of cases, in support of the official government position that there was no outbreak to worry about, or just plain ignorance and stupidity, we will never know. The official statement from the mayor remarked "The reason why the Baibuting community continued to host the banquet this year was based on the previous judgment that the spread of the epidemic was limited between humans, so there was not enough warning."But it certainly helped move the virus around, and Covid had a very happy Chinese new year. President Donald Trump, advised at this point of the situation by his Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, did not seem bothered about it. I suppose, to be fair to him and America, nobody really did. We would all learn to our costs not to be so sure of ourselves, but that was down the line.
(https://c.tenor.com/vQWKd3kFawAAAAAd/trump-shrug.gif)
On January 19 China woke to the scary news that the virus had been detected in people outside of Wuhan, as both Guangdong and Beijing reported cases, and one more person died, bringing the total at that point to three, with an estimated 201 cases in the country overall. The next day, as two medical staff became infected, the Chinese National Health Commission confirmed that human-to-human transmission was taking place. This was major news, and bad news too. Now it was confirmed that the virus could be passed on from person to person, the race began to create a vaccine. The first to undertake research into this was the National Institute of Health in the USA.

Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea were all now reporting cases, all of these believed related to a dinner held in a hotel in Singapore where one of the attendees was from Wuhan. Thus the virus made its way across Asia, and promptly began infecting more people. There's nothing a virus likes to do (well, they're not sentient but you know what I mean) more than propagate, spread and mutate as it infects, and this one was well on the way to being a major threat to Asia as well as America. It couldn't be long before the rest of the world felt its clammy touch, and it wouldn't be. Realising at last that they could no longer keep a lid on this, and that if they tried, they would be seen to be wilfully negligent and possibly complicit in the deaths that would surely follow, the Chinese came clean and shared their information with the world. A little late, but better late than never I guess. This was January 21. The next day the city of Wuhan was put under quarantine, but by now it was estimated that up to five million people could have travelled out of the city.
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErRlXtAXUAEVUfK.jpg)
While the US embassy in China raised the Health Alert Level to 2, President Trump again shrugged it off. "It's one person coming in from China," he said, "and we have it under control. It's—going to be just fine."

Of course, it was going to be anything but fine. More bad news was on the way. Mostly, for the first year or so, all we would get about the virus would be bad news, some of it very bad. This news told us that people who had the virus could be asymptomatic (not have or not notice symptoms) for several days before it showed, which of course meant people who thought they were perfectly healthy could be out and about and spreading the virus unknowingly before getting sick themselves. Then, those who had been infected, without knowing it, would infect others and so on. A vicious circle of infection that would be hard to stop, since nobody knew they were infected until it was too late.

We were now introduced to a new acronym, one which was to echo down the next two years across the world: PPE. PPE stands for Personal Protective Equipment, and covers gowns, masks, gloves, face shields, all the paraphernalia necessary for medical professionals to provide themselves protection from the virus, and to prevent it being passed on in the event they have been infected. On January 24 the US reported its second case while France experienced its first, the first case to be detected in Europe. The entire province of Hubei, where Wuhan is located, was put into quarantine. The next day the virus reached Australia. As the last week of January began, cases began to pile up. The USA now had five, South Korea had three, Thailand and Hong Kong reported eight. Dean of the University of Hong Kong, Gabriel Leung, predicted that the amount of cases was in fact about ten times what was being reported, reckoning that there could be up to 100,000 cases in China alone.

Canada was next to fall, then Sri Lanka and Cambodia, while Germany recorded its first case January 27, while a scare in neighbouring Austria turned out to be a false alarm. Samoa, the first country to implement mandatory quarantine for Chinese travellers, detained six people who had been stopped from entering the country. The Director-General of the WHO went to China to discuss the situation with the Chinese government. Brazil and Ecuador reported "possible" cases, as did Finland, Armenia, Georgia and the United Arab Emirates. Air Canada became the first airline to suspend all flights to China. Peter Navarro, Director of Trade and Manufacturing in the Trump administration, began to sound alarm bells, warning that the virus could infect millions of Americans and recommending all travel to China be stopped. China's cases now numbered around 6,000.

And the virus hadn't even got started yet.

As January wound down, the WHO declared the coronavirus a "Public Health Emergency of International Concern", advising all countries to prepare for a possible pandemic. India, the Philippines and Italy confirmed their first cases, while Vietnam now had three, while in the US the first case of person-to-person transmission, marking their sixth case overall, was reported. Azar, the CDC's Robert Redfield and National Institute of Health director Anthony Faucci, the last a name which would become synonymous with the virus, for two very different reasons, declared that a ban on travel into the USA from China should be implemented.

On January 31 the first cases were reported in the United Kingdom, Russia, Sweden and Spain. By the end of the month a total of twenty-seven countries spread across five continents had cases of the novel coronavirus.

(https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/headstone-picture-id901964114?k=20&m=901964114&s=612x612&w=0&h=6M0LoJrklSTkW-XwyaqjE7pd0E1ZkA_IBA4aSslzcN4=)
IV: Death as a Way of Life

February brought worse news, as the first death outside of China was announced, a man from China who was resident in the Philippines, and who had been connected with the now-infamous market in Wuhan. He was, in fact, a close contact of the country's first case. The next day Hong Kong also announced their first death from the virus. So far, all deaths had been linked to Wuhan, including one who had been on an evacuation flight to take them home. On February 5 a cruise liner called Diamond Princess reported ten cases, but there were over 3,500 passengers and crew on the liner, which was near Yokohama when it was quarantined. The next day Dr. Li Wengliang, as mentioned above, died from the virus, having tried to warn of the dangers and having been arrested and censured for telling the truth. He was later proclaimed a Chinese martyr.

There were now over 10,000 cases in China, 31 in Europe, 120 in Asia, 2 in the UK and 11 in the USA including one person who died, giving the United States its first nasty taste of death from Covid-19. This death was particularly worrying as it led the CDC to conclude it was due to what was termed "community transmission", (another term that would define 2020/21) meaning the virus was being spread from one person to another by close contact. Also worrying was that the woman infected died at home, suddenly becoming ill, staying at home rather than going to hospital or visiting her doctor, recovering then relapsing and finally dying over a period of a few weeks. She had not left the country. By now the total cases on the Diamond Princess, which had always been expected to increase, stood at 86.

On February 8 it was confirmed for the first time that aerosol was a factor in transmitting the virus, so that it could be carried in human sputum, breath, sneezes and so forth. China now stood at a staggering 40,000 plus cases, with over 800 deaths, by far the largest total, though not surprisingly so. On February 11 the WHO named the disease as Covid-19 (CoronaVirus Disease 2019) and officially designated the virus itself as SARS-CoV-2. The same day, Japan confirmed its first death from the virus. Two days later, France reported the first death in Europe. The woman was a Chinese tourist, but soon that would change; once the virus had a hold, the people of China, who I suppose could be seen as its unwitting transport system, were jettisoned and the virus struck out on its own, hitting every country and every continent regardless of its relation, or lack of, to China.

This would not stop President Trump from repeatedly referring to Covid as "the China Plague", nor violence being directed at Asian people, seen to be the cause of the virus by those whose brain a hungry zombie would starve trying to get nourishment from.
(https://i.scdn.co/image/ab67616d00001e027d91eae22c796f426e1aefd5)
February 16 saw the number of cases on Diamond Princess rise to 355. This was now almost ten percent of the cruiser's complement. In addition, Japan had 59 cases of its own. One day later, the cruiser had another 100 cases confirmed. You could see where this was going. February 19 saw the offloading of passengers (with the total now at nearly 650 infected) to be returned to their country of origin. The next day the first two deaths from the ship were registered. Eventually there would be twelve deaths in all. The first death in Italy, which would become one of the biggest hot-spots for the outbreak,  was confirmed February 21.

In the USA, the Trump administration continued to drag its feet and shrug, hoping that by ignoring it the virus would go away. I suppose at least they didn't try to shoot at it! Only three states were able to test for the virus: California, Illinois and Nebraska. New Zealand, Israel, Iran and Lebanon joined the club nobody wanted to belong to, but all would eventually be members of, as each recorded their first cases. On February 22 Italy became the European country with the largest case number, 79, and two deaths. One single day later it became the country with the third largest number of cases in the world, as its cases climbed to 152. Afghanistan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Iraq, Algeria, Brazil, Austria, Croatia, Switzerland and Oman joined the party, and with no travel restrictions yet put in place - other than from China - people began importing the virus into their own countries.

Italy and Iran saw people return to Denmark and Estonia respectively, creating the first cases in both countries, while an Iranian man moved back to Canada, opening up Quebec to the disease for the first time. An Israeli travelling to Italy and an Iraqi travelling to Iran helped move things along for the virus. Iran now had 245 cases  while Italy reported 655. Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman were all victims of Iranians visiting, while Norway had the dubious distinction of having both an Italian and an Iranian spread the virus there. The Netherlands and Nigeria can also trace their first infections to an Italian tourist, the latter becoming the first sub-Saharan African country to fall prey to the virus. Northern Ireland was infected for the first time, again this being due to an Italian who transited through Dublin, so we were next on the list.

Iran had 388 cases and Italy 888 as February drew to a close. South Korea remained number two in the rankings, well behind China, with over 2,000 cases to its 80,000, and on the last day of February, this being a leap year, Ireland was hit with its first case. It had only been a matter of time. Other countries to report their first cases on this day included Ecuador, Luxembourg and Qatar.
(https://cdn.hearthstonetopdecks.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/captain-hindsight.gif)


This is a regular section I'm going to be featuring, where I examine, in hindsight, what could or should have been done in the run-up to, and indeed after, full blown pandemic status of the virus. It's acknowledged by me that this is all said with the benefit of knowing what we know now, but still, there are some valid points I feel.

As I read this now, I'm increasingly struck by how almost comic the events of January and February 2020 were. Not in a look-at-that-guy-falling-over type of way, of course, but in terms of how the hell could we not see it, sort of thing. The idea of borders not being closed, or at least properly monitored, as the outbreak became an epidemic in China and then spread to a full pandemic across the world, is hard to get my head around, even though I was there as it happened. The thought of people crossing and recrossing national boundaries, going from country to country like blind and dumb supersonic snails or slugs, leaving the sticky trail of the infection behind them wherever they went, kind of boggles the mind. No country was restricted to travel to, other than China and a few smaller ones who took quick action which may have saved them from the worst. Europe basically shrugged, America laughed and Africa, at this point, probably barely knew what all the fuss was about with the white folks. Probably the only continent taking this seriously as they should was Asia.

But then we do have the benefit of hindsight, and we can see what happened when nations did begin closing borders, restricting air travel and locking down. Airlines, if they had to cut back on flights, would and did start to lose money, with a resultant slow trickle-down of loss of employment. Holiday destinations would and did suffer, and the idea of industry being slowed, much less stopping altogether as it had to eventually, surely filled everyone with dread, as it should. To say nothing of the civil unrest such measures would, and did, bring. Besides, at this point the competent authority, the main voice of health advice was the WHO, and though they had declared SARS-CoV-2 a PHEIC, it had not yet, according to them, reached the stage where it could be called a pandemic.

Generally speaking, governments do not like making decisions, or perhaps I should say they don't like to take responsibility for the decisions they may be forced to make. Politicians, as I already noted, are all about their next term, how to survive, how to continue, how to get elected again, or to a higher office. They don't like doing things that upset potential voters, and mostly try if possible either to avoid doing them, or if not possible, look for someone else onto whose shoulders they can pass the blame. And with Coronavirus, there was a ready-made scapegoat waiting, so they would do nothing until the WHO told or urgently advised them to do so. Then they could just claim - as would be the truth, if slightly simplified - that they were simply following the advice of the people who knew best what had to be done.

Surely governments across the world, certainly in Europe at least, which has turned out to be one of the major sources of deaths and cases, could have come together and made a decision, without waiting for the word from the WHO? But I suppose then they could be accused - by the opposition parties, always ready to score points even in a humanitarian worldwide emergency, and by their own people, those all-important voters - of moving too fast, of panicking, of not listening to the advice of the WHO. Speaking of panic, no government would want to engender such in their populace, which is probably another reason why they played the whole thing down as much as possible, most countries taking the line that it was "someone else's problem" and unlikely to reach their shores. Even if it did, they assured their jittery voters, they would contain it. It would never get as bad in Germany, France, Italy (um), Switzerland, the UK, the USA as it was in China.

Never.
(https://gradadmissions.mit.edu/sites/default/files/images/image2.png)
Someone, I believe it may have been President Trump's mouthpiece, spokeswoman for the White House Press Kelly-Anne Conway, sneered that Coronavirus would never enter the United States. There spoke either a liar, someone who was desperate to calm the public at any cost, or someone who did not in any way understand  how this virus worked. Perhaps all three. In any case, as we know now, and America certainly knows to its tragic cost, she couldn't have been more wrong.

To be fair, at this point nobody still knew quite what Coronavirus was. Nobody knew with any certainty where it had originated - we still don't - and for a long time there was no vaccine, so much of the efforts of medical staff and scientists went into trying to contain rather than neutralise the virus, and inevitably many mistakes were made. Conflicting public health advice, from the WHO and CDC to our own HSE (Health Service Executive) would confuse and anger people, telling them this thing then that, countermanding information it had put out a few days later, leaving everyone looking at each other and wondering what they were supposed to do? We were all winging it, we understood that: nobody in our generation had ever lived through or dealt with anything like this before. Still, we expected our men and women in white coats to know what they were doing, to tell us what we needed to do, and to keep us safe.

But nobody could.
(https://c.tenor.com/j5YcO9slE7YAAAAC/leslie-nielsen-nothing-to-see-here.gif)
Belligerence by the leadership of certain countries didn't help. It's been well documented (but I'll of course be going over it again in detail) how America responded, or rather didn't, but they weren't alone in trying to wish away or laugh at the virus. Brazil, Russia, many Eastern European countries, the UK to some degree, all seemed to think that it was being blown out of proportion - or conveyed this to their people, possibly to make them look strong and unafraid - and rather like Dickens' Mr. Podsnap tried to wave the thing dismissively away as if it were of no account. By dint of this, a basic idea developed that those leaders who adopted what we could call the Podsnappery line were seen as strong leaders, refusing to bow down to fear and join in the slowly-growing panic that was gripping the world, and those that reacted to the virus with caution and tried to protect their people, who listened to the science and understood how serious things were, could be looked on as weak, easily-led and easily-duped, and not representing the good of their people.

The world was slowly beginning to split, as people chose their side. It would only get worse as the months went on.

(https://matthewgreenwood.us/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/AdobeStock_DontPanic3.jpg)
V: Don't Panic!

Timeline: March 2020

At this point it becomes a redundant exercise noting what new country reported cases or deaths, as eventually, and quite quickly after this, there wouldn't be one left in the world that hadn't been touched by the virus, though some would fare better than others, mostly due to decisive and quick action taken while other nations dithered or refused to face reality. So from now on I'll only be noting significant points, deaths and developments. Suffice to say that by now, a map of the world showed more red than it didn't, red being the colour used for areas with a high number of cases.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/COVID-19_Outbreak_World_Map_per_Capita.svg/440px-COVID-19_Outbreak_World_Map_per_Capita.svg.png)
Note: As I begin to read and research from the book Coronavirus: 2020 Vision. The Road to Freedom Day: The Complete Diary and Events of the COVID-19 Pandemic by Keith Wright, written in 2020 obviously, it's both shocking and comforting to note that his comment near the beginning of the book has thankfully proven to be completely wrong, and that his prediction has not come through. I'm sure he is as delighted as all of us that when he wrote "Our hope is for a vaccine, yet this is impossible for many months, probably years, if at all. Sadly, the world has been unable to develop a vaccine for any of the previous coronavirus such as SARS, (or even the common cold, which is part of the coronavirus family), so it would be remarkable if they manage to do so with this one" and further that  "I start this diary uncertain whether I will be alive to finish it or sustain it if I become one of the coronavirus victims. Will I be too ill to continue? Will I die? Things change day-to-day, and suddenly the future is more uncertain than ever before in my lifetime", he appears to have been happily wrong.

So far as I can see, Mr. Wright is still posting on Twitter as of today, so he did not die. I can only hope his family are all with us and well, and as he and the world know by now, though we have a long way (and probably a lot more variants) to go before we have Covid under control, we do at least now have not one, but multiple vaccines, so his gloomy prediction for the future has turned out to be wrong, and again I'm sure he's delighted and relieved that it's so.

However this does serve to illustrate, in very stark and real terms, the fear, actually the terror that Covid inspired in us. I once wrote that people living through the onslaught of the Black Death in fourteenth-century Europe must have felt like the world was coming to an end, and I remember too my sister saying to me at one point that she wondered this too. And so did I. All around us, people were dying at a phenomenal and terrifying rate, and until the vaccine came on the scene there was no respite. Medical science could not save us. Religion (not that I believed) could not save us. Money, power, an arrogant attitude or blind fear could not save us. Nobody and nothing could. The human race appeared to be dying, and there looked to be nothing we could do about it.

And I don't have to say to  you (unless you're for some reason reading this twenty or more years in the future) this is how it was: we all know how it was. We all lived through it. We're still living through it, though what we're living through now is a different thing than what we coped with from early 2020 until the advent of the first vaccine. This is an event that has touched everyone, helped to bring the world together and helped to tear it apart, and reminded us all how small and insignificant the human species is. Without the knowledge or dedication to have created a vaccine, most of us might be dead or seriously ill by now. Only through the barrier of the vaccines have we been able to slow and slightly repulse the virus, though there are still paths open to it thanks to the ignorance and stupidity of millions of people who refuse to get vaccinated, out of fear, uncertainty, belligerence or political viewpoint.
(https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/C593/production/_111197505_carnival.jpg)
I'm no fan of our government, but hell, credit where credit is due, for now. While Boris Johnson, UK Prime Minister, was going on TV talking about people being able to continue to lead normal lives and, worse, advising people it was fine to shake hands (it would very soon transpire this was one of the worst things you could do, one of the easiest and fastest paths for the virus to transfer from one person to another) the Irish government took the very difficult but very necessary decision to shut down the Saint Patrick's Day Parade for 2020.

I'm sure nobody needs to be told what this is, or how important to Ireland, both in a cultural and an economic sense, it is to us. March 17 is for some reason I've never understood celebrated as what we know as "Paddy's Day", when Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, is celebrated. There are parades - the main one in Dublin but others throughout the country - and a general party atmosphere prevails. It's a bank holiday; nobody works (other than publicans, bus drivers, police, taxis... you know what? A lot of people work but officially it's a day off for most people) and everyone gets drunk, usually too much so. Fights break out, people get hurt, very Irish. Beer acquires a green tint, and revellers too start to look a little "Irish" after they've consumed perhaps one too many pints of the "black stuff", sorry I mean the "green stuff."

Not only do we have fun but people from all over the world come to us. Americans love it. Spanish and Germans love it. Africans love it. Hell, on Paddy's Day everyone is Irish, no matter your skin colour, country of origin or how well you know the words to "The Green Fields of France." Everyone is accepted, everyone is welcomed. It's a party, and everyone's invited. It's especially a party for the exchequer, with all those tourists coming in, all that lovely foreign money filling up tills all over the Emerald Isle, all that excise duty and VAT... everyone wins. It's also another opportunity to show Ireland off to the world, and try to erase the often-held view of our country as one of conflict and division between north and south. I'm pretty sure they even celebrate Paddy's Day up the North.

So you can see what a big deal it was to call this off. And many were against it. But had the government not made the right call, the 2020 Saint Patrick's Day Parades could have been one of the world's first "super-spreader" events, sending people from multiple nations home with the disease, a nice reminder of Ireland, to say nothing of speeding the infection rate - and surely, without at the time any vaccine in sight, the death rate - in our own country. Ireland could have become a byword for overindulgence, drunken ignorance of medical advice, and fatal irresponsibility. Instead, the Irish government were hailed as forward-thinking, self-sacrificing and wise, which to be fair they were: they knew they'd lose millions in tourist revenue, and that many event organisers would lose their shirts, given that the announcement was only made less than two weeks before the day, but public health and safety came first (and surely they hoped that when the public went to the polls again they would remember how their government has protected them at its own expense) and this was the call they made.

