Why Covid-19 won’t let go

Afew minutes ago, at 6pm on the first day of New Zealand’s shift back to Level 3, I opened my laptop and tried to open Chrome – which is how I get into my Google Docs files. I was hoping that staring at a blank file would be the spur I needed to think of a subject worthy of a column – and preferably not ‘‘severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2’’.

Along with my colleague Eugene Bingham, I’ve been making a podcast about the coronavirus and its consequences since a few days before lockdown. So most days I’ve been moderately busy bashing out paragraphs of semi-scripted banter and dad jokes about a lethal virus, alongside a few serious interview questions, plus all the intros, outros and segues you need to bolt a daily podcast together. This evening, I figured, it would be nice to write about something else.

Generally, I open the various programmes on my computer by typing in the first few letters of the name into a search bar. So I started typing ‘‘C … H … R … O … M …’’ But as I typed, my subconscious took control of my fingers, and the letters came out as C ... O … V … I …

I stopped. Deleted the partial word and started again. But I’d given up on the idea of writing about something other than Covid-19.

As far as I can tell, the virus hasn’t followed me back home after one of my rare, paranoid, hand-sanitiser-scented supermarket visits. I’ve not tramped any of these nano-sized clovestudded Christmas oranges back into my family sanctum on the bottom of my beachwalk jandals. My bubble hasn’t burst. Yet all the same, these nasty little bastards have colonised my mind – and I’m looking forward to the time when that’s no longer the case.

Imagine reading the news and finding a story in the top 15 items that isn’t about Covid-19.

Imagine meeting a neighbour in the street and not only not dodging them like you’re playing suburban-bullrush-for-grownups, but also making chit-chat about something authentically boring like the weather, or the poor quality of the Christmas lights in the street this year, or the way you can never remember which fortnight is recycling week, rather than making chit-chat about a global pandemic that’s killing hundreds of thousands.

New Zealand is moving into a weird phase where the pandemic is starting to feel slightly unreal: daily case numbers are in single digits; words like ‘‘elimination’’ and ‘‘eradication’’ are in the air; takeaways and surfing are back. Perhaps it was all a fever-dream.

Yet we also know it’s utterly real. Even if we hold our cases near zero, New Zealand’s biosecurity threat won’t recede until a vaccine’s been brewed up in huge volumes. There’s going to be short-, medium- and longterm economic carnage here and abroad. Our death toll has been small compared with elsewhere, but such statistics aren’t uplifting if it’s your spouse or parent or grandparent who’s died. And even if you’re one of the rare New Zealanders with no personal connections to anyone abroad, it’s hard not to feel upset by the sheer quantity of horrible stuff happening in so many other countries.

So even though I’d really like to stop thinking about Covid-19, I don’t think I’m going to be able to. Not yet anyway.

The Coronavirus NZ podcast was only ever meant to be a short-term response. By the time New Zealand reaches Level 2, or 1, and whatever comes after that, I’m not sure how much more virus news we – or our listeners – will want to hear.

But consider this: South Korea recently published plans for managing the next two years of its Covid-19 response. Worldwide, a health emergency is going to morph into a story of economic struggle, of unstable geopolitics, of the tussles between nationalism and globalism, of failures and successes of political leadership, and of all the weird consequences we’ve not even thought of yet. We’re all going to need two-year plans for our scary, strange and probably quite annoying post-Covid futures.

I sincerely hope that by May 2022 I’ll have long since stopped nattering on-air with Eugene about Covid-19. But I have a horrible feeling that the virus we’re not talking about will still be in the air, still getting into our heads and weighing on our minds – even if, with any luck, it won’t be sticking to our fingers. Remember to wash your hands.