Time has come now for us to learn to live with coronavirus

MY life is a social whirl. After more than 18 months when the most exciting outing of the day was a walk with the dog up the hill and across the fields, I have been out four times in little more than two weeks. Steady on, I hear you say... don’t you know there’s a pandemic on?

And it’s true, one of the most noticeable things about my outings is how grateful most people are to forget the dreaded ‘C’ word and, with one or two caveats, throw social distancing caution and annoying mask wearing to the four winds.

First off was a drinks and canapes party to launch a week-long food promotion event. It was indoors, packed and we were being served finger food off communal plates. The noise levels were high, bending in close – forget any two metre distancing – was the only way to have a proper conversation. Yet we were all at it.

Then I had a day at a barbecue cookery school. An open sided barn and plenty of bug-killing smoke probably made that a good deal more Covid-secure, but later Mrs Bowern and I joined the queue at the local cinema for the new James Bond. At two hours and forty three minutes there is plenty of time during No Time to Die for a coronavirus or two to make its way around the fug-filled old auditorium of a 1930s cinema. Yet so far, so good. Let’s hope the film title proves accurate...

My most recent outing was a dinner for 250 at a West Country hotel. Masked-up waiting staff reminded us all that Covid is still about; but guests at normally-spaced tables hugged, shook hands and generally behaved as they have done at every pre-coronavirus dinner I have ever attended. And apart from a couple of references to the virus, no one wanted to talk about it at all.

During the height of the pandemic no one I knew had the disease. While frightening pictures beamed nightly out of the television of patients gasping in hospital beds I am grateful to say my nearest and dearest, my neighbours and my colleagues all stayed Covid-free. Now I know of several people who’ve had it or got it. And after my return to the real world who knows, I could be next.

We live in strange times. But the most accurate phrase to have been uttered about our post-pandemic world came from health secretary Sajid Javid just after he was parachuted into the job to take over from the hapless Matt Hancock.

He was roundly criticised for tweeting that we had to “learn to live with Covid, rather than cower from it” and he swiftly deleted the tweet and admitted it had been a poor choice of words. So it was. Cowering is not what people who are vulnerable or who haven’t – for good reason – been jabbed have been doing and, in many cases, are still doing.

But the wider message that we have moved, pretty seamlessly, from staying home and making only wellprotected visits to the supermarket to embracing life – and often each other – once again is a fair reflection of the way pragmatic Britons have decided to approach the pandemic in its current phase.

Will that turn out to be folly? I’ll let you know. But as Sajid Javid said we do have to learn to live with the virus and slowly but surely – and at their own pace – people are going to start rejoining the world and behaving much as they have always done.

The feeling I got from everyone at the outings I’ve been on was “we’ve done our bit.” We have all protected the NHS and saved some lives. Now, thanks to the double jabs and boosters, we can begin to live again.