Johnson was probably sneering to himself that we Irish were being weak fools, overreacting and deserved to lose all that money. He wouldn't be sneering for long.

It should also be noted that, at the time the Irish Government made its momentous (and not at all popular, it must be said) decision, there was one single case confirmed in Ireland. Many countries, I feel, might have shrugged and said we were hardly touched by the virus, it would be all right, no need to panic. But our boys said no: there's only one case now, but if we go ahead with the parades, how many will we have by the end of March? It just didn't bear thinking about. Britain, at this point, completely downplaying the seriousness of the outbreak, had 51 cases. Although not yet announced as their official strategy, we would later find out that Johnson's government, based on the medical advice they were getting (or hearing what they wanted to hear) was to go for "herd immunity", basically the idea of letting the virus tear through the population until enough had been infected that natural immunity was achieved.
(https://images.theconversation.com/files/321841/original/file-20200320-22602-1v7youi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=101%2C119%2C3892%2C2538&q=20&auto=format&w=320&fit=clip&dpr=2&usm=12&cs=strip)
Of course, this would result in thousands of deaths, but unconfirmed reports, always denied, speak of the Prime Minister shrugging "if some grannies have to die so be it" and to "let the bodies pile up." They would, despite the government's change of policy. Despite calming words from Johnson, something seemed to snap in the British people at that moment and there was panic buying, though nobody knows why everyone suddenly wanted so many toilet rolls! Mind you, the same would happen here when the madness arrived. Johnson did advocate the medical advice of frequently washing hands, which would become a recurrent theme throughout the pandemic, and is still of course something we are very careful to do.

March 6 brought news of a second cruise liner, the Grand Princess, owned by the same line as the first one, Princess Cruises, reporting 21 cases on board. In Hawaii, their first case there was traced back to a person who had been a passenger on this cruiser. Meanwhile it seemed even God* couldn't protect his representatives on Earth from Covid, as Vatican City recorded its first case. The first death in Africa occurred when Egypt registered its first fatality, a German man, on March 8. In France, members of the Assembly were dropping like flies, the fifth deputy falling ill on March 9, while the next day Italy and South Korea swapped places as second and third highest number of cases, as Italy passed the 10,000 case mark, with over 600 deaths, while South Korea had just over 7,500 cases and a "mere" 50-odd deaths.

In Britain, you had to think that God* was having some sort of dark joke as, of all people, the Health Minister contracted the virus. This despite the fact that Johnson continued to appear at local and national sports and other events, blatantly shaking hands and acting as if there was nothing to be concerned about. The US passed a grim milestone of 1,000 cases, though it would be the first of many, many such markers as the year unfolded.
(https://i2-prod.gloucestershirelive.co.uk/incoming/article3955620.ece/ALTERNATES/s615/0_Cheltenham-Festival-2020-Gold-Cup-Day.jpg)
The WHO finally declared the emergency to be a pandemic, which at this point just about anyone could have worked out for themselves, but at least it was officially labelled as such, meaning, I guess, that more stringent protective measures could be put in place, or at least governments could be advised to do so, and stronger efforts could be expended at trying to contain the disease. Iran began to close on Italy in a race in which nobody wanted pole position, as cases there pushed past 9,000, but Italy was not giving up its place so easily, with now 12,500 cases itself. The first person to die of the disease was reported in Ireland. In the USA, Basketball became the first major sport to suffer as two players on one of its teams fell ill and the entire NBA season was suspended, with the Grand Prix in Australia next falling as people began to belatedly realise that with a global pandemic on their hands, perhaps crowding together at sporting events was not the best response.

Meanwhile, in Britain, Arsenal (football club) manager Mikel Arteta tested positive but the hugely popular (and profitable) Cheltenham Derby went ahead, with horse racing fans pouring in from all over Britain and Europe, and further afield. No precautions of any kind were taken, or advised, this despite Johnson seeming to confuse everyone by stating on public television that Britain was facing "the worst public health crisis for a generation." This was, of course, bulls[COLOR="Black"]h[/COLOR]it. Nobody alive had ever seen such a pandemic, not in one generation, or two, or three. In fact, discounting the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1919 - which is still not as bad as Covid - you've got to go back to that old reliable, the Black Death, for anything even approaching the worldwide infection and death toll Covid has wrought upon us, and that's seven hundred years back.

Mixed signals and confusing directions would help spread the virus, as successive governments - our own included - would give us contradictory information. First we were told masks weren't so great, then they could save our lives, then they couldn't save our lives but they could save the lives of others if we wore them, and so on. A catalogue of errors, a dark comedy of blundering and U-turns and step backs and changes in policy, not all of which could be blamed on the changing advice from the medical world, the WHO and the CDC. It's quite possible that many of the deaths in various countries came about because the people were told to do one thing, then the advice changed, and nobody really knew what to do to protect themselves. There really was only one way to assure the safety of as many people as possible, and by now some countries were beginning to realise it was a measure which, though unpalatable and a final resort, could no longer be avoided.

* If you believe(d) in him, which I don't.

(https://img.myloview.com/stickers/padlock-character-holding-world-globe-400-232601394.jpg)
VI: Lockdown: The World Stops Turning

Never in the whole history of humankind has the entire world stopped at the same time, with people told not to go to work, factories and offices shut, citizens locking themselves in behind closed doors, venturing out only for essential shopping and exercise. Never before had we been encouraged, ordered in fact, to stay at home, stay safe. Never before had the roads been so clear, the streets been so quiet, the parks so deserted. Italy, unsurprisingly, given it was now not only the concentration point of the highest number of cases in Europe, but second globally, was the first to institute lockdown orders onMarch 8, and Ireland would follow soon, on March 12. Spain began lockdown from March 14 while France was in complete lockdown by March 17. Most other European countries would instigate this tactic of defence against the spread of the virus, but some countries remained stubbornly resistant to it.

In America, President Trump fought against the locking down of individual states. The USA is somewhat of a political oddity, in that policy can be made by state governors independent of, or even in opposition to that of the White House. It's amazing to me. Here, the government says "we're going on lockdown" and we all do. We have to. Laois or Carlow or Kerry or Sligo can't say no we don't agree, we're staying open. They don't have that kind of autonomy. Counties have in fact very little power, and none to resist or defy the government. They can butt heads with them a little, on issues on which they feel they need to, or their constituents expect them to, but it's all decided within the framework of the Irish government. The UK is the same. In fact, I believe America is unique in being able to separate what they call state control from federal authority. In the USA, Texas can decide not to follow the rules, or California can give the President the finger, and this is what was happening.
(https://austincountynewsonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Where-is-the-line-between-the-federal-government-and-the-states-475x280.jpg)
With a Republican - and highly unpopular - President in the Oval Office, and America already deeply divided, that president minimising, all but ignoring or denying the pandemic, states began to make their own arrangements to protect their citizens, with resistance drawn along the line of blue/red defiance. In other words, when a Republican president who seemed to be - and was - acting not in the country's interest and ignoring the science, putting his people at risk of disease and death to further his own political standing and agenda for re-election said no lockdown, the "blue" states - those run by Democrat governors - ignored him and instituted lockdowns anyway. As President, he could not overrule this disobedience legally, though he would try, or encourage others to try, through other means.

Britain, meanwhile, was sticking to - and now announcing - its policy of herd immunity. While Trump's administration was also considering this but had come to no official position on it, since the President didn't think the virus even worth talking about, Johnson's government came right out and said it, terrifying many of the older and more vulnerable Britons, who knew they were about to be served up as cannon fodder, sacrifices to be offered to the gods of Covid in the hope the younger, healthier ones would be spared. It was almost a deal with the devil. For Johnson, that bill would quickly become due, in a very personal way.
(https://www.hartmanndirect.co.uk/information-centre/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/sleeping-man-600x400.jpeg)
My own personal experiences of lockdown were these: first, being a sort of hermit myself, with no friends or social life to speak of and my sister to look after, it made not that much difference to me. The main change was that I soon had to switch to doing the weekly shop at a very early hour. I typically get up at 11:25, and before anyone gasps or sneers, I usually hit the pillow about 4:00 AM. Karen, my sister, is looked after in the morning by carers, for those who don't already know, and they arrive at midday, so there's not a lot of point my being up before that; I'd risk waking her with any noise I might make, and the chances are that I'd probably just fall asleep again anyway. Remember, 4 AM to 11 AM (roughly) is seven hours, the same as if you went to bed at midnight and got up at 7. So it's not like I'm sleeping longer, just a different cycle, which over the years I've got used to and find hard to break.

Anyway, to minimise traffic and avoid queues Tescos set up special hours for those who were disabled, old or caring for someone to do their shopping in relative safety. These hours were from initially 7 AM to 9, but then, with typical changeability, the opening hours went from 7 AM to 8, so you only had the hour. This early shopping was necessary, because at the height of the pandemic, before the lockdown, queues were huge for Tescos, stretching right through the shopping centre, and you could literally be waiting for hours to get in. On the "special" time slot, there was no queue and you just walked in. This however meant I had to get up early, as I say: originally 6:30 for a 7:00 arrival, then changed to an hour later, but still meant I had to be rising at 7:30, four hours earlier than I had been used to. But it was necessary.

Other than that one shopping expedition, I didn't go outside the house. At all. If I was forced to leave I would take a taxi, as conditions on the local transport were still up in the air as bus drivers fought against having to enforce the likes of social distancing or mask wearing, believing - probably with cause - that it was not part of their job to be "policing" their passengers, and having in any case little or no authority to ban anyone from boarding the bus if they did not comply with the directives. Taxis were more expensive, but simpler in the long run. I began trying to make arrangements with the local taxi firms to have my cats' monthly food and medication collected from the vet's in Fairview (about a half hour away by bus, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes by taxi) and restricted my shopping to the one day, and the one place.

Everything had to be sprayed down each morning before the carers came in, and though I did not wear a mask around Karen - who cannot wear one herself - feeling that I was doing my best to protect both myself and her when I rarely went out - I made sure to wear one whenever I went past the door. Hands were washed multiple times a day, to the point where my skin began to flake and get very sore from the repeated application of sanitiser and water, and hand cream or moisturiser would help but it still hurt. Dry, cracked fingers and knuckles was the order of the day. One thing lockdown did help with was that there were no more unsolicited knocks at the door. Nobody rang our bell, smilingly asking if we wanted to switch electricity vendors, or change our broadband supplier, or help headless children in Africa or whatever. No junk mail (hardly any mail at all) and no unwanted callers.
(https://m.economictimes.com/thumb/height-450,width-600,imgsize-56357,msid-83828844/sanitiser.jpg)
Outside, it was as if the world had died. Quiet, but not a peaceful quiet. The quiet of dread, of anticipated horror. The kind of silence I imagined you got just before a big battle, or before that meeting where your company's future might be discussed and decided. No sounds of traffic. No children playing. No ice cream van tinkling. No voices. No laughter. No music. It was as if the world was holding its breath, afraid to let it out. For future lockdowns we would be a bit more blase, but this time we all feared the worst. It was, after all, something entirely and frighteningly new to us. Kids, who initially no doubt thought the idea of schools closing a great one, found to their chagrin and annoyance that they were not allowed play outside; they had to remain indoors, and that was no fun! Might as well be in school! Parents, too, risked being driven mad by their bored children, many gamely trying to provide some sort of home-school education for them as the days turned to weeks and the weeks to months.
A famous video in Ireland (you can see it above) shows a deserted Grafton Street, usually one of the busiest shopping areas in Dublin, eerily quiet as a fox walks along the pavement. This showed how few people were abroad (obviously there was one: the one taking the video, but it shows no other human as the camera pans and follows after the seemingly-oblivious animal) that a creature which usually shuns human company could come out into the open, walk along one of the city's premier shopping streets, and not encounter a living soul. That fox almost epitomised and symbolised the loneliness of Ireland, the retreat of mankind from its streets, the removal of the human presence from the world. It was almost as if the animals were about to take over, leaving us trembling and scared behind our doors and windows, looking out and wondering if the world would ever be ours again?
(https://image.shutterstock.com/image-photo/prague-czech-republic-march-17-260nw-1679935429.jpg)
As lockdowns spread, the world began to slow, and then grind to a shuddering halt. With nobody in the factories, nothing was being manufactured. Even if it had been, there were no truck drivers or airline pilots or ship captains to take them to their destination, all transport having by now ceased. Supplies began to run low, and again for some reason toilet paper was a commodity everyone had to have. I remember going into Tescos and remarking that it was like a supermarket in Russia or something: no milk, no bread, no cheese, no eggs. Very little of anything, and what there was, really oddly, was NOT rationed. Tesco could easily have said "one or two per customer", but they didn't, perhaps not wishing to hurt their already fragile bottom line, and so ignorant and greedy people were able to snap up the bulk of everything. I remember seeing one woman pushing a trolley that was literally filled with nothing other than packets of rice. She must have had hundreds of them in there. She probably still has half of them today.

This belligerent  bulk and panic buying is one reason I was glad I was able to take advantage of the special shopping hours. Anything that did come in had just been put out on the shelves, and so I was able to get most of what I needed, things that would surely have long been sold out had I to wait for "normal" shopping hours. More than once I was stopped on the way in, told this was only for the old and disabled. I then told the guard I was a carer and was let pass. He never asked for any proof, which led me to believe that some of the very young people I would see from time to time there at what should have been specially set aside shopping hours for the vulnerable looked very young to be carers! But no identification was asked for, so there was no way to know. The irony being of course that, assuming they were not carers at fifteen or sixteen, some of those people may have been infecting others without knowing, or indeed caring about it.

Essential items for a world threatened by a pandemic soon sold out. Surgical gloves could not be got for love nor money, masks were out of stock, sanitiser for the hands was like gold dust. People tried making their own versions of the latter. Anywhere there happened to be old stock of anything in demand, the price suddenly sky-rocketed: it was a seller's market, and the pharmacies were not about to lose the opportunity to make a buck. Symptoms of the disease were also vague: a high fever, aches and pains, cough. Not much more was known, but suffice to say, and I'm sure you felt it too, every time you got a bad cough your heart sunk to your knees. I recall having a very bad, hacking cough just prior to this all blowing up, and wondering if it had anything to do with an infection, but it passed luckily.

In April the thing I feared happened. Karen got sick. Not with Covid, but her pain was so bad that hospital was unavoidable. At first they wouldn't even let me go in the ambulance with her, but when I explained that she couldn't speak or make herself understood without me, they made an exception. It was like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie, arriving at the hospital and seeing all the people in suits and masks, tents set up outside for treatment of Covid patients. The hospital, like all others in Ireland and like every other establishment in the country other than those on the "essentials" list (shops, vets, doctors' surgeries etc) was on lockdown, and I was sent home once she was admitted. I spent four terrified days at home on my own, hoping against hope that she would be all right. In the end, luckily, she was, and she returned to our locked-down house little the worse for wear. That trip to the hospital was my first, and really only direct experience of the fear and chaos that had gripped Ireland, and of course the world in general.

The idea of being able to literally walk right across the road without waiting for traffic lights or check for traffic was invigorating in an odd way. I don't think I'd ever seen roads so completely empty before. It wouldn't be this way for our second lockdown, but for now everyone was staying off the road. Fear gripped the country, fear gripped the world, and fear can have a very powerful and paralysing effect.

Until, inevitably, it wears off.

And that's when the real trouble begins.

Around this time (early March) China, where the whole thing had kicked off, seemed to have reached critical mass and was now holding steady at around 80,000 cases. It was still the largest number of cases and deaths in the world (though it would soon be surpassed) but given that case numbers were hardly increasing at all, the government now began to turn worldwide quarantine policy on its head, and began screening any travellers into the country, in case foreigners were bringing new cases into China. Quite a turnaround, really, in less than five months. Meanwhile we began preparing for a full lockdown, with all bars and restaurants told to close permanently from midnight on March 15. Allah wasn't protecting his people either, as the Grand Ayatollah of Iran, Hashem Bathaie Golpayenagi, died from the virus. Ireland's cases topped 200.

People continued to ignore or resist health advice, putting personal and religious freedoms ahead of their safety and that of others. In Malaysia, a religious festival where thousands gathered saw a spike of over 125 cases, bringing the country's total to over 500. Celebrities began to be hit: Tom Hanks, Idris Elba and Rita Wilson were all confirmed as positive for Coronavirus. While Spain, Italy and Ireland shut down - a mandated lockdown; no suggestions or advice, just do it - the UK took a more nuanced, some might say cowardly approach that might absolve them of the blame which would later be attached to countries who had forced their citizens to stay indoors and out of work for their own safety.
(https://foxillinois.com/resources/media/39b1ecd4-3e2f-42fe-be53-0bb945fcff9c-smallScale_AP22011347104624.jpg?1641991115801)
Johnson told his people they "should" stay at home, wash their hands, work from home if possible, and avoid pubs, restaurants and night clubs, while still allowing those facilities to remain open. Schools were not closed, and nobody was forced to stay at home, leading to a great percentage of the British public either shrugging and going in to work anyway, or being told by their bosses there was no support for them working from home and they had better haul their backsides into work or be fired. Once again, leadership was weak and most people were thinking in terms of their pocket and not their health, especially employers, who seemed to look upon the whole "stay-at-home" thing as unnecessary and over the top.

Further confusing things, the British government closed all theatres and cinemas, and advised anyone who had a cough or a high temperature to stay at home - isolation, another word we would become horribly intimate with - away from everyone. If this happened in a setting of more than two people, then everyone had to isolate. The virus had now been generally confirmed to be attacking two types of people: the old and those with what were termed "underlying medical conditions", which as you can imagine scared the shit out of me, with Karen having MS. Initial reports of the deaths in Ireland confirmed this; almost every time we read of one it was someone in their eighties or nineties, and/or who had an existing condition. That's how it was,  until suddenly it wasn't.

New issues began to come to the fore, particularly for Britain, later for Ireland and the USA. The first was the scarcity of ICU beds. Intensive Care Units had traditionally only been needed for the very sick, or for those recovering from a major operation. It's in the name: when you're there you get intensive care - round-the-clock surveillance, meds as you need them, constant observation and the best the hospital can offer. Coma patients might be in ICU, car crash victims, those suffering from cancer. Generally speaking, they tended not to be used as much as "normal" wards, with most people admitted into hospital there for a short time or maybe a long stay, but nothing that would require that sort of care, at least not constantly. Covid changed all that.

Because it attacks the respiratory system, the lungs, those contracting it find it hard to breathe. Therefore they must be provided oxygen through what are known as ventilators, and this cannot stop while the person is sick. There's no such thing as moving a critically-ill person with Covid to another ward and out of ICU. They would die, and in fact, sadly, so many people would die in ICU wards across the world that they would begin to resemble battlezones, as if these were soldiers fighting in some horrible war they could not win, and kept dying. But more of that later. Right now, I just want to use this as a way to illustrate - if it needs to be - how desperate hospitals were for ICU beds.

And ventilators.
(https://media.nature.com/lw800/magazine-assets/nindia.2021.10/nindia.2021.10_19310786.jpg)
Not a terrible amount of point having an ICU ward without ventilators, and supply of these was running out as demand rose exponentially and to a level never before expected, or provided for. This would soon become a crisis, as companies in other industries would be asked to turn their manufacturing efforts towards making more ventilators as the world cried out for oxygen. And then there was the other side of the ICU equation. What about the people who needed intensive care, but who did not have Covid? What about the heart attack patients, the cancer patients, those with other respiratory conditions? How would they be looked after if their beds, as it were, were occupied by people suffering from Covid?

Interestingly, Boris Johnson had just been handed a memo from Oxford Imperial College, bemoaning the response of his government to the pandemic so far, and warning that if things did not change, if proper action was not taken, up to half a million people could be expected to die from the disease.

