And now that Omicron has arrived at its shores, the bastion of Zero Covid is recording daily cases in the thousands. Even New Zealand’s government admits it is time for a new strategy. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has ruled out further lockdowns. And earlier this month, Chris Hipkins, the minister responsible for the pandemic response, admitted that “everybody would agree [they are] not feasible”. Indeed, the large case numbers in recent days have not brought the sort of anxiety and panic that previous, much smaller, outbreaks did.

Undoubtedly, this shift has been a long time coming, presaged by many false starts. The international border remains closed, for instance, despite an initial plan to allow the gradual return of citizens from 17 January. The government promised that his reopening was “locked in”, but it was suspended in late December, sparking dismay and anguish from stranded citizens unable to get one of the very few places in the country’s quarantine hotels.

The government was unrepentant, however, proceeding to suspend the allocation of new quarantine places for a month, claiming the system was struggling with Omicron. Its cruel and arbitrary nature was highlighted by the story of a pregnant Al Jazeera journalist, Charlotte Bellis, who was denied an emergency place to return home to give birth, forcing her to turn to the Taliban for protection. After international outcry, a place did mysteriously materialise, but the government continues to defend the system as having “served us well”.

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The original re-opening plan will now begin at the end of the month: citizens living in Australia will be able to return from 27 February, if they quarantine at home. There will then be a slow and gradual reopening to citizens from elsewhere, as well as international students and visa holders. Even then, it’s a case of two steps forward, one step back, with “Fortress New Zealand” not due to fully open to the rest of the world until October 2022.

Nevertheless, the government and its supporters defend such caution, arguing that over the past two years it has enabled the New Zealand to buy time to prepare for the pandemic, and learn from countries’ experiences. But is New Zealand making the most of its late mover advantage?

On the one hand, there are positive signs. Observing the benefit of boosters against Omicron, the government acted swiftly, slashing the waiting period between doses, and ramping up its roll out. As a result, 2 million people — out of a total population of 5 million — are now boosted. New Zealand also took notice of the “pingdemic” in the UK in 2021 — and the food shortages, closed businesses and supply chain chaos in Australia, when Omicron forced the isolation of essential workers — and planned accordingly. Under “phase 2” of its Omicron Response Strategy, the isolation period for positive cases has been shortened and the definition of a close contact relaxed. Essential workers with a positive case in their household will be allowed to continue working if they return a negative test.

This certainly contrasts positively with the bungled policymaking in Australia over the summer, where federal and state governments made up new rules and requirements on the hoof; Prime Minister Scott Morrison actually suggested enlisting minors to drive forklifts to ease the supply chain shortages. Instead, the New Zealand government confidently predicts “we’re ready”.

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And yet, two years into the pandemic, the health system remains perpetually “stretched to its limits”, with warnings that Omicron will tip it over the edge. New Zealand remains near the bottom of global rankings when it comes to ICU beds per capita, more than 50% below the OECD average, and below countries like India. In December, funding was finally allocated to increase that number, but the new beds won’t be ready until June. Experts predict the country is about 90 beds short of what is required. There is also a shortage of critical care nurses to serve them, and dire warnings of the dangers of delayed care for cardiac and surgery patients. Ironically, this situation is made worse by closed borders, and the lack of priority given to nurses waiting in the immigration queue.

Meanwhile, for all the forward planning, the government has dropped the ball on the most important element: testing. Rapid antigen tests (RATs) remain scarce in New Zealand; the government failed to secure enough ahead of the Omicron wave. Like Australia, it only seems to have caught on to the importance of RATs once Omicron was raging around the world, by which time the global market for them was tight. Most of its rushed orders since are not due to arrive for weeks, and there are currently only 7 million RATs in the country, with more arriving by the end of the month. This has led to rationing, with RATs restricted to essential workers through a convoluted bureaucratic system. There are examples of the government confiscating tests ordered by private businesses, sparking ugly public recriminations.

Lacking RATs, New Zealand continues relying on the PCR testing system, which is struggling to deal with exploding cases, leading to long wait times for results. Consequently, businesses in Queenstown are already closing and reducing trading hours due to staff shortages.

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In short, despite talk of lessons learned and readiness, it looks like New Zealand may end up repeating many of the mistakes made by other countries. And there will be consequences for the Ardern government, which has a lot riding on the next few months. For the past two years, the Labour government has remained wildly popular due to its pandemic response, even if that popularity took a hit during the Delta lockdowns last year. But this year, the nation having finally reached the Covid crossroads, the government’s handling of the pandemic has increasingly come into question.

Polling shows 44.3% of the population believe the government hasn’t prepared well enough for the Omicron outbreak, and the net number of those who feel the country is heading in the right direction has decreased from 15% in January to 1% this month. And the opposition National Party — under a new leader, former businessman Christopher Luxton — has been zeroing in on the government’s shortcomings, and is being rewarded for it in the polls.

