Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Covid weaves a world wide web
PANDEMIC 2020 BBC2, 9pm SOMEONE is coughing on the streets of Wuhan in China. Food video blogger Xie, recently married, has decided to head out with her husband into the deserted city and film lockdown and the few people they can find.
They want to show their future children the pandemic.
This is January 2020, when this poignant three-part series begins its intimate look at the first year of the global pandemic. Meanwhile in Leamington Spa, England, it’s a very different story as we see British doctor and mum Amie enjoying a karaoke birthday party.
She says: “Sometime in January we jokingly were talking about Covid and it just didn’t seem real.
“It was thousands of miles away so it didn’t seem relevant to us.” Elsewhere, a woman whose mother fell victim in a nursing home, says: “This wasn’t a thing that could come to Iceland. “We’re just on this tiny island in the middle of nowhere.”
Shot in 21 countries, this compelling series gives a powerful view of the pandemic told from all corners of the globe.
From a wedding singer in Delhi, whose livelihood was suddenly outlawed, to a pastor in Louisiana, who refused to close his church, and a tribesman from the Amazon, it’s still shocking that absolutely everyone has been affected. In this episode, Vladimir, who works in the Mayor’s Office in Bogota, Colombia, begins to lock down the city.
And Valery, an accordion player from Minsk, recalls how everything was ordered to stay open as authorities believed that the virus would never reach them.