Finally, months after allowing people to travel from country to country spreading the virus, a worldwide travel ban was put in place. Sport suffered another setback as the Euro 2020 Football Tournament, which involves, or can involve, most of Europe, was postponed, not cancelled, but would not take place until the following year. Even in lockdown, Ireland's cases kept multiplying, giving us by the middle of March a total of nearly 400, with, thankfully, only two deaths at this point. Italy, leading the field, was heading for the 40,000 mark with cases and now had almost as many deaths from Covid as had perished in the 9/11 attacks on America. Speaking of the Land of the Free, they were climbing towards 10,000 cases with 150 deaths. Trump continued to ignore the emergency. He played a lot of golf.

On March 18 schools closed in Scotland and Wales, but not in England. People began to worry about losing their jobs as businesses, shops and offices closed, nobody able to say for sure when they would be able to open again, nobody certain of getting their job back if and when they did. The stock markets began to crash, as the world hurtled towards an economic depression, just to add fuel to the already-blazing fire. On March 19, though following the example of Scotland and Wales - albeit later - in closing schools, Johnson confidently declared that "London will never be locked down." I think a lot of people in the UK now realised this man is an idiot, a dangerous one, and that they couldn't trust a thing he said. Still, he was in power and there was no way around that, so they had to bite the bullet and do as they were told.
(https://www.statnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/AP_20085289288271-645x645.jpg)
Around this point President Trump started talking about the benefits of Hydroxychloroquine, which seems to be some sort of drug used to treat malaria. He also considered the possibility of people drinking bleach to "clean out the virus". However we won't be going into his possibly insane response to the pandemic here, as we will be going country-by-country in later chapters and you can bet that America will take up a few! For now, it seemed Italy had risen to the top of the dungheap and been awarded the first prize gold medal nobody wanted: deaths in Italy now outstripped even those of China, though for now it had only half the amount of cases, around 40,000. Despite being ostensibly on lockdown since early in the month, it was revealed that a visiting doctor from China saw people walking around, going into shops, eating in restaurants in Milan, and could not believe it. One reason for the high volume of cases in Italy was advanced as their population being so old, with the second-oldest population in the world. As the majority of people succumbing to the virus were over 70, that certainly made sense. The other point might have been to have actually observed the fucking lockdown, guys!

Speaking of which, Johnson finally grasped the nettle and ordered businesses to close. No suggestions, no advice, no requests, it's a Nike thing. Just do it. He still seemed to think that Britain could beat the virus in three months. I get the feeling (though at the time I wasn't following British response to the pandemic, having enough to do to keep monitoring our own) that he thought this was his chance to be Churchillian, to treat the threat of the pandemic as a kind of twenty-first century blitz and rally the people behind him against the menace. The problem there is that the virus is not a sentient thing, not a country, not a state, not a dictator, not even an idea. It didn't care what mentality the British had, because it was and is incapable of caring. It has no free will, or will of any kind. It's a bunch of cells that destroys other cells and replicates itself, and that's all it does. It doesn't stop to consider how good or bad you are, whether you've followed the advice or willfully ignored it. It doesn't care. It never did. It never could. So Churchillian speeches and a "stiff upper lip" meant nothing to it.

At this point, it would be unfair and inaccurate to say Italy stood alone, but it was the top hot-spot for the virus, and its hospital systems were collapsing in on themselves. News reports from that country made it look as if there had been some natural disaster or a thousand bombs had gone off all over the city. It looked like a warzone. Terrified of the escalating crisis, the government tightened up restrictions, confining all people to their houses regardless. The most scary thing about this scene, as we watched it on Tv and listened, as it were, to the silence, saw the ghostly, empty streets haunted by only the spectre of the Coronavirus and with no living human to be seen, was that it was something which would, inevitably, and quite soon, be heading in our own direction. As Kent Brockman once said about "giant alien ants", one thing was sure: there was no stopping it. The virus would soon be here.

(https://www.ws-virology.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/animated-globe-gif-38.gif)
Chapter II: My Country, Wrong or Right -
Individual Nations Respond to the Pandemic

I've spent a good deal of time outlining what happened at the start of this pandemic, how it grew from a few infected Chinese in some town nobody heard of or cared about (let's be brutally honest) to an event of concern and finally to a worldwide panic as a danger we had never experienced in our lives (SARS? Hardly touched us. Foot and Mouth? We got through it. Bird Flu? Pah!) descended on our comfortable way of life and gleefully began ripping it apart like a pride of lions chasing gazelle across the Serengeti, or something. This was something completely new to us, which might to some extent explain why we were all so slow to react to it. I personally feel - as I felt at the time - that we were all kind of in denial. Nobody wanted to believe this was going to be as bad as it got, and so nobody did. We all adopted the equivalent position of someone sitting on the floor, hands over their ears screaming no no no!

But we couldn't stop it, and our denials were useless. It was coming, and we had no choice but to try to prepare ourselves as best we could to weather the storm.

In this next chapter I'm going to look at how individual countries reacted to the news. How they prepared, how they informed, or didn't, their citizenry, what help if any they offered and how many countries basically self-isolated while others tried to assist their neighbours. The pandemic has, as I said earlier, brought both the best and the worst out of humanity, and here I'll be looking at how that attitude was distributed across the countries of the world. As we're pretty much only talking about the outbreak here, I won't be cataloguing each country's total response to the pandemic, but just the first few months, usually comprising their first lockdown (if they had any), and generally up to a half-arbitrary date of June 2020.

In the case of the USA I'll be doing it by state, as some states never did anything about the virus, while others locked down. Some, such as Texas and Florida, actually made the situation worse by legislating against mask and vaccine mandates, and encouraging their people to resist the efforts by the CDC and the government to protect them. We'll be looking at those, probably in alphabetical order, or we may do it by blue/red states, or even just do the ones first that had lockdowns. Haven't quite decided that yet.

I won't of course be doing every country, but will be concentrating, inasmuch as I can, on those that had the biggest cases, those which entered lockdown first, those which had the most deaths and of course those who ignored, or tried to ignore it. This won't be done alphabetically, but I think I will try to do it chronologically, as cases grew and deaths began to be reported. That being said, I am going to start with the three countries - or at least, with respect to smaller nations, the three significant countries - who decided to implement lockdowns first.

Before I start, a few notes, which pertain to asterisks shown in the data sheets to follow:

* Refers to the first lockdown, if there were subsequent ones

** At time of writing here refers literally to when I wrote this, not when I posted it. Sadly, as cases continue to mount, even with vaccines, this figure may already have increased by the time I post this, never mind by the time you get around to reading it. The same caveat applies to vaccine uptake and current status.

*** Each country is scored, by me, on a scale of 1 to 100. 1 is a country whose people and/or government not only did not listen to the advice but went against it and which is now in a worse state because of it (and probably has the highest cases/deaths and lowest vaccine uptake) while 100 is a shining example of how to get through this with as little deaths as possible.

++ refers only to the party in power when the pandemic hit, ie from 2020, if the government changed during that time.

+++ Reaction level is based on how the public, generally, reacted to the lockdown. Were they supportive, resistant? Did they abide by it? Did it spark protests and/or violence? The level goes from 1 to 10, with 10 being total agreement and compliance and 1 being total anarchy and revolt.

Current Status: This is on a sliding scale and indicated by a letter, with a country "back to normal", in as much as any can be after two years of this pandemic, going into three, with industry back up and running, schools open, travel re-established and the population all or mostly vaccinated being ranked as A, down to a country still battling the ravages of Covid, probably not still under lockdown (as I don't think anywhere is now) but definitely struggling to recover. Letter not yet decided, possibly D or E.

Score is out of 100, and takes into account both the amount of cases/deaths, what the initial response was from government, and how the country is now.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/73/COVID-19_Italy_-_Cases_per_capita.svg/600px-COVID-19_Italy_-_Cases_per_capita.svg.png)
Country: Italy
Continent: Europe (Western)
Governing Party:++ Coalition of M5M and Lega
Political affiliation: Unitary (don't ask me: I've tried to figure it out - is this a left, right leaning or centrist, or other government? Dunno).
Main crisis leaders: Guiseppe Conte, Prime Minister
Status of country: Republic
Cases (at time of lockdown):* 9,172
Deaths (at time of lockdown) 463
Cases (at time of writing):** Over 18 million
Deaths (at time of writing): over 168,000
Date of first lockdown: March 9 2020
Duration: 70 days
Lockdown type: Full
Number of lockdowns (to date): Two
Result of lockdown(s): Initially pretty useless till they were finally enforced. By then, of course, that horse was already galloping across the fields and out of sight. Nobody took it seriously. Italy resembled a warzone. Eventually the government was forced to implement the strictest lockdown outside of China.
Reaction level: +++ 8
Vaccine uptake (at time of writing): 80 - 90 %
Current status (at time of writing): A
Score:*** 60

There's probably a case, unfortunately, to point to Italy as a prime example of the belief that lockdowns don't work. The first major country to instigate such measures, they still ended up racing to the top of the charts, so to speak, overtaking even China in the number of deaths in the country and easily taking second place with amount of cases until the USA caught up and overtook everyone. But the story of the road taken to the Italian lockdown might explain that in some part. It began in February, which you would think was pretty early, and it was; however the staggered approach may have been a problem. As everyone knows by now, and can remember, the main trouble spot in Italy was the area of Lombardy, in the northwest. Cases were spiking here and hospitals were coming under increasing pressure.
(https://www.thetimes.co.uk/imageserver/image/%2Fmethode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2F93f939b8-6192-11ea-8602-7e1f881b1af0.png?crop=585%2C488%2C0%2C0)
Like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel, the Italian government under Giuseppe Conte proclaimed Red Zones and Yellow Zones in the north of the country. Red Zones were under quarantine, and there were penalties for moving from them to the safer Yellow Zones, though there was no restriction within the actual Red Zones. This looks to me (and I haven't fully researched it) like all the government were doing was putting a bunch of people together who might have been, or  might going to be infected, and keeping them away from everyone else. Of course, that's the very idea of a quarantine, but while this would save anyone outside of, say, Lombardy or Veneto's Red Zones from being infected, it didn't do much to help those inside the zones who were, or would be. The Italian military were called in to patrol the Red Zones, and these people must have felt a little like they were being forced into or contained within a ghetto.

Within the Red Zones, schools were closed, public events cancelled and church services curtailed. For an intensely religious and Catholic country such as Italy, the very heart of the Catholic Church, that must have hurt. Train and bus services were halted, and even outside of the Red Zones, within these municipalities, sporting events were now called off too. The closing days of the Carnival of Venice were cancelled, and anyone exhibiting symptoms of Covid was told not to go to hospital but to phone a special emergency number. Famous tourists attractions such as the Milan Cathedral and St. Mark's Basilica in Venice closed. Italy was heading towards full lockdown.
(https://gdb.voanews.com/2f9bb423-68f0-45f8-a0d0-ac2c4c9bd261_w408_r1_s.jpg)
The Ocean Viking, carrying migrants to the country, was quarantined for two weeks in Sicily, and people began panic buying, emptying the shelves at the local supermarkets. Tom Cruise's latest Mission: Impossible instalment fulfilled the promise of its own title, and was cancelled, having been filming in Venice. Those who could, worked from home. Schools and universities began to close, as did the courts. In the Red Zone, under medical advice, people no longer shook hands or kissed each other on the cheek, which for Italians was surely as hard as not being able to go to mass, but would become common practice as we learned how Covid spread through droplets and human skin contact. At the same time, a report by the DW.Com website said that very few people in the Red Zones wore or believed they needed to wear masks. This might partially have been due to the scarcity, and thus the higher price, of such items.

Despite being supposedly quarantined though, it seemed, according to the same report, that police officers who were meant to be enforcing the thing were letting just about anyone through, if they had "a good story". Clearly, at this early point in the unfolding story of the virus, few people were taking it seriously enough; almost everyone thought the government was being heavy-handed and bemoaned the closing of public events and the lack of football. With the churches all closed, funerals were a problem, as would become the case certainly throughout Europe if not the world; one resident noted with horror that a victim of the virus could not have their funeral and their coffin had to be carried directly to the cemetery.

The tourist industry took a big hit as some events were cancelled and ones previously booked were now unable to gain permission to go ahead. Fairs, exhibitions, expositions, all were cancelled or postponed. On March 4 all schools and universities in Italy were ordered to close, and all sporting events to take place behind closed doors (without spectators) until April 3. March 8 the measures in the Red Zones were dramatically tightened and the next day all of Italy went on complete lockdown. It was the first national lockdown in Europe.

The sad thing was that it kind of wouldn't matter: the damage had been done. At the time the lockdown was imposed Italy had a total of 9,172 cases and 463 deaths. The very day after the cases pushed through the 10,000 mark and deaths rose to over 600. By the end of the first week after lockdown cases figures had doubled to over 20,000 and deaths had more than tripled to over 2,000. Perhaps if the people in the Red Zones had taken things seriously enough and not wandered from zone to zone as if this was some annoying inconvenience instead of their lives they were risking, and the lives of others, case numbers might have been easier to control. I know, I know: Captain Hindsight. But when you read the accounts of Italians living in the quarantined zones now, over a year later, you just feel like shaking them and saying "wake the fuck up! Your country is about to become all but a national cemetery!"

There were riots in the prisons as conjugal visits were prohibited, and several prisoners in various jails died. Others took advantage of the confusion to escape, apparently. Realising that people who can't work because everything is closed down by their orders, the government introduced the world's first "pandemic payments" system, which they called the Curia. It consisted of  "funds to strengthen the Italian health care system and civil protection (€3.2 billion); measures to preserve jobs and support income of laid-off workers and self-employed (€10.3 billion); other measures to support businesses, including tax deferrals and postponement of utility bill payments in most affected municipalities (€6.4 billion); as well as measures to support credit supply (€5.1 billion)."
(https://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/h_55904173-714x419.jpg)
Many other countries would find they would have to follow suit. A grim development on March 19 saw the army come out on the streets, not to maintain order or enforce lockdown, but to get the bodies of the dead to the crematoria. There were just too many to be handled by normal means: by now Italy was the country with the most deaths from the virus in the world, surpassing even China with 3,405, and dealing with over 40,000 cases. The next day, exercise was strictly limited to one person alone rather than groups and only within a short distance of one's own home. Industry began to shut down across Italy, and heavy fines - and even threatened prison sentences (which sort of made little sense, as the prisons were in a hell of a state, but they probably meant after the lockdown) - were imposed on anyone breaking the lockdown regulations. This was deadly serious, and there would be no more tipping the wink to a guard and slipping out of your house to visit a mate, or go for a walk. The only thing walking the Italian streets now was Death. (Yes, yes, very poetic, Trollheart, give it a rest...)

On April 1 the lockdown was officially extended to April 13, with all ports and airports closed on April 8, and two days later Conte extended the lockdown into May, with a hopeful gradual restart set for May 4. By now the country's death toll had climbed almost to 20,000, with cases now reaching a record 150,000. Only the USA surpassed this, with over half a million cases and a comparable number of deaths to Italy. Worldwide, the coronavirus was responsible for close to 107,000 deaths with 2 million cases. Italy's medical community was being hit hard, with the death of 100 doctors announced. 

Schools were to stay closed until September, but industry could begin a slow comeback from May 18, with people allowed to move freely, but only within their own region. On June 3 the first lockdown officially ended. By now the country had suffered over 30,000 deaths and had in excess of 220,000 cases. A second lockdown would begin in October as the second wave of the virus hit.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/40/COVID-19_cases_in_Spain_per_capita.svg/440px-COVID-19_cases_in_Spain_per_capita.svg.png)
Country: Spain
Continent: Europe
Governing Party:++ PSOE (Spanish Socialists' Workers Party)
Political affiliation: Democratic/Socialist
Main crisis leaders:++ Pedro Sánchez
Status of country: Kingdom
Cases (at time of lockdown:* 5,232
Deaths (at time of lockdown) + 1,000
Cases (at time of writing):** 12,890,002
Deaths (at time of writing): 108.259
Date of first lockdown: March 15 2020
Duration: 98 days
Lockdown type: Gradual, from "state of alarm" (March 13) to full lockdown (March 15) to gradual re-opening of services through de-escalation in certain areas and for certain services.
Number of lockdowns (to date): 2
Result of lockdown(s): First one lifted too soon, as once this was done the infection rate skyrocketed, making Spain the country in Europe with the highest total of cases.
Reaction level:+++ 6
Vaccine uptake (at time of writing): 79%
Current status (at time of writing): Back to normal, as it were
Score:*** 64

Spain was another country whose name would become synonymous with Covid, and find its tourist industry decimated by the sheer volume of cases it would deal with over the next two years. Initially slow to restrict travel from China, the government believed this to be "xenophobic and reactionary", possibly in part because the measure was called for by the opposition. Unlike Italy though, Spain's first case did not occur on the mainland but in the Canary Islands, when a German tourist was tested and came back positive for the virus on January 31. The second was also on an island, this time Palma de Mallorca, and this time a British tourist who had had contact with a French infected person. This was February 9, and three days later Barcelona cancelled its lucrative  Mobile World Congress. The following day Spain recorded its first death.

The spectre of the horror unfolding to the northeast in Italy came with a vengeance to Spain on February 24, when a doctor from Lombardy who had been on holiday in Tenerife tested positive. The hotel he had been staying at was placed under lockdown. This was the first real action Spain took in relation to lockdowns, although it was very local and specific. Over the next week, Italians in Spain began testing positive and the caseload went up. By the end of the month there were 58 cases in Spain, one of which was responsible for the first case in Ecuador, a woman returning from holiday in Spain bringing the virus to the South American country. On March 8, as the government dithered and the opposition fumed, a planned march for International Women's Day went ahead and a big football game was not called off. After this, Spain's figures doubled, with 1,231 cases and 32 deaths the very next day (not that much in one day I mean, just that the previous day cases had stood at 616 and deaths at 17, so basically, whether it was to do with the two events - which surely it must have been - there were another 615 cases and another 15 deaths announced).
(https://assets2.cbsnewsstatic.com/hub/i/r/2018/03/08/ceb1bfce-6bd9-4a32-a481-6479c1a102a7/thumbnail/640x427/fb1177f87864b04ef46e4591eeba6735/2018-03-08t123623z-933762792-rc13737e0730-rtrmadp-3-womens-day-spain.jpg)
Regional governors such as the Catalan began suspending events, but still there was no lockdown nor any travel restrictions. Schools shut down from March 12, but again this seems to have been an independent decision by the establishments, not an order received from the government. This came, more or less, the next day in the announcement of a "state of alarm" (basically a watered-down version of a state of emergency; I suppose to some extent you could call it a state of mild worry?) and then at last a national lockdown from March 15 was imposed. By now Spain was heading for the 10,000 mark in cases and had recorded over 300 deaths. Like Italy before it, Spain announced a support package for those who would be out of work due to the lockdown, theirs comprising 200 billion Euro. A moratorium was put on mortgage payments, signed into law by the King of Spain, Juan Carlos, and efforts begun to research to find a vaccine.

On March 22 the lockdown was extended into April, and, a grim reminder of how many deaths there were - over 1,000 now - one of the ice rinks in Madrid was converted into a temporary morgue. This was a sight we would see in other countries too, a harrowing visual representation of the threat the virus posed, and a reminder to those who dismissed Covid as "a small flu." As more and more medical staff were found to be positive and unable to work, and the hospitals and care homes began to creak at the seams, a horrible discovery was made. Old people left abandoned in retirement homes, left, presumably, to die while their so-called carers saved their own skins. Like I said, the pandemic showed us the best and the worst of humanity, and this was certainly a bitter example of the latter.

Spain's head of the Centre for Health Emergencies, Fernando Simon, tested positive on March 30. Simon was the face of the daily coronavirus briefings, so I imagine it would be as if Dr. Faucci had caught the virus. At this point there were over 64,000 cases in Spain, and over 4,000 deaths. The lockdown was again extended, this time to the end of April. Finally, from the beginning of April cases began to slow down, and the peak of the first wave seemed to have been reached. As case numbers dropped, Spain began partially re-opening, from April 13, with a phased de-escalation in four sections resulting in the country coming fully out of lockdown on midsummer's day, June 21. Case numbers had risen to over 220,000 and deaths to over 25,000. For a country whose government confidently predicted that there would only be a "handful" of cases - not deaths now, cases - this was a stunning shock and probably seen as hubris by the Spanish government. Mind you, as we'll see, and as we know, very few countries took this pandemic as seriously as they should, so we can't be too hard on Spain. They were only saying what every other government was saying.