Meanwhile, a “Freedom Convoy” made its way across the country, arriving in the capital last week and blockading the streets outside Parliament. One of many demonstrations inspired by the Ottawa truckers, it demands an end to vaccine mandates and Covid restrictions. New Zealand requires workers in a wide array of industries to be vaccinated, including in health, education and police and emergency services, as well as — crucially — workers in ‘close-proximity’ businesses that require a vaccination pass for customers to attend, such as hospitality, events and gyms. Estimates suggest that this could include up to 70% of the total workforce, with bosses having the power to sack workers if they refuse to get vaccinated.

In this context, the protesters insist they will continue their occupation until the mandate is removed, and restrictions eased. They include a very diverse range of people, often with wildly contrasting politics. What unites them is their growing marginalisation from everyday life as vaccine mandates create a two-tier society.

Unsurprisingly, the response from the government — and the wider political class — has been one of disdain. Politicians from the main parties refuse to meet with the protesters, labelling them violent and anti-social, and dismissing any discussion of their demands. (While there have been instances of abusive and violent behaviour, for the most part the protests have been peaceful.)

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The parliamentary authorities have resorted to underhand tactics to disperse them, turning on sprinklers, and blasting loud music — strategically, the greatest hits of Barry Manilow — to wear them down. With ridicule failing to do the trick, the government is turning to repression: police have attempted to clear the camp and arrested more than 120 people. Even the army was called in to remove the protesters’ vehicles. Yet the protestors remain.

While local residents have little time for the protests, a recent poll found that 30% of the population support them — which creates another dilemma for the government. Having already dismissed them as beyond the pale, it is unlikely to backtrack. But a violent crackdown to remove them will further marginalise a large portion of the electorate.

In short, New Zealand’s once oh-so-cohesive Covid policy is falling apart. And as disenchantment grows, its government could soon find itself overwhelmed by a crisis of a very different order.

Something similar applies to a story unfolding here in Hong Kong. It too involves dozens of senior officials ignoring the advice of their own government by going to a party — although many of the details reveal the differences between the two approaches to Covid.

The basic facts are straightforward. With Hong Kong on the brink of its fifth Covid wave, the Government this month advised people to avoid large gatherings. Yet last week, dozens of government officials and politicians instead went to a birthday party in a tapas restaurant, hosted by Witman Hung, Hong Kong’s delegate to the National People’s Congress. Estimates of the number of people present vary — and indeed, keep climbing as more information seeps out — but more than 200 seem to have been involved at various points in the evening.

A few days later, one of the women at the party then tested positive for Covid.

If you are a close contact of a known Covid case in Hong Kong, you don’t get pinged and asked to stay at home for a bit. Instead, you are taken off to a room in a quarantine centre for up to three weeks. It is common to see these rooms described as spartan or like being in prison, albeit by people who have never been to prison and wouldn’t have lasted long in Sparta — but they are not the Mandarin Oriental and three weeks stuck in a single room is far from pleasant.

This policy is stern and unbending. Currently sitting in quarantine, for example, are a class of kindergarten kids, aged three and four. Even contacts of close contacts have found themselves locked up, albeit it for shorter periods, while they are tested.

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The result is that multiple members of the Government, including the home affairs secretary, the head of immigration chief, and the secretary for financial services, now find themselves in quarantine. Others escaped by being able to prove they left the party before the Covid case turned up — although at one point, when a second case was identified, it looked as everyone might get locked up, only for the second case to turn out to be a false positive.

A key difference between the stories in the UK and Hong Kong is that the Chief Executive Carrie Lam wasn’t at this party and moved swiftly to distance herself from those present, in an event one Hong Kong observer referred to as the Night of the Long Ibérico Ham Knives. To paraphrase Jeremy Thorpe, when Harold Macmillan defenestrated multiple colleagues in an attempt to save his own political skin: greater love hath no woman than this, that she lay down her friends for her life.

It is not that those attending Witman’s party had necessarily broken any laws, although things are a bit murky as to whether everyone had been entirely on it when it came to using the tracing app required to enter restaurants. But they had all gone against their own government’s clear advice.

And then there’s the public reaction. The overwhelming response of the public to the various Downing Street beanos has been anger at the hypocrisy of politicians who appear to have been behaving in a way that they were preventing others from doing. All those people who couldn’t visit a dying parent — and, as one of this group, here I declare an interest — look askance at politicians going on the razz.

In Hong Kong, there is anger at the behaviour of their politicians, but it is mixed with massive dollops of schadenfreude. By European standards, Hong Kong’s fifth ‘wave’ is less of a wave and more of a millpond. It has involved fewer than 50 cases thus far. In a territory of more than seven million people, one of them just happened to attend a party containing many of its most senior political figures; of all the tapas restaurants in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.

