Polly Vernon: I had no idea how good people were, did you?

Polly Vernon reports on an unexpected upside of the pandemic – a surge in kindness and community spirit

there’s this video doing the rounds; it’s a few weeks old, which makes it about, what? 45, 46, in corona years? But it still makes me cry every time I see it. It shows a Spanish taxi driver arriving at the hospital to and from which he’s been ferrying patients, free of charge, through the epidemic, and being applauded by medics. One minute of jerky iphone film pans from him – strapping and awkward at the hospital doors, shifting from foot to foot – to the doctors and nurses, grinning and cheering beneath surgical masks, off their half-hidden faces with the joy in giving rapturous credit where it’s due.

There are thousands of examples of these vids doing the rounds: mini showcases for the many acts of casual, potent, pragmatic kindness this crisis has engendered. They proliferate on an hourly basis. I collect them like football cards: moving monuments to how endlessly decent we are, after all.

I had no idea how good people were two and a half months ago, did you? Not just the people in the memes. Not just the big names: the Captain Toms, the Kia Tobins – the 17-year-old care worker who put a photo of the face of the wife of one of her residents on to a cushion for him to hug. Everyone. My mates. My neighbours. My colleagues. My bloke. Strangers I pass on the street. Shop workers. Bus drivers. Chemists. The 750,000 people who signed up to the NHS volunteer scheme, within hours of it being opened. The furloughed professionals, giving up services for free. The big and small brand designers who’ve turned their factories and workforces over to PPE. Anyone who asks anyone else, ‘How are you?’ and discovers they really want to know. Anyone who, en route to the shops for essentials, calls up to a neighbour they hardly know, asks if they can grab something for them, while they’re there. Everyone who gathers on steps or leans out of windows on Thursday night, to clap the NHS, yes: but also to revel in a moment of mass, shared,