As would be the case almost always after lockdown was eased, people went mad with their freedoms restored, and inevitably the case numbers, and deaths, began to climb again, leading in Spain's case to a reinstitution of lockdown from October.

(https://i.infopls.com/images/mdenmark.gif)
Country: Denmark
Continent: Scandinavia, Northern Europe
Governing Party:++ Social Democrats
Political affiliation: Left I guess
Main crisis leaders:++ Mette Frederiksen (Prime Minister), Queen Margrethe II
Status of country: Kingdom
Cases (at time of lockdown:* 674
Deaths (at time of lockdown) 1
Cases (at time of writing):** 2,519,057
Deaths (at time of writing): 4,250
Date of first lockdown: March 12
Duration: 33 days
Number of lockdowns (to date): 2
Reaction level+++: 90
Vaccine uptake (at time of writing): 82%
Score:*** 95

When Covid first popped its ugly head into our world, and we began to learn about - and later to fear - it, the initial contacts were always from China, where the whole thing had kicked off. But as you read above in its entry, China was pretty soon superseded by Italy as the go-to place for infections, and so anyone coming from there was liable to carry the virus on its travels. Such was the case for Denmark, where the first two cases came, not only from Italy but from Lombardy, the very first major hot-spot in terms of the virus. Denmark might have been somewhat isolated, being up there in the far north and kind of removed from the rest of Europe, but once one of its citizens decided "You know what? I fancy a skiing holiday. Wonder where I'll go? Oh, Italy looks nice!" they were screwed. Dragged down into the morass with the rest of us, Denmark recorded its first case pretty early, at the end of February. A third case resulted from a conference held in Germany, and Denmark was well on its way.
(https://www.theaa.ie/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Winter-Travel-Image-e1505213374409.jpg)
Iran had also by now become quite the place to go if you yearned for Covid in your life, and so it came to pass that the country's tenth case in all (seven more from Italy had already been found) had been to the Islamic Republic, and as March got going the Danish authorities were not that bothered, only ensuring anyone infected (ten up to now, as I said) self-isolated at home. Of course it wouldn't stay that way, and twelve days into the new month the country would be on lockdown. Prior to that though, they must have thought there was hope, as their "Patient Zero" recovered fully. Meanwhile, Danish - and, by association, Dutch - sport began to be affected, as a player for one of the national teams was infected, leading to his teammates and those in the teams that had played them recently having to quarantine. Ajax (pronounced eye-yax) from Holland had been involved, so also had to isolate. As the country entered lockdown on March 12, whether she wished to evoke a "blitz mentality" or whether she really believed this to be the worst crisis her country had faced since then, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen invoked the words used by her predecessor at the onset of World War II, calling for samfundssind, or a sense of community spirit, to get the country through this difficult time.

Like most countries, the level and speed of escalation was frightening. From a "mere" 53 cases on March 9 the figure had jumped to a massive 674 in just three days as the country entered lockdown. On this same day, Thomas Kahlenberg, the footballer who had originally tested positive, recovered, but on the other side of the scales, Denmark registered what could have been its first death. I say could have, because the man in question did exhibit symptoms, and died of a heart attack, but the link between the two could not be proven. He might have had his heart attack and died anyway. He was eighty when he died, and had had a history of heart problems. Another man died in similar circumstances on March 14, almost the same age.
(https://3pw8zx30ta4c3jegjv14ssuv-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/20-GER-1881817_CQD_650x450_1218158665-1-650x450.jpg)
Denmark, like most of its neighbours, recognised the vulnerability of the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions to the virus, and so grandparents were asked to stay away from their grandchildren, and as we all had to do, they self isolated. Schools were closed (I'm sure, like here, the hurrahs soon faded as the kids realised they couldn't go outside to play) and the order to work from home where possible was instated. A sight soon to be familiar to us all, large and then smaller gatherings of people were banned, shops, restaurants and night clubs were closed, leaving only essential outlets such as groceries and pharmacies open, and sporting events were cancelled. On March 14 Denmark closed its borders, and only commercial vehicles delivering vital supplies were allowed on the roads, along with a few other specific exceptions, such as people returning home to Denmark, which any Dane abroad was advised/instructed to do without delay.

This seems odd to me. I suppose nobody wanted to trap or hold anyone in the country, but the government allowed any non-Dane to leave, and at this point their country had over 600 cases. True, there had not been many deaths, but still, you're talking about letting someone leave a country which has infections, potentially allowing them to spread the virus to wherever they lived, which might at that time have been a Covid-free zone. Just seems a little irresponsible to me, but then, many countries would of course put their own interests first as the pandemic grew and spread across the world, and everyone looked to their own safety. The idea, too, of Danes being allowed to come home? Did they check where they were coming from? Was it likely they were returning from Italy, Iran, Spain? China? Was anyone tested on re-entering the country?
I don't have those answers.

Look, we were all learning about this damned virus, and it's not fair to, nor will I, place the blame for poor information or guidance on one health authority in one country - the CDC kept changing tack, and so did the WHO, and these are two biggest health authorities on the planet, so what chance had Demark got? Nevertheless, they did get it wrong, they said on April 10, when they agreed with the general consensus around the world that asymptomatic cases (those not showing any symptoms at first) could also transmit the virus, where before they had said there was no danger from this. In effect, this led to workers continuing in jobs - particularly in nursing homes and medical facilities - who turned out to be positive but originally asymptomatic, with the resultant transmission of the virus to those they came in contact with.

And then, there was that touch of mink.

We all read about how mink on a farm in Jutland were found to be infected by a mutated form of the virus, and had already transmitted the new variant to humans, so the mink were culled. Rich women everyone must have gasped in shock, as no doubt did animal rights groups. A new lockdown was instigated for Jutland, beginning November 6, the national one having been lifted April 13. On Christmas Day Denmark would enter its second lockdown, which would last three months into the new year, however this year they became the first country, not only in Europe but in the world to suspend their vaccination programme, so they must now be doing all right.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f5/COVID-19_14-day_incidence_rate_per_100%2C000_population_in_Ireland.png/440px-COVID-19_14-day_incidence_rate_per_100%2C000_population_in_Ireland.png)
Country: Ireland
Continent: None; island, but politically part of Europe
Governing Party:++ Coalition of Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and various independents (hey, it's Ireland, y'know?)
Political affiliation: God knows! Left I guess. Maybe
Main crisis leaders:++ Leo Varadkar and then Michael Martin (Taoiseach) Simon Harris and then Stephen Donnelly (Minister for Health) Dr. Tony Holohan (CMO)
Status of country: Republic
Cases (at time of lockdown:* 97
Deaths (at time of lockdown) 1
Cases (at time of writing):** 1,615,426
Deaths (at time of writing): 7,573
Date of first lockdown: March 12
Duration: 67 days
Number of lockdowns (to date): 3
Reaction level+++: 60
Vaccine uptake (at time of writing): 81%
Score:*** 80

And so we come to my home country. No vanity involved, I do assure you: I'm trying, as I said, to process these chronologically, in the order they occurred, and based on the date of the first official lockdowns. I seem to have pre-empted Spain a little, by about two days, but let's not quarrel about that. To show (as if you care) that I'm not trying to push Ireland to the front, I concentrated on Denmark before this, as they had their first lockdown on the same day as Ireland. But now here we are, and while as usual I'll be referring to Wiki for details, data and confirmation of figures and dates, this I can write almost freehand, as I literally lived through it.

Like most people, I assume, I watched the stories of the spread of what was known at the time as the Coronavirus with little real worry (and, it has to be said, little sympathy either), never dreaming it would visit our shores. But of course it did, and Covid arrived in Ireland at the end of February. Our government at the time had already set up the NPHET - the National Public Health Emergency Team, an acronym we would all become exhaustingly familiar with over the next two years - to monitor the progress of the virus before it ever reached Ireland, or even Europe, so you might say we were well prepared, but of course we were not. Nobody knew what we were facing, and this wasn't because other countries wouldn't share their knowledge, it was just that everyone was in the same boat. We were learning as we went along, adjusting and adapting to a new virus, a whole new way of thinking and endeavouring to battle an opponent we had never even heard of before, never mind fought.
(https://c.tenor.com/cQojGm50sOUAAAAM/the-simpsons-homer-simpson.gif)
(https://media1.giphy.com/media/3o6Mb63zdK1K0u9oNG/giphy.gif?cid=6c09b95284244c2c22a48ce0ffebe2503f5a1d55a5a917a4&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g)
Like most countries in Europe, our point of contact for the first cases was Italy, with one case being detected over the border in Northern Ireland as a woman returned from Northern Italy, and then one in our own Republic, same thing, except this victim was male. This was February 27 and 29 respectively, taking us into March with one case in the Republic of Ireland. Of course, it wouldn't remain that way for long, and in fact we chalked up our first death eleven days into the new month. Like many, indeed most fatalities linked to Covid in the early days, this was an old person, who had died at a hospital. Lockdowns swiftly followed.

At the time, our taoiseach (pronounced tee-shock, and basically our Prime Minister, the head of the government, other than our President, itself largely a figurehead) at the time, Leo Varadkar, who would later become I think the only leader of the country to take a lower level job in the government - he's now the tanaiste (tawn-ish-ta, second-in-command) ordered first the closure of all schools, colleges and childcare facilities on March 12, followed by all pubs and bars the next day. By March 27 we were instructed to "remain at home" with strict limits on where we could go (no more than 2 km from our home, for exercise or vital shopping, doctor's appointments, that kind of thing), the order being shown on the TV: "Fan abhaile" (fon a-wall-ya) - Stay at home. This first lockdown would be our longest, and would instil the most fear into people, as we had never in our lifetimes experienced anything like this at all, and everyone was on edge.
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ERxrugWXYAAi-vE.png)
As case numbers - and deaths - climbed steadily, and medical advice changed on almost a weekly basis, the hospitals began to creak at the seams. No country's hospital system had ever been designed to take this sort of pressure, and in addition to Covid patients it must also be remembered that people were getting sick and hurt for other reasons, as they always have done: car accidents, heart attacks, domestic accidents, trips and falls, shortness of breath - all the usual stuff emergency departments deal with on a daily basis, but now they had also to contend with hundreds or more of patients who needed urgent isolation and accommodation in the ICUs, and beds, never at a premium in Irish hospitals, were more scarce than ever. In addition, people feared coming to hospital, worried they would catch Covid, doctors and nurses feared they would bring it in (and maybe go back and transmit it around) and the government advised all sick people to stay away from hospitals altogether. If you thought you were coming down with the virus, they said, ring - do NOT visit! - your GP and do NOT attend the Emergency Room.

For my part, I was forced to do my shopping early in the morning. Having witnessed with shock the huge queues of people waiting to get into Tesco (and once in, finding almost everything out of stock anyway) I had to take advantage of the special shopping hours set up for the elderly, the vulnerable and carers, which meant being at the doors originally at 7am, later changed to 8. This period only ran up to 9am though, so you had to get in and out quickly, and back safely home. We had of course been advised to wear face masks and to socially distance, and to wash our hands thoroughly, which naturally I did. I've described elsewhere the eerie feeling of quiet on the deserted roads, the fear of going out, even for a short while, and the way the lockdowns, especially the first one, impacted on us, so I won't go into that again. Suffice to say that, like everyone, we were scared and nobody had any idea where this was going or how it was going to end.
(https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/comp-1584788695.png?quality=90&strip=all&zoom=1&resize=480%2C270)
One of our most important events, and one of the biggest tourist attractions Ireland can offer, the Saint Patrick's Day Parade, was cancelled amid fears it would become what was later termed as a "super-spreader" event, and we would be responsible not only for increasing the number of cases - and probably deaths too - in Ireland, but also for others taking the virus back to their own countries and propagating it there. So, amid general disappointment but, it must be said, agreement and understanding, the event was cancelled. Sporting events soon followed, as well as the likes of the Rose of Tralee Festival and the All-Ireland Championships, and school examinations such as the Leaving Certificate were postponed.

But in a country so famed for its welcome, and so religious, two other aspects of Covid hit harder than most. The first was the idea that nobody should or could shake hands or hug any more, as this was known to be a way to pass on, or contract, the virus. Even for me, it became hard not to give in to second nature and extend the hand or reach for the shoulders of loved ones. Irish people have always been a very "touchy-feely" people, if you like, and we love contact, so to suddenly have to cut that off was very hard. But necessary. I'm not entirely certain many in Ireland adopted the rather silly "elbow bump" that places like the UK did; we just kind of touched without touching. Saying goodnight, I would make the motion of kissing Karen's forehead but not touch it, and so on.

More to the point for Ireland was the closure of churches. Nobody needs to be told how strong and vital a part religion plays in Ireland - the whole Troubles period was based, after all, on differences between Protestant and Catholic, and we here in the Republic have always been a Catholic country, well over a thousand years back, if not more, maybe nearly two. So when churches were closed people were worried and concerned. The clergy, to their credit, saw the sense of it, unlike, as we will see later, certain religious figures across the Atlantic, and did what they could to help their parishioners, holding "virtual masses", transmitting over radio, absolving Catholics from their need or duty (perceived I imagine, as nobody is required) to attend mass and doing all they could to minister to the needs of the soul without being physically present.
(https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/img_auth.php/c/cd/Church_of_Ireland_3.jpg)
Of course, this raised another issue. Most priests in Ireland are quite old, which immediately placed them in the "vulnerable" bracket, and even if they weren't, most of their parishioners were, so you had the sort of "double whammy" of an old priest not being able to attend an old parishioner, lest one (or both) give the other the virus. For old people this of course made things even worse. One thing Irish people - older ones certainly - could always rely on was a visit from the local priest, some of them even receiving Holy Communion at their home, as did my aunt, when she was too old and infirm to make it to the church. That stopped, of course, as such visits were no longer safe, nor permitted. I remember phoning our priest when Karen was depressed and wanted to talk to him, and he sheepishly apologising; he was "cocooning" himself and could not attend. Cocooning was the phrase used to refer to older or more vulnerable people self-isolating, not because they had the virus, but in case they got it. A sort of protective custody by themselves.

Funerals were another thing. As the dead piled up, it became impossible to allow people to attend funerals, at least in the kind of numbers you would normally expect. With social distancing important, and the virus basically airborne and carried by droplets (and how many of them in a tear, and where do people cry the most?) the idea of a large crowd of people mourning the deceased - and, like as not, crowding into a pub or house afterwards - could not be condoned, and so sadly many of the dead went to their rest attended only by a priest and a few select family members. Sad times. Certain groups - travellers, mostly (knackers/pikies/gypsies/whatever you're having yourself) openly flouted the restrictions, having their usual huge gatherings, to the extent that the Gardai (police) had to break some up, and even stop a planned wedding going ahead in County Wexford. Travellers have always considered themselves apart from the law, living on the fringes of society, so I suppose they either thought the law didn't apply to them or wanted to give the finger to the authorities, but both funerals surely acted as super-spreaders, as would the wedding, had it gone ahead.

Hospitals basically closed their doors to visitors. Even those who were sick and possibly dying could not be visited, as the hospitals had by now been forced to implement a strict and zero-tolerance "no visitors" policy, as again related by me elsewhere in respect of Karen's visit. This obviously put additional pressure on hospital staff, as they tried to comfort dying patients and also fielded angry calls from their loved ones. A lot of medical staff naturally got infected and the staffing levels went down as nurses, doctors and other staff had to self-isolate, leaving their colleagues trying to make up the shortfall. Meanwhile the ICUs were still filling up, and like most other countries we were running low on respirators and beds. PPE gear was also in short supply, and until the vaccine arrived it must have been a daily source of fear to have to go into work and face all those sick people. You have to just stand in awe of people who did this, day in, day out, with little to no concern for their own health.

Ireland may not have been alone in this, but it's the only country I know of so far which instigated a five-level status in the time of Covid, with level 1 being basically all is well and level 5 meaning a full lockdown. Over the course of the pandemic this was applied separately and at different levels to different counties, as case numbers spiked there. In particular, Offaly, Laois and Kildare would all find themselves at a higher level than the rest of the country until their case numbers slowed. At best, I suppose this could be compared to the way certain states in the USA were under lockdown while others threw caution to the wind. Not really though. I think they did something similar in the UK, which we'll check out in due course.

Oh, and don't we Irish just love a good pilgrimage! When you're getting too pleased with yourself, or you just need a good soul scourging, a barefoot walk over hard rock up Croagh Patrick was just the thing to bring you back down to earth (not, hopefully, literally!) and knock some of that heathen pride out of ya! But not this year, me auld segoshas! This year the event was cancelled; I mean, it made sense. Who wants to suddenly start feeling peaky (sorry) up the side of a bloody mountain in their bare feet, and from where would the rescue come, with the damn country on lockdown too? Hey, maybe God would understand and forgive you just this once, yeah?

(https://www.goodfood.com.au/content/dam/images/g/z/y/s/x/8/image.related.socialLead.620x349.h0xjx0.png/1521170474180.jpg)
But even more than ripping our soles (for the benefit of our souls) to shreds on stabby rocks in the cold morning air, we Irish love our pint, and if anything was going to push us to riot it was the closure of our beloved pubs. It didn't. Irish people seldom riot. Though to be fair, that's usually because we're in the pubs, and this was one time we couldn't be. In the pubs, that is. But if there was one complaint I heard more during the lockdown and rolled my eyes at, it was when were the fucking pubs going to be open again? To be fair, it was hard on the publicans, who lost money hand over fist, so much so that some never reopened, and the government did not help, dangling the hope of reopening and then changing their mind (not their fault; they were being guided by the NPHET), engendering frustration, anger and despair in the hearts of the hard-pressed vintners. Restaurants were the same; closed with no way to pay staff and no idea when they'd be opening again, times were hard.

Times were indeed hard, and to their credit the government instigated the hilariously-named PUP, the Pandemic Unemployment Payment, to be paid to anyone who was out of work due to Covid restrictions. Naturally, there were some who took advantage of this, claiming the payment while working, or having been on the dole, and so on, but overall the instances were not that high. There was also a corresponding payment to employers, to help get them over the hump and also to encourage them to have as many as possible of their staff working from home. When pubs were eventually allowed to reopen it was under strict guidelines, not all of which were adhered to by every establishment, and the Gardai did close down many, the owners of which were fined. Social distancing at houses, though mandated/advised, proved impossible to enforce, as Gardai had not the power (nor, I think, did they want it) to enter homes to confirm such guidelines were being followed, with the result that many house parties took place which featured no form of restriction at all. I imagine many new cases, and, sadly but inevitably, deaths arose from this irresponsible behaviour.

Ireland would go through two more lockdowns, both of which would be largely ignored, with the vaccine available, the rollout of which would be praised as the best in the world, which is certainly something. Like other countries, there was some hesitancy and some outright opposition to vaccines, and some right wing groups even organised demonstrations against the government and, um, Covid. There was sporadic violence, but nothing like rioting, looting or clashes with the police. Even so, thankfully those days are now long behind us. Nevertheless, Ireland is perhaps an example or cautionary tale of getting too complacent; as we basically shrugged at Covid, and largely still do, case numbers are growing again, though with the vaccines the amount of deaths had seriously dropped, one reason I suppose why most people don't take the virus too seriously now, and consider it something that happened, back then.