Depending on your point of view this is either a sign of how unlucky the politicos were or, and this seems to be the view taken by many of the people I speak to, it proves that that there is indeed a God. Because it is, bluntly, hugely enjoyable to see people who have inflicted such heavy-handed measures on the population hoist by their own petard like this, especially when not all of them have handled their incarceration with grace and dignity.

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As an example of how heavy handed it is, consider this. At the same time as the Witman story unfolded, a four-year old girl tested positive for Covid — and was put on her own in an isolation room in hospital, with a bell to ring should she need anything. Somehow, and because she was bored or terrified or lonely, she managed to escape. When she was spotted, maskless, outside of her room, she was sent back in, for what could be weeks of isolation, while the two staff who found her were themselves carted off to quarantine. In almost any other place in the world, isolating children like this would be a huge story; in Hong Kong it has somehow become accepted as normal. It, and the many other restrictions in place here, are not normal.

The flipside of how easily we understand some scandals is that sometimes we fail to comprehend the more complicated, duller, but maybe more serious issues. And however enjoyable the Witman scandal is, there is a danger that it all distracts from the broader points about Hong Kong’s record of dealing with Covid.

The cautious approach that initially served it well is now crippling it. The death rate remains staggeringly low relative to the rest of the world; per capita, the UK’s death rate is 78 times higher. But this policy is becoming increasingly unsustainable, the measures required increasingly harsh. What once advertised itself as ‘Asia’s global city’ is becoming ever more isolated. Multiple travels bans are in place; even of those who can fly in, most have to spend three weeks in quarantine. Hong Kong’s airport is now a ghost town, save for the families leaving. The goal of reopening the border with the mainland — which Lam and others see as their priority — appears no closer to fruition either.

The vaccination programme has been a disaster. Despite ample resourcing and availability, fewer than a fifth of the over-80s are vaccinated. The Government’s approach to driving up the vaccination rate has been woefully hands-off, wasting months when the city was effectively Covid-free which could have been used for a vaccination drive.

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The result has been that the handful of cases seen since January have led to a widespread reintroduction of restrictions, including, as I write this, the suspension of face-to-face teaching in primary schools. This will be the third time since Covid began that primary teaching will have been suspended. (All local schools, including secondaries, were anyway still not back to full face-to-face teaching anyway, even two years into the pandemic.) Announcing the closure of schools, Lam said that she didn’t want to see young children sent into quarantine; that there may be other ways of dealing with this appears not to have occurred to anyone.

The inter-generational tensions caused by Covid are evident all around the globe, with the young, mostly safe, forced to undergo restrictions to protect the more elderly. But nowhere is this issue starker than in Hong Kong, where the youngest are again being punished to protect an elderly population that has done next to nothing to protect themselves — and by a government that has also done next to nothing to make them protect themselves. This, rather than a piss-up in a tapas restaurant, is the real scandal.

The mood is a far cry from the breathless commentary during the first 18 months of the pandemic, when New Zealand was held up as an extraordinary case of pandemic management, contrasted with the disasters in Europe, the UK and US. Indeed, the country’s tough border closures, skilful contact tracing, tough lockdown restrictions, commitment to Zero Covid and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s empathic and inclusive leadership were lauded as a model for the rest of the world.

And yet, contrary to ill-informed hot takes half a world away, New Zealand’s approach had its merits. Following an initial lockdown last year, the country recorded only 1,500 cases and 22 deaths from Covid-19, and succeeded in eliminating the virus in the community. Importantly, this was achieved without significant restrictions on individual liberties or substantial cost to the economy. While the rest of the world has spent the past two years in crisis, New Zealanders have lived remarkably normal lives. Undoubtedly, there was some luck involved, given New Zealand’s isolation from the rest of the world. But, as its neighbour Australia illustrated, isolation is no guarantee of success.

However, this New Zealand model came with two important caveats. First, the cost of normality enjoyed by citizens at home was paid for by its citizens abroad. The country’s harsh border regime, which allocated a limited number of places in a 14-day hotel quarantine system, meant that thousands were stranded abroad, unable to return home, often left facing destitution. Likewise, while the economy thrived, the cost was borne by the tourism industry — 18% of the economy — whose reliance on international visitors left it on the verge of collapse.

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Secondly, the New Zealand model could never be sustained long-term, once it became clear that global elimination of the virus was unlikely. As such, there was a need for an exit strategy, which seemed to centre on vaccinating the whole population before the virus got in. This was always a gamble and a race against time; one which Ardern lost this August, when a cautious re-opening of the border to Australia led to the arrival of the Delta variant, and sparked a new outbreak.

