I’ve lived in terror, but I refuse to be scared of Covid now

FOr two years now I, like everybody else, have lived in a constant state of barely suppressed terror. I’ve tried to repress the fear and during the first few months of the pandemic, when I was still regularly going to Broadcasting house to present Woman’s hour, I was determined to keep going, refusing to broadcast from home and relying on the early morning temperature tests to reassure me I didn’t have the virus.

Then came working from home, endless lockdowns, missing friends and family and, as I’ve admitted before, drinking far more alcohol than was good for me.

Now, though, there’s hope. Several of my friends and family, of all ages, have contracted the Omicron variant, had a few days of feeling a bit grotty and recovered quickly with no lasting ill-effects.

It’s time, surely, to abandon the word pandemic, accept the virus is now endemic and live with it, just as we do with flu.

As expected, the Prime Minister has lifted the Plan B Covid measures with working from home scrapped immediately and Covid passports no longer necessary. The best news from my perspective is the end of the ghastly masks. I’ve hated them all the way through, loathing that sense of walking about, surrounded by people who look like criminals, hiding their faces from view.

ThIS week I worked with a young film crew who’d been told they must wear their masks at all times. They were jabbed, tested negative and I suspect were anxious to protect me. But I didn’t want them to wear masks. I wanted to be able to hear what they were saying. A mask makes lip reading impossible.

So, no more masks, hooray! No more people suspected of being work-shy insisting they must work from home. No more phone calls to an insurance company, a bank or a doctor and finding so-called customer service saying: ‘We are experiencing extremely high call volumes due to the Coronavirus pandemic and our wait times are longer than usual.’ Come on, answer the phone, do your job! Some suspicions have arisen about the willingness of teachers to get back to work. One colleague had a letter from her child’s state primary school saying pupil attendance was back to prepandemic levels, but teacher attendance is not. Funny that!

Then there’s the trains. Tomorrow I have to make a trip to Liverpool. Will there even be a train, as railways across the country seem to be using the virus as an excuse to cut back on services because of staff shortages? ‘Until further notice’ is the official line. One commuter told me her station master said the problem would last till the summer. What are all those staff doing? Lounging at home, playing with a train set?

I refuse to be frightened by this virus any more. I’ll stay up-to-date with vaccination, just as I do with flu and meet and hug friends and family just as I used to. I urge the removal of all those signs warning us to keep two metres apart and the ones on shop doors demanding the wearing of a mask.

I want to sit in a cinema or theatre where even complete strangers can sit alongside each other.

I want, for the years I may have left to live, to see my fellow human beings as benign companions and not as a possibly lethal threat.

It’s time for this fear of each other to stop dominating our social interaction and our work ethic. Only then will we get the country properly up and running again.