It was done with, in the past.
But of course it isn't.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f9/COVID-19_outbreak_the_Netherlands_per_capita_cases_map.svg/650px-COVID-19_outbreak_the_Netherlands_per_capita_cases_map.svg.png)
Country: Netherlands
Continent: Europe (Western)
Governing Party:++ People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD)
Political affiliation: Left
Main crisis leaders:++ Jaap Van Dissel (Outbreak Management Team), Mark Butte (Prime Minister)
Status of country: Kingdom
Cases (at time of lockdown:* 1,135 (or possibly as high as 6,000)
Deaths (at time of lockdown) 1
Cases (at time of writing):** 8,264,406
Deaths (at time of writing): 22,496
Date of first lockdown: March 15
Duration: 22 days
Number of lockdowns (to date): 3
Reaction level+++: 50
Vaccine uptake (at time of writing): 69%
Score:*** 40

You would think a relatively forward-looking, progressive country as the Netherlands would have had an equally progressive reaction to the virus and lockdowns, wouldn't you? Yeah. Read on. Also one of the countries which protested the most violently against measures (eventually) put in place to try to save their lives, the Netherlands turned out to be something of a flash point for the exercise of what can really only be called anti-Covid demonstrations. As if you can protest against a virus, now honestly! Reminds me of those idiotic Texans or Floridans (can't recall which) shooting at a hurricane!

Two major blunders characterise Netherlands' initial response to the virus. The first was that Schiphol Airport, one of the busiest in Europe, took no special precautions, citing the lack of direct flights from there to Wuhan, but somehow forgetting about connecting flights, and the second was the contention of their version of the CDC, RIVM, that the virus was "not highly contagious" and therefore posed little risk. Where they came to this conclusion is beyond me, but it certainly set the scene for the kind of deaths the Netherlands would see, probably the most since World War II. In this atmosphere of unconcern, people were allowed to head to Italy at the end of February for skiing holidays, so I expect I'll find as I read on that many of the cases originated from there.
(https://nltimes.nl/sites/nltimes.nl/files/styles/news_article_full_mobile_1x/public/2021-01/Image%20from%20iOS%20%282%29.jpg?h=639a72b2)
Four days later, February 26, the government, probably in the light of Italy's Own escalating problems with the virus, thought better of it and advised against - but did not prevent - people going to the affected areas of Italy. The next day the Netherlands had its first case, and yes, as expected, it was a present from Italy. Numbers quickly rose, standing at 82 by March 5, more than double the previous day. The next day the Netherlands registered its first death, and cases were soon quadrupled. On March 13 flights began to be suspended to countries already on other no-fly lists, the likes of China, Iran, South Korea and, oh yeah, Italy. Although the statistics show that the Netherlands began their first lockdown two days later, I read that the Prime Minister was not doing this, and was instead trusting in herd immunity. Universities were closed but schools remained open (wait, what?) while cafes and restaurants, night clubs and, um, sex clubs had to close. Schools were eventually included, as well as childcare centres.

Hold on here, let's back up a little. The no-fly order still allowed aircraft coming from the virus hot-spots to land if they had taken off before 18:00, when the announcement was made? How was that supposed to work? Anyone who had left Italy, Iran etc before 6pm was magically not infected, but anyone after that was? How ludicrous! About as crazy as waiting for enough people to get sick and die that immunity would be achieved. By the end of the month the country's caseload had climbed to 10,000, one month after that the figure had tripled and the death total was at just over 3,500. The first of many demonstrations took place in June, though this one was not against Covid restrictions or vaccines, but was in support of those decrying the senseless death of American George Floyd. Nonetheless, over 5,000 people gathered with little consideration given to social distancing, a possible super-spreader event.

It would not be the last.
(https://cdn.european-virus-archive.com/sites/default/files/3847rivm_1_0_0.jpg)
As I intimated in the introduction, the Netherlands was one of the countries in Europe where the harshest backlash erupted against the restrictions imposed by the government in an attempt to control the spread of Covid-19. The main bone of contention seemed to be the imposition of a curfew, from mid-January, prohibiting the presence of the public on the streets after 9pm. Violent protests broke out against this on January 21 in Eindhoven and Amsterdam, and a Covid-19 testing site was even set on fire. You have to wonder about the mentality of these people: how dare you try to ensure we're safe? Take that! Burn, you bastard! The demonstrations - which quickly descended into rioting and looting - were helped along by right-wing and anti-lockdown groups and conspiracy theorists, with the aid of our good friend social media, and then of course the police responded, and all hell broke loose. Property was damaged, people injured, arrests made, special January sales deals were worked out without the troubling detail of money changing hands.
(https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/https%3A%2F%2Fd1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net%2Fproduction%2F3f07a540-fc44-4ec1-9ef6-5a61a1a957c3.jpg?fit=scale-down&source=next&width=700)
And the riots continued for the next several days, spilling over into other cities and districts as the whole anti-lockdown/anti-curfew/anti-everything movement grew and spread like the very virus its opponents were trying to protect them from. It should in fairness though be pointed out that not everyone took part in or supported these actions; in certain towns, groups of individuals, like in one, a sports team, came out to defend their city or towns and turn back the rioters, most of whom did not even come from there.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/COVID-19_Outbreak_Cases_in_Iran_%28Density%29.svg/440px-COVID-19_Outbreak_Cases_in_Iran_%28Density%29.svg.png)
Country: Iran
Continent: Asia
Governing Party:++ None, so far as I can see: all ministers serve under the Supreme Leader and the President
Political affiliation: I guess you'd say right wing?
Main crisis leaders:++ Ali Khamenei (Supreme Leader), Ebrahim Raisi (President),  Mohammad Mokhber (Vice President)
Status of country: State; Islamist Theocracy
Cases (at time of lockdown:* 9,000 or 100,000
Deaths (at time of lockdown) 34 or 210
Cases (at time of writing):** 7,251,429
Deaths (at time of writing): 141,44 or 270,898 depending on source
Date of first lockdown: March 14
Duration: 37 days
Number of lockdowns (to date): 2
Reaction level+++: 60
Vaccine uptake (at time of writing): 69%
Score:***  25

How do you think the virus got on in an Islamist state? Yeah, if you want real, hardline, uncompromising, stuck-in-the-eighteenth-century good old blood and guts Islamic fundamentalist fire, Iran is the place to go. As I note above, the system of government is hard for me to work out, given only the most cursory look at how it works, but I don't think there are any political parties and even the President is very much subservient to the Supreme Leader, who basically seems to rule more or less like an absolute monarch.  His word is law, and even presidents can be dismissed or - presumably - imprisoned or maybe even executed on his orders.

So it will come as a shock to absolutely nobody that Iran followed the "Chinese approach" when it came to outbreaks in its country, which is to say, they told everyone who knew about it to keep it buttoned unless they fancied losing various important parts of their anatomy. Iran has never been that forthcoming anyway (remember the nuclear facilities back in the 2000s?) and tends to forcibly isolate itself from the west, and from most of the rest of the world too, so they were hardly going to be sharing information were they? As a result, early reports of cases there are hard to verify, but it looks like some medical professionals, worried about the coming crisis and braver than most, spoke to a reporter for the west on condition of anonymity, being quite attached to all their bodily parts. From their data it seems the first case in Iran may have been as early as December of 2019, almost just as the Chinese were realising they had a big problem on their hands. Not only were they told to shut up, but in a move so massively arrogant as to all but defy logic, they were told not to wear protective gear, for fear of causing a panic if anyone saw them. Oh  yeah, that's cool: risk your life for the State. If you die, the Prophet will be pleased, but he may ask you to wear a mask before you're admitted into Paradise. As for those seventy-two virgins, well, you just remember the social distancing rule, buddy, all right? Last thing we need up here is a fucking outbreak of Covid-19!
(https://els-jbs-prod-cdn.jbs.elsevierhealth.com/cms/asset/e4b569bf-bc64-4d84-8753-57eef7cf372b/fx1.jpg)
I have to admit, I'm staggered. I mean, I knew the Americans were crazy (some of them anyway) and would risk their lives and those of others to apparently prove a point, or be the alpha dog, but though mask mandates were only ordered in a few states, I feel sure that even in the reddest of the red states the doctors were not discouraged from wearing masks and PPE, much less forbidden to do so. On February 19 - not quite sure why, but they must have been forced into it - the government announced the first death. This surely came as a surprise, as up to then the public had been kept in the dark about Covid, and with presumably little or no access to western media, would likely have known nothing about the plague that was already in their country wreaking havoc. As one of the doctors reportedly said, "We reported the first death before we reported the first case." Surely a unique situation.

Showing the difference between official case/death counts and actual ones, a graphic on Wiki shows that on February 19 two deaths were reported, but the anonymous doctors barked bitterly to the reporter that there were already so many dead that a bulldozer had to be hired by a local cemetery in order to bury them. The airline controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Mahan Air, stubbornly continued flying into China, indeed into Wuhan, long after other countries had stopped services to the Asian continent. As cases, and deaths, spiralled out of control, the Revolutionary Guard were detailed to visit hospitals and seize death counts before they could be released to the media. Iran would become a focus of the virus, but would do its best to remain the tightest-lipped and least cooperative of all countries in reporting its progress.

It was of course, as it ever has been, all about control. If the people, who were supposed to look to the Supreme Leader as a kind of god figure (not really, but the representative of the Prophet on Earth, so maybe a far more powerful and active Pope?) realised that there was something Khamenei had lost control over, his power might come into question, and that would never do. Can't wait to see how North Korea approached this! They think their guy IS a god! Anyway, back in Iran the idea of Covid being used as a tool of suppression, a sort of Covid conspiracy theory before there were Covid conspiracy theories, was spread around, as the government blamed the USA for over-hyping the virus in order to, get this, disrupt Iran's elections! Oh yeah. America was already battling its own president's refusal to even acknowledge the existence of Covid-19, but had time to sneakily interfere in Iran's internal politics! Right.

The regime also vowed to take action against anyone who tried to find out, tell or otherwise fuck with the truth. Iran didn't need the truth. Iran couldn't handle the truth. No truth handler, it! Bah! I deride its truth-handling abilities, and so on. In fact, it could handle it, it just didn't want to, or to be more accurate, it didn't want it getting out. So the usual heavy-handedness went on while the virus, unconcerned about Allah or Mohammed or Ali fucking Khamenei, went about its business. Look, I know, and you know that the virus is not sentient, so this is just for artistic purposes, but Covid must have considered an extended stay in Iran. So nice: the people ignore you, there are no precautions at all, you can kill at will - why would you want to leave?

And it didn't. Iran would become another of the huge hot-spots where cases, and deaths, would absolutely go through the roof. So much, then, for Allah's divine protection.

(https://www.iranintl.com/api/image?id=855c98887c652728ed6c37ee061a7f81230b52d6-1220x686.png&rect=207%2C0%2C807%2C686&w=600&h=510&auto=format)As is usually the case though, one rule for them and one for us. The parliamentary session held on February 29 required all members to submit to body temperature readings (the closest they would allow to Covid testing I guess) and when three members were found to be in the range which would indicate a positive test they were asked not to attend. Fuck you, all three said, and went anyway. How Trumpian of you, guys. By March they had at least admitted publicly to the outbreak, and a committee was set up to tackle it. Old enmities and rivalries surfaced when Iran (having previously called them a "tool of the western hegemony") asked the IMF for money to help them combat the spread of the disease, and Trump said "I'll be buggered by a Democrat before I let those filthy muslim bastards have any of our money!" Or words to that effect, possibly those exact words, who knows? Basically, the US said no, so the IMF spread its hands and said, sorry guys. No cash for you. No doubt muttering about capitalist infidels and pulling out those plans for an attack on a US embassy somewhere, the Supreme Leader fumed but could do nothing. In fairness, had this somehow been reversed, do you think old Ali would have helped out brother Donald? As if.

With the news now out in the open, and terrible retribution and punishment no longer on the tabel (well, not from the government anyway; the virus was about to hand out its own terrible form of poetic justice) one of the premier colleges in Iran published a study which gave three, more or less equally bleak, scenarios: if people cooperated with health guidelines, the Republic could expect to see in the region of 12,000 deaths before this thing blew itself out. If there was a more moderate response, the deaths would climb to 110,000, and if nobody cooperated the death toll would be in excess of three million. That of course did not stop Iran screaming about western influences, and the doctors from Medecins Sans Frontieres were kicked out, accused of being spies. Talk about cutting your nose off to spite your face!

Trump madness reached into Iran, as over 700 people died as a result of drinking Methanol, believing, somehow, that it was protection against the virus. Might as well have been drinking bleach. Oh. Wait. Never mind. Not at all to anyone's surprise, at least outside of Iran, many prominent politicians and public figures, including those in the Health Ministry, were infected and quite a few died. I'm not going to go writing all their long bloody names here, but suffice to say Iran's first ambassador to the Vatican found himself unexpectedly closer to Allah than he had intended, a member of the Supreme Leader's Expediency Council shuffled off too, as did a commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, a former ayatollah and a film director. A whole lot more got sick. Typically, Iran blamed the USA in a conspiracy whereby the "Great Satan" had engineered the virus, or a version of it, to specifically target Iranians. Sounds familiar, don't it? And where the USA is, can Israel be far behind? Natch, the Jews got pulled into the conspiracy, another one without of course a shred of proof.
(https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSDiE1XySeqfvhKln4jfGdpSEXZ2geeHAL2oA&usqp=CAU)
Crackdowns continued. Anyone who was seen to be promoting or disseminating "false" information (ie, true) was arrested and charged, and eventually in a Hitlerian move, all newspapers were shut down. To date, Iran is said to have arrested over 3,500 people on charges of, well, whatever they want to charge them with I guess. Probably sedition, or spreading information deemed to be harmful to the regime, or god knows what. Iranians were not allowed take part in vaccine testing by "foreign" companies (I doubt they had their own vaccine developed, as surely Allah wanted them to die, so to oppose his will... you know how it goes). Prisoners were released - up to 70,000 - and others didn't wait, breaking out or rioting - and then breaking out - as chaos erupted across the state as it headed for its first lockdown, despite the assurances given only weeks before that there would be none.

Unlike western democracies - and some Arab ones - where pandemic payments were made available to the public, in Iran these were seen as loans, and to be repaid with four percent interest. Nice. A phrase that really echoes in just about any country rang true here too: with the lifting of restrictions, the number of new cases rose. It's staggering to me how people just did not get it. When we do France, I'll be remarking on how Parisians, released from lockdown, immediately - and I mean immediately - ran out into the streets and mingled with not a care for social distancing, masks or any other precautions. Children being let out of school, with about as much sense of responsibility. And of course, very quickly cases spiked again. But it happened everywhere, especially here. You can of course understand people's frustration and the need to get back to normal, but you know, the virus don't care about normal, and it was just waiting to inflict further death and illness once restrictions allowed it to get in range of people again. And they helped.

Although Iran made Remdesivir locally, this is not a vaccine but a treatment, and they were eventually constrained to bow to the inevitable and import vaccines from the USA, despite opposition by the friendly old Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who probably feared the Great Satan was trying to turn all Iranians into Christians or something. Given the lack of any sort of precaution, lockdown or even information about the virus up to four months after the first case may have been detected there, Iran became another Italy or Spain, spreading the tentacles of Covid far and wide. Cases resulted from contact with Iran in places as far apart as Canada, Norway, New Zealand, Qatar and even Thailand. Spread the love, that's what I say! I'm sure Mohammed would have approved.

Nevertheless, the EU provided 20 million Euro to Iran to help them combat the outbreak - a long long way from the five billion it wanted from the IMF, but I guess something is better than nothing - and various aid agencies sent workers and supplies to the stricken state. Trump grinned he would be willing to help "if they asked". He'd probably like that request on bended knee, the Supreme Leader kissing a Bible. His sanctions against the country for their nuclear ambitions had of course made it doubly difficult for efforts to combat the virus to work, but Trump just grinned while one of his lobby buddies snarled that no aid of any kind should be allowed get through to Iran, effectively I guess making the - completely ludicrous - case that they should all be left to die.

Speaking of death - and with the Coronavirus, when are we not? - many accusations were levelled at the Iranian government that they underreported cases and especially deaths (quelle surprise, huh?) with some sources claiming the figures could be as much as five times higher than were officially reported. One source (possibly the reporter that spoke to the doctors at the beginning of the pandemic, referred to above, or someone who used his data) claimed that when the government reported 34 deaths on February 28 there had been in fact 210, while cases of 9,000 just before lockdown were widely believed to be more in the 100,000 range. Even the First Deputy Minister of the Parliament agreed that the figures released were "not real". Leaked records from the Iranian government, obtained by the BBC in March, showed that cases and deaths were being underreported by a factor of three-to-one, in other words three times as many were being infected/dying as were being admitted to officially. Satellite images of huge freshly-dug mass graves backed up the doctors' contention that far more were dying initially than had been reported, and that more were expected to die.

One opposition group, now in exile and dedicated to the overthrow of the current government (therefore I guess what the Supreme Leader referred to as "counter-revolutionaries"), estimated the death toll to be as high as TWENTY times that reported. Needless to say, the official position was to deny any allegations or accusations of suppressing of numbers of cases and deaths by the government of Iran. In July of 2020 the US Department of State accused Iranian state officials of embezzling money from the fund of over one billion Euro, meant to combat the outbreak, and of hoarding masks, PPE and other medical supplies for sale on the black market.

Clearly, the virus is still slicing its way through the populace; as recently as February of this year (2022) a quarter of the Iranian parliament have contracted the Omicron strain, and death figures continue to mount, though what the true picture is I guess we will never know for sure.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/56/COVID-19_Germany_-_Cases_per_capita.svg/650px-COVID-19_Germany_-_Cases_per_capita.svg.png)
Country: Germany
Continent: Europe
Governing Party:++ Christian Democratic Union
Political affiliation: Centre Left?
Main crisis leaders:++ Angela Merkel (Chancellor), Jens Spahn (Minister of Health), Horst Seehofer (Minister of the Interior)
Status of country: Republic
Cases (at time of lockdown:* 1200+
Deaths (at time of lockdown) 2
Cases (at time of writing):** 29,308,100 (yeah: just shy of thirty MILLION!)
Deaths (at time of writing): 142,139
Date of first lockdown: March 16
Duration: 76 days
Number of lockdowns (to date): 2
Reaction level+++: 50
Vaccine uptake (at time of writing): 76%
Score:*** 20

Oh here we go. America could have kicked the virus's arse, had there been someone competent in charge, yes? If the US had had a man - or woman - in the White House who actually listened to the science and didn't try to pretend the virus didn't exist, they would be in a far different and likely better place than they are today. So Germany, Europe's powerhouse leader and pretty much the equivalent of the US on the continent, should have been leading the field, driving lockdowns, vaccine production, protecting its citizens, yes? Should have been a breeze to them. But wait! What's that I see? Almost thirty million cases? How did that happen? Look! Germany even had the Infection Protection Act, which gave the country's government wide-ranging powers to tackle a virus outbreak. This should have been a slam dunk. What went wrong?

Well...

Germany's first recorded case seems to have come on February 25, and who would like to guess where the gentleman had just spent his holidays? A day later, two people related to him also came down with the virus, as did others who had recently returned from Italy. Okay, hold on: this article is doing its cases by state, so I have to correct that. That guy on Feb 25 was not the first, just the first in that state. Pays to read ahead, Trollheart you dummy! Right, let's scan, people. Okay, so, to redress that error: the first case was actually in January, in Bavaria, and is interesting. Despite my snide comment above, this man did not visit Italy; China was his undoing, but he had not been there. His colleague had, but she had caught the virus from her parents, whom she had met in Shanghai, and who had come from the very epicentre, ground zero, Wuhan.

Right, it's too confusing to try to do a timeline for the number of cases, with all these states treated separately, so let's leave that for now. There were certainly in the region of at least 100 by the end of February, that much I have been able to add up, but then, I don't know if that article is only taking representative states and maybe there are others which aren't reported on, but which had cases. It seems though that Germany, like its neighbour the Netherlands, initially shrugged at Covid-19 and did not believe it to be a threat; no travel restrictions were considered or implemented in January. I guess the people didn't have the same sort of faith in their government, and by the close of January there wasn't a mask to be got in Germany. Again, pretty amazingly, the main concern of the government as January gave way to February was the possible stigmatisation of those who had been infected, that they might be excluded from society. I mean, come on! There's taking liberal socialism too far, isn't there?
(https://oldmanmackie.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/stigma.jpg)
Two weeks in and Germany was indeed emulating its huge corpulent brother across the great ocean, and dismissing the pandemic; they voted against the restriction of travel to or from China, believing it xenophobic. Ah, those Germans! How easily they forget. Sorry. The madness continued. With not a mask to be bought for love or money in Germany, they decided to export over 8 tons of PPE to... China. This was in fact in addition to a previous consignment of 5 tons already sent. You couldn't make this stuff up!

