Almost exactly a year ago, SA identified its first case of Covid-19. Three weeks later a 21-day hard lockdown began, and the rest is contested history featuring hot chickens, cold politicians, vast looting, extraordinary courage and skill from medical professionals, and, for far too many families, the grief and anger of losing someone to a virus their neighbours say is a media hoax.
This week I’ve seen a number of people marking the anniversary of Covid-19 in this country, and I can see why. There’s something about two dates separated by a dash that act as a type of reassuring historical bookend. A pandemic that began in 2020 is a pandemic that is still rolling relentlessly on. But the 2020–2021 pandemic, well, that’s a pandemic that might, with any luck, be nearing the beginning of its end.
Admittedly, people have been calling an end to this one since its start. On March 19 last year, with fewer than 14,000 cases identified in the US, Elon Musk famously declared there would probably be “close to zero new cases” in that country by the end of April. By the end of that month there were more than a million. Today, at least 29 million Americans have had Covid-19. This isn’t over by a long way.
Still, the anniversary does feel like a moment to pause; to see whether the world has changed as much as we were told it would and to reflect on what we’ve learnt since March last year.
Again, this is tricky. Perspective requires time and distance, and I’m not sure we’ve had enough of either. For example, when I was a child I believed the greatest threat to humanity was nuclear war. It is only now, decades later, that I understand we will all be destroyed by M-Net reality show Love Island.
Nonetheless, when the biggest news story in the world involves Oprah and the British royal family, I can’t help feeling we’ve returned to regular programming and perhaps it’s not premature to look back and revisit some of the contested ideas of the past year.
A year ago, for example, many people were about to start worrying that lockdown regulations were the advance guard of an ANC hell-bent on imposing communist autocracy on SA.
A year later, I think we can agree that if the ANC is, in fact, imposing totalitarianism on us, it’s doing it at the same speed and with the same proficiency with which it’s tackling corruption. The ice caps will melt long before the ANC has figured out which way up to hold Stalinist Hell-Holes For Dummies.
When I was a child I believed that the greatest threat to humanity was nuclear war. It is only now, decades later, that I understand that we will all be destroyed by Love Island.
Speaking of which, the past year has also taught us that climate change will be an impossible sell, at least to the sort of people who gather on Muizenberg beach in Cape Town to protest the existence of reality or who believe pixelated infographics shared on WhatsApp are the same as getting a degree.
Even now I expect they are starting to piece together their YouTube clips illustrating how the Sahara has always extended to Swellendam, though it’s probably good that they’re getting a head start: even a small rise in ocean levels puts most of Cape Town’s Lentil Belt under water, which means Muizenberg’s shamans will have to crack on before they’re forced to unplug the MacBook and paddle to greener, less orca-infested pastures.
Mostly, however, I hope we’ve learnt that scientists will save us if we stop accusing them of being witches.
The deliberate mainstreaming of wilful ignorance over the past few years has been extraordinary to watch, but Covid seemed to mutate it into a particularly virulent airborne strain, infecting apparently rational, modern people with a kind of medieval outlook, where science was witchcraft and foreigners were plague-carriers, and the only thing that’s true is what you feel to be true.
Certainly, I no longer believe the Enlightenment view that evidence and facts alone can change minds. I now believe that facts are simply accessories with which we decorate our opinions, which themselves are the picket fence of our psyches.
But what I believe about facts and what the wilfully ignorant believe about 5G and Bill Gates and microchips and altered DNA and satanic vaccines didn’t matter to the scientists.
As we argued on Facebook, the doctors and the nurses kept walking those endless rounds, fighting for every life. As the modern medievals occupied beaches or deliberately hawked discredited statistics, the vaccinologists kept pushing and pushing and pushing, and now there are vaccines that work 90% of the time.
Over the past year we’ve heard or read millions of words; spilt across or out of screens, scrawled on placards, on WhatsApp, then Telegram, then WhatsApp again.
Today, however, I’d like to repeat just four of them.
Thank you, experts.
Sincerely.
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