"Why can't we buy masks, gloves and shields, sir?"
"Oh, we sent them all to China."
"But... but didn't they start this whole thing?"
"Well yes, but we Germans don't need that sort of stuff. Coronavirus isn't contagious. We'll be fine."

Gott in Himmel! Incredibly, by March, when many other countries were considering lockdowns, Germany persisted in keeping its borders open, running social and sporting events, keeping people at work and refused to limit flights, describing such action as "inappropriate". Just to add to the rampant stupidity or blindness, they sent another few ton of medical supplies out of the country, this time bound for Iran. Where, as we saw in the previous post, they were most likely taken by government officials and sold on the black market or hoarded for their own personal use. Nice one, Angela! I'm reminded of the ending of the Fawlty Towers episode "The Germans," where, having witnessed the chaos in Fawlty Towers, a bewildered German looks to the camera and delivers the final line: "How did they ever win?" Well, I'm now thinking how did these people ever secure all of Western Europe and hold it for nearly five years?
(https://thumbs.gfycat.com/AlertInfiniteBordercollie-max-1mb.gif)
To their utter surprise, the day after a large consignment of medical gear had headed out to the Islamist Republic of Iran, German facilities began complaining they hadn't enough medical equipment to handle their own Covid cases. Well, duh! The next day a prohibition order went out, stopping any future export of medical goods. I wonder could they hear the horse galloping over the fields and the barn door banging in the wind? Jesus wept. So, too, most likely, did the German patients waiting to be seen to. Even more incredibly, at this point Health Minister Spahn was STILL going on about "fear being worse than the virus". Well no you stupid fucker, it was not. Fear doesn't generally kill people in their thousands, while the virus does. I begin to run out of expletives for how stupid these people are coming across as being. Master race my arse!

Hold the phone there! Two of the smaller parties actually praised the government for their handling of the crisis? Did I read that - yeah, I read that right. The radical right-wing party AdF disagreed, and while I'm loath to share any common ground with the far right, I have to admit that, based on what I've read here, they were on the money and were possibly one of the only ones with the balls to speak against the government. I'm sure they were nutcases who wanted to burn the Reichstag or whatever, but at least they were truthful nutcases. Israel must have surely taken some sneaking pleasure in declaring a quarantine on all German travellers arriving in their country, but it was of course the right thing to do. Well, no: the right thing to have done would have been to have banned them entering Israel, but they didn't go that far.
(https://c.tenor.com/5fnQ8ZTwpdwAAAAM/tracey-morgan-no.gif)
Denial seems to have been the watchword in Germany. Even into the first week in March the people were still being told not to worry, this was nothing, it would all pass. Trump must have been taking notes (or sending them), although he probably would not have approved the very important measure the Germans took of banning prostitution for the duration of the crisis. On March 9, with cases standing at 1,200, the first two deaths from the virus were announced. Merkel still refused to instigate any sort of lockdown, or restrict travel. Truth to tell, the Chancellor had been conspicuous by her absence during the previous months, so I guess the running of the crisis management - if it can be called that, with extreme generosity - must have been Spahn. As could only be expected in a country taking pretty much no precautions, and leaving it up to individuals to protect themselves (while still throwing out contradictory advice such as not to bother with disinfectants, those who showed no symptoms should not be temperature tested and so on) members of the German parliament soon got the virus, then Trump blindsided Merkel by banning travel from Germany to the USA on March 12. Germany had not been consulted.

The next day almost all of the federal states in Germany (14 of 16) told Merkel to go fuck herself and closed all their schools. The German Bundesliga (German soccer association) suspended all matches till at least April, to the dismay of the Mayor of Berlin, who had arrogantly claimed the big match between Bayern Munich and Union Berlin would go ahead, with full spectators, the next day. Leaving Germany to it, Poland, the Czech Republic and Denmark closed their borders. Germany was left scrambling for ventilators and other important medical equipment it had already sent to China and Iran. With 4,500 cases and nine dead, Germany finally got it and went into lockdown on March 16, closing their borders as Italy screamed "Don't end up like us! This thing is real, and it's killing us!" The next day the entire European Union closed its borders to any travel from outside of Europe for thirty days, and advised (but did not prohibit) Europeans from travelling. Somehow, incredibly, through I guess some legal loophole, flights still arrived and passengers were allowed in from... China and Iran. Jesus.

Hospitals were by now of course facing a shortage of PPE, while it was reported that 80% of GPs had none. Evidence emerged that a manufacturer of masks had warned in early February of shortages, but had been ignored. German health officials twisted and turned, trying to shift the blame. Curfews began to be imposed by various states, unrest and riots broke out, and panic buying ensued, as it always would. Volkswagen bought medical equipment from China (which could have been originally some of the consignment Germany sent them, if you think about it) and donated it to the German efforts to fight the virus. In a comically tragic episode, six million German-manufactured masks, which for some reason, never explained, were in Kenya, were half-inched and never got to their destination. Germany was now begging China for masks, reversing the role they had played when they had been so sure that the virus was nothing to worry about that they could send the PPE off to China. Bet they wished they had kept them at home!

As they stubbornly and pig-headedly charged with eyes wide open towards disaster, Germany still refused to cancel school exams, declaring they would go ahead on March 25. The Robert Koch Institute, a voice crying unheard in the wilderness, continued to make dire - and as it turned out of course, accurate and true - predictions of how bad this was going to get, and convince the government to take it more seriously. Which they did not. Some took perhaps the easy way out: on March 28 the body of Hesse's Finance Minister, Thomas Schäfer was discovered near a railway line; clearly the pressure had been too much for him and he had taken his own life. Amazingly, it took till almost April before any sort of mask mandate went in place, and that only happened in certain states. Of course, there being no masks for even hospitals might have had something to do with this; not much point rushing out to buy a mask only to be told there are none to be had. Borders began to open from May 13, with full access to be allowed by June 15.

(https://i.infopls.com/images/msarabia.gif)

Country: Saudi Arabia
Continent: Asia
Governing Party:++ None
Political affiliation: None
Main crisis leaders:++ His Majesty King Salman Bin Abdulaziz, His Highness Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
Status of country: Kingdom (Unitary Islamist absolute monarchy)
Cases (at time of lockdown:* 562
Deaths (at time of lockdown) Unknown; I can only find details of 1 confirmed death. Right.
Cases (at time of writing):** 547,402
Deaths (at time of writing): 8,922 (official) to 182,773 (independent estimate)
Date of first lockdown: March 23
Duration: 90 days
Number of lockdowns (to date): 1
Reaction level+++: 10
Vaccine uptake (at time of writing): 72%
Score:*** 55

I suppose there are advantages to being an absolute monarchy in a situation such as we faced with the outbreak of Covid, one being that there is no opposition party to thwart or raise a dissenting voice to your plans to tackle it - Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, where the King has the same basic power as the likes of King Louis XIV in France in the seventeenth century, i.e., absolute - and another being that in an absolute and, let's face it, brutally oppressive monarchy such as that practiced in Saudi Arabia, you really don't have a choice. If the King says take your vaccine, you take your vaccine. If the King says stay at home, you better believe you're staying home! So on the surface - and always depending on the attitude of His Majesty to the virus - this should have been a done deal. No protests or riots here! No disobedience, no refusal to comply, no civil disorder.

But was it like that? And did the King go with science or did he, being subject to the laws of Allah, trust in his god and sneer at vaccines, at the very Coronavirus itself? I ask, not as leading questions, or to give you the answers, but honestly, as I have, until I read it after typing this, no idea which way the Royal Family went, where they stood, which side they came down on when it came to this devilish plague that assaulted believers and infidels alike.

So let's find out, shall we?

First of all, how did the virus get in? Well, it seems another Islamist Republic was to blame, as the first case was traced to a man returning from Iran via Bahrain (spread it around now, don't be mean) on March 2. It took another twenty-one days before the King ordered a curfew; nobody was allowed travel within the Kingdom between the hours of 7pm and 6am. What this meant in terms of travel outside of the realm I don't know, but you certainly could not consider it yet a lockdown. Despite this precaution, and as we have seen in other, more progressive countries, the case load grew, ballooning to 562 by March 23, and the next day to 767, at which point the Kingdom had its first death reported, that of an Afghan national. By the end of the month cases were climbing towards the 1,500 mark.
(https://cdn.expatwoman.com/s3fs-public/styles/width_420/public/hajj-main_0.jpg?itok=ExsZLk-t)
Prior to this, the King had already banned the entry of Muslims into the country who wished to visit the great shrines at Mecca and Medina, and ordered the Grand Mosque closed for daily sterilisation, and on March 19 all prayers were suspended. For an Islamic nation, this surely came as a massive blow. I mean, people here in Ireland were whining about the churches being closed, but hell, most of them would go to mass once a week, if that, other than the older generation (mostly old ladies) who might go every morning. Now imagine going several times a day, every day, and suddenly you're prevented from doing so. I wonder, had this not been a monarchy, would unrest, to say the least, have erupted?

To make matters worse for the Muslim population, the next day the two shrines, the major mosques at Medina and Mecca were closed. I suppose consider St. Mark's Square suddenly being made off-limits to Christians. Which, given the state Italy was in, it probably was. As early as February 6 His Majesty had banned travel from his Kingdom to China. Like Lombardy in Italy, one area of the Kingdom was placed under total lockdown early, this being the Al Qatif governorate, though the rest of the Kingdom soon followed. Sports events were originally to be played behind closed doors and without spectators, though a week later these were all cancelled until further notice, as was the Saudi Olympics (what?), scheduled to have taken place at the end of March.
(https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article23902622.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/0_THIS-is-the-terrifying-moment-suspected-kidnappers-attack-a-man-and-bundle-him-into-the-back-of-a-va.jpg)
Interestingly, and indeed surprisingly to me anyway, it seems that even in so tightly-controlled a country as this, misinformation and disinformation found its way in, and people were arrested for spreading false information. Of course, that might have been false as in, the Palace is reporting lower numbers than there are, or something, but even so, given that maybe you could have had your tongue pulled out for such a crime possibly, it shows how passionate some people were about spreading what they believed to be the truth. Not at all surprisingly, no information is available on who or how many were arrested, what happened to them or if they were even seen again.

Rather oddly, again to me anyway, is that while other countries were putting together special packages of pandemic assistance to help those who had lost their jobs due to Covid, and in a country as filthy rich as Saudi Arabia, the King was busily cancelling the cost-of-living payment and RAISING the level of VAT! And I mean raising! Like, tripling from 5% to 15%! Might as well just drive your people out into the desert and let them die, Your Majesty! It'd be quicker. King Salman also cut public spending and seemed to think that the fall in oil prices, leading to a deficit in the Royal budget, should be taken out on his people. Would it not have made more sense to, I don't know, sell a few of your Bentleys or a bunch of horses, your Kingship? No? What's that big guy with the sword coming towards me... oh well, I guess you know your own people, sorry I mentioned it.
(https://assets3.cbsnewsstatic.com/hub/i/r/2020/05/13/bfc50924-158e-40fe-8483-9db46800718a/thumbnail/640x427/1e75f66596ff761fba6ffc25486e459b/saudi-arabia-coronavirus-outbreak.jpg)
As history has shown before with the Black Death, power, status, wealth and privilege are no protection against the plague, and accordingly the Royal Court was infected, with a reported (but not confirmed) 150 members of the Royal Family falling ill. From what I read, the Saudi Royal Family numbers up to 15,000 members, though the more important ones comprise about 2,000. Even so, that's a reasonably high percentage, indicating that perhaps the Royal Court may have been  placing more of its trust in Allah than in face masks and social distancing. In the first week of April the case numbers had rocketed to around 3,000, almost doubling each week.

It should be understood of course that in an absolute monarchy details are hard to confirm, and information is tightly controlled. The last thing the King wants, presumably, is for his people to start believing that he is not in control, which would surely threaten his standing. Perhaps even factions within his own Court might endeavour to take advantage of what would be seen as weakness. I don't know this, but if we use history as a guide, it's usually the case: those closest to the monarch are the ones he or she need fear the most, as they are just waiting for their chance to seize power from him or her, assert their own claim to the throne. How this works, if it does, in the Saudi Royal Court I have no clue, I admit, but it does set you thinking.

Anyway, the point is that figures coming out of Saudi Arabia never could and never can be trusted; as you can see above, even now the deaths reported vary wildly between the official figures released and those calculated and reported by an independent (western) source, the Economist. So we can never be certain of the true figure, and as the pandemic raged across the world Saudi Arabia was accused of minimising the figures, downplaying the seriousness of the outbreak. This led to a mass exodus by American diplomats in July, as - official - case numbers reached 100,000. Strangely, it was at this point that the King ordered the lifting of all restrictions, effectively ending the lockdown, though mask wearing and social distancing continued to be enforced.

(https://t3.ftcdn.net/jpg/04/36/63/70/360_F_436637000_gQIO5C6lBXUeQwscc512nOzsO9lUilsF.jpg)
Chapter III: Trumpocalypse: An American Genocide

While it would be fair to say that few if any countries met the Pandemic with an adequate response, this is not too surprising. Covid was, after all, something entirely new to the entire world. There had not been a proper pandemic really of this nature since the early twentieth century, and everything else we had experienced, from Ebola and Bird Flu to Foot-and-Mouth and SARS paled in comparison. This virus was virulent, racing across the globe like someone had lit a touch paper on a very long fuse, and it burned everything in its path. But while some countries made a mess of their response, others actively helped the virus propagate by both trying to ignore or deny its existence, and politicising it. You'll not be in the least surprised to hear that the primary culprit here was the United States of America.

Under the Trump administration, hundreds of thousands of Americans died who need not have; people were not only not given the right information to help protect them, they were lied to, and, in a tragic twist, believed the lies and began spreading them themselves, acting almost as a secondary virus, the virus of misinformation and disinformation, a concerted effort to twist and deny reality, assert some sort of stupid idea of independence and freedom, treating a pathogen as if it were a sentient being, and punishing those who believed in the science and were trying to save lives. America was not of course the only country where Covid information was corrupted and contorted out of all shape, and where conspiracy theorists screamed and foamed and dribbled about all the things and people involved in trying to take people's freedoms, but it was the epicentre of such drivel, and as such, its citizens reaped the whirlwind their president and his cronies had sown early in the days of the first cases.
(https://media11.s-nbcnews.com/i/MSNBC/Components/Video/202010/mask_off_trump.jpg)
This major article will explore how and why that happened, the effect, not only on America but on the world, its ramifications for future pandemics or outbreaks, its political fallout and of course the human cost. Don't expect an unbiased write-up: you can't varnish the truth out of existence, and we all saw - and some of us experienced first hand - the bungled effort by the Republican Party to pretend the virus didn't exist, and I don't intend to pull any punches when laying blame squarely at their feet, and at those of their master. Trump and his band of, let's be brutally honest here, killers, are not the only ones who have to shoulder the blame for over a million American deaths (a responsibility they of course deny and tried to shift towards the incoming administration) - there were plenty of fringe groups, far-right militia, non-elected officials, school boards, police departments... it goes on, but let's just say there's a lot of blame, and a lot of shame, to go around.

However, before I launch into this endeavour, I will of course, as always, go back to where it all began, and I don't mean 2016, when the most unlikely election result since perhaps the rise of Barack Obama set the scene for all but state-sanctioned murder three years later. It's not certain by any means that had another Republican candidate won the presidency instead of Trump that the same thing would not have happened, but it's hard to believe it would have had the public support it did in what we must, I suppose, call the Age of Trump, though I'd rather refer to it as the Age of Idiocracy. So if we, for now, hold one man personally responsible for all those deaths, and for the spread of the disease on a unbelievable scale, to say nothing of the other human cost - black people shot almost out of hand, women reduced to objects, the rise of the far-right from the shadows and American democracy literally attacked - then it is surely necessary that we know our man. Where did he come from? How did he rise to the status of the most powerful man on the planet and all but manage to overthrow the government of his country? And why and how did he get away with it?

(https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1570304816841-906a17d7b067?fm=jpg&q=60&w=3000&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHxzZWFyY2h8M3x8bmV3JTIweW9yayUyMHNreWxpbmV8ZW58MHx8MHx8fDA%3D)

Part I: Conman-in-Chief: From the Boardroom to the Oval Office

I: Genesis of a Grifter: The Worm in the Big Apple

Despite his repeated claims on his reality show that he was an ordinary guy, Donald J. Trump was born into wealth and privilege. His grandfather, Frederick (originally Friedrich, a Bavarian German) made his money in the Alaska Gold Rush, but not as a prospector. He began a tradition that would persist through his descendants to today, one of being involved in the service industry, of making his money off the sweat of others. While hopeful miners panned for gold in the Alaskan wastes, they had to eat, and they had to sleep, and Frederick Trump provided both - for a price, of course. There is, to be fair, nothing wrong with this; I wrote about men who were big in the Transcontinental Railroad who did the same thing. Not everyone went to California to dig for gold, and I have no idea what sort of man Frederick Trump was, but it's well known what his son was like. Frederick did not die poor, and his wealth was passed on to his wife, who then had a son, named after his own father.

Fred Trump used his father's inheritance to set up what is today known globally as the Trump Organization. Fred got into real estate, which would be the cornerstone of the family's wealth and power into the twenty-first century, and probably beyond. He married Mary MacLeod, a Scottish emigree in 1936 and they had a son, Lucifer, sorry Donald. He was born a week before midsummer's day in 1946. While I want to resist making this a hatchet job, as I could, I will report the facts as I learn them, and it seems that from the very start Donald was enrolled in a private school, in fact one where his father sat on the board of governors. With behavioural problems surfacing at an early age he was sent to a military school to straighten him out, this being the New York Military Academy, where the young man suddenly found to his dismay that things which had been done for him previously - such as making his bed, shining his shoes - were tasks he now had to perform. His brutal side, already coming to the fore, was demonstrated when he hazed a cadet so severely that it became necessary to remove him from his student command and transfer him to another.
(https://www.usnews.com/dims4/USNEWS/64d52e1/17177859217/resize/800x540%3E/quality/85/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.usnews.com%2Fcmsmedia%2F7d%2F2c660496b823f534b6a70c2e3eb2cc%2Fcollege-photo_12860.jpg)
His university education began at Fordham University in 1964, however it would appear his time there was less than salubrious, as he transferred a mere two years later and now it's said the school does not recognise his time there, nor does he acknowledge that he ever went there. He ended up at Wharton School of Business and Commerce of the University of Pennsylvania, but though he did stay to make graduation from there, again his time must not have been very special there, as in 2015 he had his lawyer sue all his colleges and high schools if they should release his academic record, and this would have been as he made his bid for President, so can't imagine they would have been glowing reports.

He managed to avoid service in Vietnam, and while it's certainly not my place to sit here in comfort in my bedroom and rail at young men for not wanting to die in a stupid war of ideologies that had nothing to do with them, it is rich that on the campaign trail Trump should them make his infamous claim about candidate the late John McCain not being a proper war hero as he was taken prisoner. But then, that always seemed to be - and to an extent, still seems to be - the case with Donald Trump: one rule for him and one rule for everyone else. It's also hard not to sneer at the image of other men, possibly his college friends, if he had any, dying in the paddy fields of Indochina while he began wheeling and dealing in real estate with his father, already worth the equivalent today of a million dollars by the time he had graduated.

In 1971 he moved to Manhattan, and quickly became head of the Trump Organization, then known as the Elizabeth Trump & Son. One can only speculate and never be sure, but given his innate disdain for women and his unmanageable ego, it seems likely that he was eager to push his own name to the front as soon as possible, and remove what he would have seen as his lower status as the son of the boss, in fact eliminating her entirely. In 1978 he began to get involved in hotels, and, another part of his business which would be  inseparable from his buildings, kickbacks and bribes. He in fact managed to get the Grand Hyatt Hotel built by convincing the city to give him and his investors a 40-year tax break, for which the city would receive a percentage of the profits. I don't know too much about building regulations or planning permission or whatever, but that sounds like a bribe to me.
(https://assets.trump.com/website/business/TRUMPTOWERNY-_721_Fifth_Avenue_1.jpg)
His next project was the world-famous/infamous Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, a building which stands as a monument to his excess and boasting, with more gold in it than perhaps the late and not lamented Saddam Hussein's royal palace. In 1976 he met the woman who was to become his first wife, Ivana Zeinickova, from Czechoslovakia, today the Czech Republic. She was a model, and the two soon became the golden couple of the New York society scene. Ivana had three children, Donald Jr, Ivanka and Eric. All would end up playing major roles, not only in the Trump Organization, but in their father's later presidential run and then in his administration. However if Ivana expected this womanising misogynist (sorry; I have to have some leeway here, don't I? And it's the truth, we all know it) to remain faithful she was barking up the wrong tree. When her husband cheated on her with another model, they began divorce proceedings, finally separating in 1991 with a twenty million settlement on her side. If there's one thing Trump loves it's money, so I can't imagine it was anything like an amicable split.

Two years later there was a fourth addition to the Trump clan, a girl called Tiffany (could this be because Trump Tower stands opposite the famous jewellers? You decide) and Donald decided it might be best if they got married, so in 1993 Marla Maples became Marla Trump, perhaps foolishly believing she would be the one. She was not, of course. Before the turn of the millennium she was out, and he was moving on to his third - and so far, current - wife. Can there be something, I wonder, in the fact that two of the three future Mrs. Trumps have been immigrants from eastern Europe? Ivana was, as noted, a Czech, and Melania came from Slovenia. Hmm. Melania Knauss became wife number three in 2005 and gave Trump his fifth child, Barron.
(https://media.newyorker.com/photos/590978d18b51cf59fc4236cf/16:9/w_1280,c_limit/ONeill-Trump-Wedding.jpg)
It seems that Trump's business deals, despite what he (or rather, ghost writers employed by him) would have you believe about his acumen, were characterised by two main points: riding over anyone he had to in order to get what he wanted and often leaping before he looked, ending up losing money on big projects that became money pits or white elephants. In 1984 he bought a huge property in Atlantic City which he named Harrah's at Trump Plaza. In 1993 he expanded it by buying the surrounding buildings, including hotels, and in 2011 tried to expand it again but had exhausted his funds, leading to the place closing down three years later. The Trump Taj Mahal, costing twice its budget, remained in operation for about a year before going bankrupt. It's still open now but under a vastly restructured deal under which Trump had to give away most of his stake, and it still shut down in 2016, eventually being bought out by Hard Rock International.

He then fought to have residents removed from an apartment block near Central Park so that he could build his tower blocks there, but he lost the legal battle. He would later buy Central Park outright. He also fought against resident in west Manhattan who stood in the way of his plans for a twelve-skyscraper property to be called Television City, and had to admit defeat here too. Tales of his golf course in Scotland, and the opposition to it in his mother's native country are also well-known, and it seems everywhere he goes as a property developer Trump has little compunction about stepping on the little guy, furious when that little guy fights back.
(https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/newscms/2020_20/3351016/200515-mar-a-lago-mc-1141.JPG)
He likes to present himself as a super businessman, the tycoon of tycoons, the man who can get any deal done on his terms, but the reality is that Trump has filed for bankruptcy no less than four times over a thirteen-year period to 2004. In order to reduce his debts he has had to sell his airline and his yacht. Like a bad penny though, he turned back up and remade his fortune, and in 1985 he purchased what has become perhaps the most famous property in Florida after Disney World, Mar-a-Lago. The story of its purchase is typical Trump: offering the trust which held it 15 million dollars and being turned down, he did what he always does: he tried to strongarm the owners. He bought adjacent land and threatened to build a resort there specifically to block the beach view from Mar-a-Lago, which pushed the price of the resort down, allowing him to snap it up for - estimates vary - either five or eight million less than he had originally offered. Adding in what it cost for the land purchase - about two million - he still saved at least three million, and due perhaps to his presidency it's now estimated the estate has risen in value by a factor of at least fifteen.

There is ample evidence to suggest Trump delays paying his debts or finds ways to avoid them, and it's a matter of record both that he fought for years to prevent the release of his tax records - a successful bid only occurring this year - and that he paid a paltry few thousand dollars in tax in 2021. He opened organisations such as the Trump Foundation and Trump University (but, perhaps oddly enough, not the Church of Trump), all of which are now under investigation, or have been issued legal challenges and demanded recompense for losses. As of 2020 Trump was in the hole for two billion, mostly to Deutsche Bank, UBS (a Swiss bank) and Bank of China.

So how in the name of all blue holy hell did this multiple loser and conman become the 45th, and now the 47th President, of the USA? Ah, thereby hangs a tale...

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/de/The_Apprentice_original_logo.png)
II: It's Not Necessarily the Cream that Rises to the Top

Although Donald Trump had been involved with public features such as the Miss Universe Contest/Miss Teen USA and the ill-fated United States Football League, the collapse of which he was largely responsible for, as well as buying an airline and trying to remake the Tour de France in, literally, his name, he was probably best known before his presidential bid and four-year tenure for his reality TV show, The Apprentice. The brainchild of producer Mark Burnett, the show appealed to Trump's immense vanity and self-confidence and arrogance, essentially becoming a free advertisement for he and his products, while also showing the world how rich and successful (sic) he was. His legendary catchphrase, "You're fired" is probably about as well-known now as, for instance, Bruce Forsyth's "Nice to see you, to see you nice" or Simon Cowell's "It'a a no from me" over here.

The series was very successful, spawning imitations as far as Australia and the UK, and even we Irish had a go, but whether you like reality TV or not, the point is that this is where people really began to see Trump as a genuine personality. Up till then, everyone knew his name - vaguely - and knew he was rich, but other than that he was pretty much yesterday's news, a sort of Howard Hughes figure: he had been big in his time, but now nobody knew what he was doing or where he was, or cared. The Apprentice thrust him squarely back into the limelight, and it is without question this resurgence in notoriety and the raising of his public profile that prepared him for his run for the White House, the first of which would fail miserably.

Trump does not seem to have been committed to or loyal to any political party, changing his affiliation four times over two decades. Beginning as a Republican in 1987, he switched to Ross Perot's Reform Party in 1999, then to the Democrats in 2001 and finally back to the Republicans in 2007. Since becoming president, he has repeatedly lambasted those within the party whom he sees as weak, not upholding the traditions of the GOP (or, more accurately, not conforming to his wishes) and called them RINOS, or Republicans In Name Only. There hag been talk of his starting a new party, but this never came to pass.

But back in 1988 he was already trying to get on the path to power, asking to be put on the ticket as George H.W. Bush's running mate, a request which was laughingly denied. Perhaps because of that, perhaps not, he joined Perot's independent Reform Party, under which banner he then made a bid for the White House in 2000. Within a month or two he had withdrawn, ostensibly due to infighting within the party, particularly revolving around his own personal dislike for Pat Buchanan, their expected nominee for the presidency, but according to other sources his run had been merely a publicity stunt to promote yet another book he had had no hand at all in writing. Following his withdrawal he became involved in The Apprentice, which sufficiently raised his public profile to allow him to mount a serious presidential bid sixteen years later. Trump had arrogantly predicted that if he ran for President, he would win. On this occasion, he did not run and therefore in fairness could not be said to have been proven wrong, and indeed, to all our horror and amazement, his prediction would actually come true the next time he made a bid for the White House.

The election in 2008 of America's first black president seems to have marked a turning point for him. His well-documented racism and bigotry led him to consider a bid in 2012, before Obama won a second term, but he decided against that. However once Obama's two terms were up, he was ready to take over.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/69/Trump-Pence_2016.svg/560px-Trump-Pence_2016.svg.png)

Having again switched allegiance, from the Reform Party to the Democrats, Trump shuffled his deck again and came up with the Republicans for a second time, under whose banner he would contest, and win, the 2016 Presidential election. Even at that, he continued to jump from camp to camp like some fat orange Mexican jumping bean, calling himself independent - or at least, affiliated with no party, two years after rejoining the GOP, and then a year after that settling back in the arms of red power and the right wing of American politics. Whether he was toying with his public perception or not I suppose we will never know, but he announced in 2011 he would not be running, as Barack Obama won his second term. Ignoring advice from friends to run for governor of New York in 2013, Trump failed to renew his contract for The Apprentice in 2015, showing he was about to concentrate on a new presidential bid. Four months later he made his announcements. British bookmakers Ladbrokes set his odds of winning at 150-1. Few would take that bet.

From the beginning, as expected, Trump played to the gallery, and that gallery was packed with his supporters, the kind of people who still believed the Civil War had been lost, that certain kinds of folks didn't deserve to be in America, that women were second-class citizens at best, and had, generally, not only the shakiest grasp of politics and world events, but of America's geographical position in the world, leading to some hilariously stupid comments later on. Trump made his infamous speech about "cleaning out the swamp" and "building the wall", and made derogatory comments about his neighbours to the south that infuriated Mexicans everywhere, as well as Democrats and even some Republicans, though most of the latter tacitly supported his ideas, perhaps not courageous (or stupid) enough to say these things out loud while still thinking them, rather like pushing someone into the line of fire while shouting "I'm right behind you!" from some considerable, and safe, distance.

His comments began to hurt him where he hated to be hurt: his pocket. His Miss Universe pageant was dropped by all networks (resulting, of course, in legal action from him), NASCAR ended their deal with him, other sponsors withdrew from associating themselves with his name, including megastore Macys and various Mexican TV channels. But he was only getting started. Next in an incredibly hurtful and bigoted stream of rhetoric were Muslims, whom Trump intended to single out for special surveillance if he were elected, creating a national database of Muslims in the USA and having mosques watched; he then went further, declaring he would ensure that a total ban went in place to deny Muslims entry to the country. These remarks drew sharp criticism and condemnation, not only from Democrats, but from outside of the US too, with France and the UK, two countries with large Muslim populations, stating their shock and outrage that such a notion could be considered, never mind proposed.

It is, however, no surprise to find that he walked the Republican primaries, beating off (not literally, but then, who knows what this man would do for power?) rivals such as Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson, and emerging easily as the hope of the Republican party to take back the White House after eight years of Democrat power. His path to the presidency, however, would not be so easy, and he was easily the outsider as former President Bill Clinton's wife, and former Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, was largely touted by media outlets and polls as a shoo-in for the position. It may very well have been her own arrogance and complacency of her party that ultimately lost them the election, but we'll get to that. Right now, Donald Trump was riding and rising on a tide of anti-this and ant-that comments, his slogan, "Make America Great Again" resonating with people who had had enough of Democrats, and a policy under Obama which had pretty much under delivered. Even committed Democrat voters were disappointed, after the initial euphoria of having had the first African-American president in history elected, how poorly the administration had been seen to conduct its affairs.

You can't really accuse Trump of telling the truth much of the time, or being in any way honest, but perhaps one of his most telling comments (which he probably didn't even realise was essentially telling people he could not be trusted) was made after the last of his opponents dropped out of the race for nominee, leaving him as the presumptive candidate. He said "You've been hearing me say it's a rigged system, but now I don't say it anymore because I won. It's true. Now I don't care." This statement takes, as they say, a little unpacking. On the face of it, he's saying the system is rigged, but since it's rigged in my favour I don't care whether it's rigged. Could he also be saying it's not rigged, that I was just saying that in order to get elected? Or is it just as simple as his final three words, almost a slogan or even epitaph for his later presidential term: I don't care?
 
And then the fun really began.

Rallies for Trump swiftly became notorious for their violence, intolerance and clashes between sides. Far from discouraging or condemning such actions, Trump actively spurred his people on, at one point urging them to "beat the crap out of" protesters, and winking that he would pay all the legal fees. He began using his "drain the swamp" phrase, which rather quickly became replaced by another, more dangerous one, as he opined that his rival, Hilary Clinton, should be imprisoned, and the chant of "Lock her up!" resounded across arenas and fields and meeting halls whenever Trump was in attendance. At one point this changed to "lock them all up", with no real justification for, or reason provided for the intended incarceration.

However, no matter how loud his supporters chanted, no matter the banners and the slogans, the lies and the incitements to violence, Donald Trump did not have what most presidential candidates have, the support of previous presidents belonging to his party. Neither of the two Bush presidents would endorse him, and both said they would not vote for him, nor would Florida governor Jeb Bush, In fact, following the January 6 attack on the Capitol building in 2021, both Bush and Obama would come out against Trump and his supporters, decrying his behaviour and his inciting of the riot when he couldn't take defeat like a normal human being. Of course, by now he would have the Republican party by the throat, and there would be few who would not support him, as the party began to implode and fascism grew in its heart.

With a campaign of soundbites, empty promises and again playing to the gallery - and with apparent assistance from America's old enemy, Russia, Trump took the electoral vote (but not the popular one) and won in what was pretty much a landslide: 306 votes to Clinton's 232. Bucking the trend and proving both that America has some of the dumbest voters in the known world, and also that the Democrats had failed to pay him the proper respect as a challenger, Donald J. Trump was elected the 45th President of the USA on November 9 2016, and after eight years the White House was again red. Soon, this would become a literal statement.

III: The Lunatics Take Over the Asylum: QAnon,The Proud Boys and the Rise of the Far Right

It all started, apparently, as many good things do, with pizza. However, this was anything but a good thing, and you won't find Dominos or Papa John's or any major pizza chain wanting to be connected with what became known as Pizzagate. I'm not entirely sure why every major conspiracy or political event - and even some outside of the arena of politics - end up with a "gate" on the end. I know it has to do with the most famous (until recently) political scandal involving a sitting president, but why everything becomes Millygate or Borisgate or Votergate or whatever, I'm not sure. In the end, it's not really important, as that's just the accepted name this, one of the first major conspiracy theories to grip America with any real power, was given.

Pizzagate began when an anonymous poster on the imageboard 4Chan, who went by the name of Q, purported to be an insider posting from deep within the Clinton administration, and supposedly leaked sensitive coded information that claimed the Democrats were sexually abusing children in Satanic rites with, um, a pizza parlour as their base. Okay, okay: I know we've all heard it and you have to have had your brain replaced with a pizza to believe it, but unfortunately many did. This later evolved (or devolved) into Pedogate, which removed the overt political and American element from the conspiracy theory and widened it into a global sex trafficking and pedophilia ring operated across the world by "the elite". These "elite" included movie stars, pop stars, bankers, Jews (of course), Democrats (of course) and basically anyone the loons could think of to prop up their quickly-discredited theory.

Identifying a shop in the Comet Ping Pong Pizza chain as the base for this alleged cabal brought danger and death threats to its staff and owners, with one lunatic actually entering the place with a rifle to "conduct his own investigation". He ended up getting four years, but believed what he had been doing was the right thing. The conspiracy then spread to other pizza shops and unrelated businesses in the area, still without a shred of proof. Pizzagate, completely debunked and proven a totally fictitious story almost better than something Lynda la Plante or Stephen King could dream up, nevertheless persists in America like a turd that will not go down the U-bend. To date, there are over a million messages on social media tagged with its hashtag.

This, then, was the beginning of QAnon, who would play such a large role in Donald Trump's attempts both to convince the American people he had won an election which he clearly lost, to resist the vaccine for Covid that would have saved their lives, and which would lead, eventually and tragically, to the steps of the Capitol Building, where an armed mob would attempt to destroy democracy and install a dictator.

Through high-profile supporters in the government and the entertainment industry (I was surprised to read that Roseanne Barr, whose show I used to enjoy, was one of the propagators of this dangerous, lunatic nonsense: I'll never look at her the same way again) the idea of QAnon spread like dark wildfire, touching all corners of mainstream and underground media, and finding a particularly receptive audience in what became known as "fake news" sites such as Infowars, Breitbart and, for a long time, the grand-daddy of all mouthpieces for the Republican party, Fox News. Trump of course latched on to what QAnon were saying; everything tied in with his base, and while he may or may not have believed in the child-sex ideas being propagated (he's just thick enough to make that a possibility) it certainly helped him take control of the far right narrative, and provided him with all but an invisible army to carry out his agenda.

The accusation probably can't be levelled at Trump that he communicated directly with these far-right groups, or even that he endorsed them, but he certainly did not disavow them. In fact, during the first presidential debate of 2019, as he faced Joe Biden, he was invited to tell his followers to stand down; he deliberately misspoke and told them to "stand by", which of course they took as a rallying cry. But back to QAnon. Not terribly surprisingly, the Church in America was generally on their side (I say was, because once the administration changed and these eejits fell out of favour, most likely the pastors and vicars and other clergy who supported them, either tacitly or overtly, melted back into the shadows, whistling with their hands in their cassocks) as many of their beliefs were in line with the more fundamental Christian ones, including homophobia and misogyny, and the old chestnut, anti-semitism. And of course Russia and China did all they could to promote division in the USA by supporting and spreading QAnon and other far-right groups.

And then in January of 2020, Covid arrived in America.

(https://dims.apnews.com/dims4/default/fedfaab/2147483647/strip/false/crop/3000x2000+0+0/resize/1486x991!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstorage.googleapis.com%2Fafs-prod%2Fmedia%2F731aab8845c44d25bef60bb84abe0f02%2F3000.jpeg)
PART TWO:: Immunity from Reality - Trump Botches America's Response to the Pandemic

"We have it totally under control. It's one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It's going to be just fine." - President Trump, January 22 2020

Despite Kellyanne Conway's smug claim that "Coronavirus would never reach America", it ended up being the country with the most cases (over one hundred million) and deaths (just over a million), and certainly was the nation where the response was completely and utterly mishandled as the President attempted political sleight of hand by tricking people into thinking Covid was not real, even as they died in their hundreds of thousands, even as his own White House became a plague zone, even as he himself contracted the virus. By the end of his presidency it could be perhaps said with some confidence that though Trump himself got sick from the virus, its biggest victim, in his case, was his second term as President of the United States. His mishandling of, and determination to ignore the Covid-19 pandemic, to pretend it wasn't anything as bad as it was, to denigrate those who had died and shrug that none of the deaths were his fault, ultimately sealed his fate as a then one-term president.

Initially, to be fair, the reaction by the US was adequate, as you would certainly expect it to have been. When Covid-19 was declared a PHEIC (Public Health Emergency of International Concern) on January 30, and on the same day the first case of person-to-person transmission of the virus surfaced in America, Trump arranged the evacuation of Americans from Wuhan. Was this a good idea? Wuhan was not at the time under quarantine, yet America was unprepared and unable to properly screen those coming back from what was now known to be the epicentre, the ground zero of the outbreak. Again though, to be equitable here, every other country did the same: nobody wanted their people left in a "plague zone". Trump's administration banned flights to China, which was probably the right thing to do. As early as April the USA had already become the country with the highest amount of deaths, 20,000, surpassing Europe's top hotspot, Italy.

Trump was opposed to the idea of "shutting down America", so no national lockdown ever took place, each state deciding for itself whether they would impose restrictions, and what those restrictions would be. Inevitably, those states controlled by Republican governors remained open while the "blue" states, where Democrats held office, mostly instigated lockdowns and "stay-at-home" orders. Also inevitably, it would be the "red" states, the ones who had refused to implement any sort of quarantine or preventative procedures who would see the most cases, the worst hospital surges, and the most deaths. By May, cases had reached a million and deaths had quintupled to 100,000 as the pandemic raged across America, all but welcomed in by a large number of states. Trump's response to the advice from the WHO was to withdraw from the organisation, bleeding it of critical financial resources when it desperately needed them the most. The ramparts were being manned. America would stand alone. America would fall alone.
(https://ruralhome.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/covid-map-a-oct1.jpg)
While the rest of the world was, mostly, panicking but taking the necessary measures, and the planet began to resemble the science fiction novel The Quiet Earth, America remained open for business. Despite frenzied requests for nationwide shutdowns to help contain the disease, the Trump administration allowed huge spectator events to go ahead, more people to get infected and take their new pal home with them to infect more and more of their family and friends. To nobody's surprise, cases kept steadily climbing, and it did not take long until there were five million cases in the United States. In fact, it was only August, meaning the cases had again increased by a factor of five in less than four months. A month later there were 200,000 Americans dead.

And then a vengeful wave of Covid hit the seat of power as the White House became the centre of a superspreader which almost took out the most powerful man on the planet.
(https://s.abcnews.com/images/Politics/amy-coney-barrett-04-gty-jt-200926_1601155794830_hpMain.jpg)
Trump's disdain for face masks, a basic requirement in the fight against Covid-19, led to most of his staff not wearing one, either to get on his good side or to avoid the ridicule heaped on them by those who thought they didn't need them. As a result, when Trump flouted all health regulations and continued campaign rallies as he attempted to win a second term, while his rival, Joe Biden, called a halt to his, and when a major outdoor event was held in the Rose Garden to confirm the appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, the writing was on the wall. At the confirmation event, there was no social distancing, hardly any mask wearing and plenty of close contact, resulting in many high-profile cases, including the President himself, and his First Lady. Despite this, contact tracing was not initiated and offers by the CDC to assist were repeatedly declined.

Despite his bravado and trying to tough it out, Trump was hospitalised on October 2. Prior to this, he continued to act as he had always done, with arrogance and a complete lack of empathy or concern for anyone, holding rallies, attending a presidential debate, and attending gatherings while apparently quite aware that he had tested positive. Everyone in his orbit began dropping like flies: he was like the 21st century equivalent of Typhoid Mary, though his diagnosis was swathed in security, lies and dismissals. Eventually Trump had to be taken to Walter Reed Military Hospital for urgent treatment (though his true condition was never officially released, shrouded in secrecy like just about anything that could be spun as negative about him) and after receiving treatment not available to the ordinary American, returned to the White House to publicly downplay Covid and tell people not to be afraid of it.
(https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/9032b0d59c47a67eb58100bff4d398f71d0b5a84/0_300_4500_2700/master/4500.jpg?width=1200&height=1200&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&s=118a42e10bdca42f460d915c8782020b)
Oh yes. It's hard to believe, but I remember it well. After returning from the hospital he very deliberately and defiantly removed his mask and spoke to reporters and staff and media unmasked, with no idea whether he was cured or not. He claimed he was now "immune", one of many unsubstantiated and quite insane claims he made during his presidency - nobody has ever so far been found to be immune to Covid. Anyone else might have learned from his ordeal - Governor Chris Christie, who was at one point close to death after the Rose Garden event - certainly did, apologising for ridiculing mask wearers and asking everyone to get vaccinated and wear a face mask - but not Trump. No humility in the man at all, he probably felt like now he was in a position to say he had survived Covid (he hadn't; if it hadn't been for the expensive, experimental and exclusive treatment he received, it's possible he could have died) and could dismiss it the way he dismissed anything else that didn't fit in with his own personal narrative, or anything that made him look weak.

I won't lie, and I damn well won't apologise for saying it, but I truly hoped the man would die. Not only because it would show his followers he was not immortal or invincible, not only because it would remove the threat of a second Trump term, but because it might, just possibly, make his blind and literally dumb (not in the speaking sense but in the mental sense) public stop and think for a minute, and realise that if "someone like Trump" could die from Covid, then, despite his downplaying of the seriousness of the virus, they could die too, and then maybe they might start taking it seriously and fucking do something to protect themselves. Sadly, either God does not exist or was busy those few days, and the bastard pulled through, which only strengthened the belief of his MAGA crowd and his Republican base that there was nothing this man could not do, and that if he could kick Covid's ass, well hell, shoot and damn, they could too!

In that, of course, they would prove to be totally, tragically and fatally wrong.

On what would in fact prove to be his last official day as the President, Election Day 2020, November 3, Trump decided he wanted to have a big party, and like a fat, bullying, selfish child who has no interest in the safety of others, he broke all Covid rules and threw a lavish reception for hundreds of his staff and cronies, with again no masking and no social distancing. In the days following his defeat at the hands of Joe Biden, Trump's staff and those who had been at the party began to fall like dominoes in a long line. Many of the diagnoses, such as that of his chief advisor Mark Meadows, were kept secret until they could no longer be.

(https://s.abcnews.com/images/US/covid-lookback-230_hpMain_20230319-102222_16x9_1600.jpg)
II: State of Emergency: the Covid Pandemic hits the USA.

Surprisingly, it seems hard to find a list of reactions, or the lack of them, to the pandemic by state, but I'm going to do my best to list each state in alphabetical order and see how the virus developed there, and what, if any precautions were taken, how many cases and deaths resulted, and how the population reacted. This might be a little shaky, but we'll see how we go.

Note: these are just going to be basic sketches: I'll go into much more detail later on in the article. Also, I'm not about to do fifty states in one post, so I'll break it up over the course of the article. Got some books to read, too.

Notes on categories: Apart from the ones I used in the first part for individual countries, some of which obviously don't apply to states, I've added two new ones. Leadership level refers, naturally, to how the state responded through its governor. How did he or she face the crisis, what precautions (if any) did they take and how did they help or hinder the spread of the virus? This is distinct from Reaction Level, as the population may not have gone along with the rules - if any - implemented, like Gretchen Whitmer's attempts to keep Michigan safe, despite themselves. So a governor may not always be responsible for how his or her state reacted, though most times they probably will be. Leadership level goes from 1 to 10, 10 being perfect and 1 being they might as well not have been in the state. Death rate is on a slightly different scale, counted out of 50, as there are 50 states, so the state with the lowest death rate overall will be marked as 50/50 while the one with the highest will be (anyone?) 1/50. In any cases where this "position on the leaderboard" is not available, I'll just score than from A to D, with the obvious correlation that A is in the higher bracket, B is high but not as high as others, C is low but not the lowest and D is among the lowest.

Score will be an average of the Leadership reaction and the actual state reaction; if both are not available then I'll use what I have.

(https://cdn.britannica.com/37/195737-050-BC226872/Alabama-united-states-locator-map.jpg)
(https://cdn.britannica.com/30/5430-050-036CEB5A/seal-Alabama-states-coat-of-arms-map-1939.jpg)
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2c/Governor_Kay_Ivey_2017_%28cropped%29.jpg/330px-Governor_Kay_Ivey_2017_%28cropped%29.jpg)
Red or Blue State? Red
Governor: Kay Ivey (Republican)
Cases:  1.65 million
Deaths: 23,692
Date of first lockdown: April 3, though it's hard to be sure, as Gov. Ivey consistently refused to order a lockdown (or, as she referred to it, a "shelter in place order") and counties were more or less left to decide among themselves how and when to shut down. Overall, most of them seem to have taken this decision, independently, around March 27, until she finally gave in and bit the bullet. Unfortunately, not literally.
Duration:  27 days
Number of lockdowns: 1
Leadership level: 3
Death rate:  2/50
Reaction level:  Unknown, but I think in general they were let down by their governor and I don't see any reports of protests, disobedience of mask mandates or anything, which kind of surprises me. Then again, they weren't exactly rushing to get a jab were they? Pity I can't find out more about this state.
Vaccine uptake: < 35%
Score: 40

ALABAMA

Alabama being of course one of the Deep South states, is and probably always will be red, so therefore if you divide America along lines of political ideologies, and place on one side of that line the "blue" states, which were more responsive to efforts to curb the pandemic and more likely to listen to science, and on the other side the "red" states, who convinced themselves it was either all a hoax or that their freedom was being threatened, Alabama would of course fall squarely on the side of the latter. It would then naturally follow that cases, and deaths, would have been high here. Let's look into this first of the red states and see how they met the challenge.

On February 4, possibly (though I can't say for sure) in line with the President's dismissal of Covid as "one person coming in from China", the Alabama governor, Kay Ivey, delivered her "State of the State" address (which I can only guess but would imagine is similar to a smaller version of the president's "State of the Union" speech) and declined to make any mention of Covid. Near the end of the month plans to have had one of the facilities in Anniston used as a quarantine centre were suddenly cancelled, and the state shrugged and advised its citizens to get a "flu shot" and "take normal precautions". Of course, at this point there was no vaccine, so a flu shot, while always advisable in any situation, would have been less than useless against the new virus. As March closed in, and despite hundreds of cases in ten states now, and eighteen deaths, Ivey sneered that there was "no need to panic, and no need to close down large events."

Friday the thirteenth came hard for the state as it recorded its first case, and hard on its heels six more. Ivey decided, finally, to declare a state of emergency and shut down all schools for a month, and within a few days was recommending smaller social gatherings, working from home and flexible hours - but only for state employees. No recommendations or mandates were given to the ordinary working people. Acting independently of a governor who seemed to be doing pretty much nothing, counties began to make their own rules, Birmingham issuing a stay-at-home order for a week, Tuscaloosa implementing a curfew, again to last one week or so. Even as late as the end of March, when cases in the USA had reached over 80,000 cases and with her beloved president grudgingly acknowledging the reality and recognising Covid as a pandemic (and trying to claim credit for having predicted it, no surprise there), Ivey refused to shut down the state, again sneering "We are not New York, or Louisiana or California." No. Those states would, in the main, fare much better because of early reaction, instead of standing there like a toddler with her hands on her hips, red in the face and scowling in temper.

Despite all "non-essential" businesses closing on March 27 Ivey again refused to implement a statewide shut-down, passing the buck to local authorities and admitting she would "not object" to them taking their own precautions. Montgomery responded by putting in place an indefinite curfew, but despite some basic attempts to help medical staff continue to man facilities, and with Covid outbreaks in six nursing homes throughout the state, by the beginning of April Alabama had climbed to the unwanted spot of fourth-highest number of deaths by state, with almost 150 people dead. Ivey finally gave in and passed a statewide stay-at-home order, to last to the end of the month. Cases continued to grow and people continued to die. By June there were a reported 31,000 cases and nearly 900 deaths. In July Ivey issued a mask mandate, but in August she allowed schools and universities to reopen, with a resultant 500 or more cases. By the end of the year, the state had reported 280,000 cases and 4,000 deaths.

As late as June of 2021 a mere 35% of the state had been vaccinated, leaving Alabama open to infections from what was then the newest variant, Delta. As of the time of writing, there have been over 1.5 million cases and over 20,000 deaths recorded.

(https://cdn.britannica.com/38/195738-050-72D6F2BC/Alaska-united-states-locator-map.jpg)
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/Seal_of_the_State_of_Alaska.svg/1200px-Seal_of_the_State_of_Alaska.svg.png)

ALASKA
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b0/Mike_Dunleavy_official_photo.jpg/330px-Mike_Dunleavy_official_photo.jpg)
Red or Blue State?
Governor: Mike Dunleavy (Republican)
Cases: 310.513
Deaths: 1,268
Date of first lockdown: N/A
Duration: N/A
Number of lockdowns: 0
Leadership level: 2
Death rate: B
Reaction level: Unknown
Vaccine uptake: 72%
Score: 35


The remoteness and small population of the northernmost US state may account for its low caseload and few deaths; much of Alaska is uninhabited, but it is a red state, so how did its governor react to the pandemic? Faster, it seems, than his counterpart in the south. Governor Mike Dunleavey closed public schools on March 13, restaurants, cinemas and public gyms and fitness centres on March 18 and required self-quarantine for any travellers arriving into the state on March 24. In May all restrictions were lifted. As of the time of writing, Alaska has reported over 310,000 cases and 1,200 deaths. This in fact puts it on a par with Alabama for cases, which slightly surprises me. However they are well ahead in terms of vaccination, with about 70% of the population having received at least one dose of the vaccine. Alaska does not seem to have instigated any sort of lockdown, though again this could be indicative of the much smaller population and how it is distributed. Let's look at that, in fact: okay that looks much, much worse. Alaska's total population is around 740,000, which means that slightly less than half of the state was infected, whereas Alabama has a population of just over 5 million, meaning only (!) a fifth, or twenty percent of Alabama was infected. As for the more important statistic,  deaths: 1,200 approx out of 740,000 is 0.16% while 24,000 out of 1,650,000 is 1.4%, so there was a larger percentage of deaths in AL but less cases than in AK. Which surely means that in Alaska, more people died who were infected than did in Alabama.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d8/Arizona_in_United_States.svg/300px-Arizona_in_United_States.svg.png)
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6f/Arizona_state_seal.svg/640px-Arizona_state_seal.svg.png)
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/Doug_Ducey_%2854188309540%29_%28cropped%29.jpg/330px-Doug_Ducey_%2854188309540%29_%28cropped%29.jpg)
ARIZONA

Red or Blue State? Red
Governor: Doug Ducey (Republican)
Cases: 2.7 million
Deaths: 31,333
Date of first lockdown: March 31
Duration: 44 days
Number of lockdowns: 1
Leadership level: 1
Death rate: A
Reaction level: Unknown
Vaccine uptake: 75%
Score: 10


Another red state, among the reddest really, almost crimson you might say, and so destined to be one of those coloured the brightest when the map began to appear on television screens, showing infection rates and deaths across the country, the deeper the red the more in trouble that state was. Following more or less the path taken by Alabama (and probably other red states too, but I'm doing this alphabetically so haven't come across them yet) Governor Doug Ducey not only ruled out a lockdown but refused to limit social gatherings. Head of the Navajo Nation, Jonathan Nez, went ahead and declared a state of emergency for his own people. In mid-March the two Arizona universities announced they would provide online courses "where possible", which to me really doesn't say much at all. Despite the early action by Nez, by March 19 there were 14 cases of Covid in the Navajo Nation, 9 out of 22 tribes affected. Again, many counties began making their own arrangements as nothing was being done by the state. Tucson issued a closure order for businesses, extending to bars, restaurants, night clubs etc. Given that this order was enacted on St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 20:00 was the last chance to get a drink, as everywhere closed until March 30.

Two days later, Ducey made a half-measure when he ordered the closure of facilities in any county with confirmed cases (like there would be any that would not fall within that criterion!) and laid down a few restrictions, but stopped well short of a lockdown, even as some fellow states were doing, and as most of Europe was already shut down. That very day, March 20, Arizona recorded its first death. It took a further ten days before Ducey finally issued the stay-at-home order, and by April he was already staggering re-opening efforts across the state. With 651 deaths and over 13,000 cases as the lockdown ended, Ducey passed an executive order preventing businesses from mandating mask wearing by their employees. He eventually reversed this a month later.

Heading for 28,000 cases and with nearly a thousand deaths, and with Arizona State University defying his order and insisting its students and faculty wear face masks, Ducey reversed his order and allowed the wearing of face masks, if required by businesses and institutions, but did not implement a statewide mandate. At the end of June the president rolled into town, maskless with a huge gathering of his fans and left the state struggling under a huge new caseload, nearly double figures for deaths and edging towards 100,000 cases, an increase of five times the previous figure. Trump was gone by now, but his Covid-dismissing stink remained long after Air Force One had winged its way back up into the blue Arizona sky. No let-up in July either, when Vice President Mike Pence arrived to finish the job his boss had started, and left eight Secret Service agents in Phoenix hospitals as he, too, fucked off back to Washington. Air Force Two departed the state as its bigger brother had, again trailing green sickly Covid smoke behind it.

By October, despite 19 cases in different ones, school remained open across the state. The death toll now stood at over 2,000 with over 112,000 cases. The man who must have been seen as the Angel of Death, even in the fiercely red state, made two more visitations, one to Tucson - where masks were not worn, despite pleas by the mayor - and one to Prescott, both of which were quickly hit with more cases. Trump attempted to lie his way out of this situation he had created by claiming that there had been a spike, but it was over, when in fact Arizona was burning in the flames of Covid. Not that he cared. And as if the four horsemen of the Apocalypse had decided Arizona was the place to be, the third uncaring idiot showed up in December.

Rudy Giuiliani, ex-mayor of New York and now Trump's lawyer, testified before the Arizona State Legislature for an energy-draining eleven hours, maskless, triggering the closure of the institution. Giuliani had already tested positive before testifying, and was well aware of the fact, but was more concerned with spreading his master's lies about the lost election than protecting the people who had, let's face it, voted for him. Despite having the highest virus spread in the entire country, Ducey again refused to instigate a lockdown as the state hurtled towards Christmas, the busiest time for shoppers and the time when people gather in groups, both at work and at home. A time Covid would spread even faster and more virulently. By the end of the year the state had reported over two million cases and was looking at deaths of around 32,000. Even at that, vaccination uptake was slow, with barely 35% having received a shot.

In an incredible statistic, at one point Arizona had more cases (remember, this is just one state, we're not talking about the whole of the USA, just one stupid refusenik state) than all of the European Union put together! This, despite having only one-sixtieth of the EU's population. That's quite an achievement, Doug! Trump must have been proud. Ducey was certainly a stubborn, arrogant and ignorant fool, but in some ways you have to feel sorry for him. Kind of. After the Pandemic he was attacked on both sides, with one group demanding his recall for not protecting the citizens enough, and another demanding the same for having protected them at all! Poor old Dougie: can't win huh? Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Which he didn't, and they were. Damned that is. Surprisingly perhaps, given that he was so blase about Covid, he escaped contracting it, or at least, I've read no accounts of his being infected. Can't have everything I suppose.

(https://cdn.britannica.com/40/195740-050-B9DA3DFC/Arkansas-united-states-locator-map.jpg)
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a4/Seal_of_Arkansas.svg/800px-Seal_of_Arkansas.svg.png)
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/69/Asa_Hutchinson_by_Gage_Skidmore.jpg/330px-Asa_Hutchinson_by_Gage_Skidmore.jpg)
ARKANSAS

Red or Blue State? Red
Governor:  Asa Hutchinson (Republican)
Cases: 1 million
Deaths: 14,199
Date of first lockdown: N/A
Duration: N/A
Number of lockdowns: 0
Leadership level: 1
Death rate: C
Reaction level: 70
Vaccine uptake: 54%
Score: 15


Governor Asa Hutchinson began preparations for closing down schools on March 17, a week after a local pastor had managed to inadvertently infect most of his congregation, leading to the deaths of four people, one of which was contacted via tracing systems. Casinos were closed the same day as the schools, nursing homes began to report cases both in residents and health workers, and a USAF pilot tested positive at the Little Rock Air Force Base, necessitating the closure of the base for thirty days. Despite recording their first death on March 24, the state did not mandate a shutdown, though some businesses and institutions were ordered to close. Trump announced he expected America to "reopen for business" by April 12, but of course he both had no clue and didn't give a shit how many people died or got sick, as long as he got his way and could play the big man. Events however conspired against him; the virus had him in its sights, as already reported.

In April National Parks were closed to the public, but by May the state was again trying to reopen the businesses that had been closed, including the parks. By June there were 3,000 new cases thanks to the reopening, and in July more than 1,000 cases were reported on a single day. By September cases had rocketed to 80,000 with over 1,400 deaths recorded. The next month it passed the 100,000 mark with 1,700 deaths. Still no lockdown was considered by Hutchinson. Unsurprisingly, politicians began to fall to the disease, including the governor himself and the State Surgeon General. Always consider it darkly ironic when the man or woman who was, or should have been, telling you how to protect yourself caught the virus. And it happened with nearly every state, and many countries outside of the USA, though more frequent there for certain.

By June of the next year, 2021, Arkansas had not learned a single lesson, with less than 40% of its population vaccinated, and the state became the centre of a surge of Delta variant cases, forcing the mandating of masks in national parks, though still no lockdown. Far from it: in April, as cases spiked again, the state passed a law outlawing mask mandates, though in certain counties, as in most states, local government made their own arrangements for masking, particularly in Fayetteville and Little Rock. Christians put their trust entirely in God, again no surprise, as the Assembly voted for a resolution to prevent the governor restricting the observation of church services. As of March 2022 there have been almost 820,000 cases in Arkansas, with over 10,000 deaths.