Despite the fact no country had managed to eliminate Delta, the Government reverted to its tried and tested approach, closing the limited openings at the border, announcing a snap lockdown, and re-committing to eliminating the virus. But this time, it didn’t work.

While the outbreak was contained to Auckland, the key pillars of New Zealand’s model — contact tracing and tough lockdown restrictions severely curtailing people’s movements — proved no match for the infectiousness of the Delta strain. Case numbers refused to budge, totalling more than 8,400 for the current outbreak, while deaths have nearly doubled to 43. Admitting defeat, the Government formally abandoned elimination as a strategy in October. Nevertheless, Auckland’s “snap lockdown” — meant to last for two weeks — has now dragged on for over 100 days, with predictable consequences for children’s schooling, mental health and the economy.

While the situation still compares very favourably to many parts of the world, New Zealand’s sheen has started to come off. Contrary to its claims of exceptionalism, throughout the current Delta outbreak, it has shown itself to be a normal country just like every other: faced with the same dilemmas, failures, trade-offs and divisions when it comes to dealing with the pandemic. What’s more, it hasn’t necessarily dealt with them any better.

Take vaccination. One consequence of the New Zealand model was complacency when it came to the roll-out, with many convinced that the country could take its time while the pandemic raged elsewhere. As a result, less than 20% of the population was fully vaccinated when Delta arrived in August, leaving it unprepared for the outbreak. In response, the government tied the lifting of lockdowns to the vaccination rate, setting a very high target of 90% before restrictions would be eased.

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Still, while this was eventually abandoned, 86% of New Zealanders are now double-jabbed, making it one of the most vaccinated countries in the world. As we also saw in Australia, nothing concentrates the mind when it comes to vaccinations like a prolonged lockdown.

This is not to say that the issue hasn’t been divisive. Behind the high overall rates, there remain significant pockets of unvaccinated people in New Zealand, especially in the regions, and among the indigenous Maori population. Higher rates of poverty and disadvantage, and low levels of trust in the Government mean that only 68% of Maori are fully vaccinated, despite repeated efforts to roll out culturally specific and targeted programmes.

Meanwhile, the high rates of poor health outcomes have left the Maori more vulnerable to the virus, leading to demands that any re-opening be delayed until vaccination rates exceed the rest of the country. The Maori Party has been warning of a “modern genocide” if lockdowns are lifted while the virus remains in the community, with some local iwi (tribes) threatening to set up roadblocks to keep Aucklanders from visiting their regions once freedom of travel is restored.

More broadly, despite the high vaccination rates, the Government has not shied from introducing controversial vaccine mandates. With the country slowly opening up, Ardern has described vaccination as “the golden ticket to freedom“, requiring vaccine passes to enter most workplaces, hospitality, retail and entertainment venues. At the moment, unvaccinated people can do little more than shop for essentials, creating a two-tier society and sparking bitter conflicts. The Government has doubled down, stressing the mandate will continue into next year, and showing little sympathy for the unvaccinated minority.

This, in turn, has sparked protests for the first time in the pandemic. When the current outbreak started, commentators mocked a lone demonstrator at an anti-lockdown protest in Auckland. Since then, crowds have grown, with thousands recently marching across the country against lockdowns and the vaccine mandates. While they have not matched the numbers or violence recently seen in Europe, these protests bring together a similar constellation of far-Right agitators, conspiracy theorists, wellness gurus and ordinary citizens increasingly marginalised and excluded from society. It’s part of a wider fragmentation taking hold in the country, with support for the Government’s handling of the pandemic dropping from 80% to 46%. Ardern’s personal popularity has also declined to 34%, while more people now think the country is heading in the wrong direction for the first time since 2008.

This is a far cry from the ‘Team of Five Million’ approach championed by the Government in the first 18 months of the pandemic. And Ardern seems fully aware of this: the Government recently rushed through new laws to lock in many of the draconian restrictions on the unvaccinated, bypassing the usual means of oversight and scrutiny, in a move labelled “a constitutional disgrace” by legal experts.

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In short, over the course of the past four months, many of the key features of New Zealand’s pandemic response have been found wanting. Yet old habits die hard. While the rest of the world has largely opened up and travel has begun to stage a comeback, New Zealand’s plan for reopening its borders announced last week remains extremely cautious.

Fully vaccinated citizens will only be able to return from Australia from mid-January, provided that they quarantine at home for seven days. This will be extended to other countries in mid-February, while foreign nationals will not be allowed to enter until the end of next April. There is no detail yet on how long the seven-day quarantine requirement will remain in place, and the tourism sector has reacted with dismay, describing the plan as a “body blow” that will delay its recovery until 2023. For a country approaching a 90% vaccination rate, this seems needlessly restrictive, a relic of the Zero Covid mentality, rather than the long-promised exit strategy.

And this was before the emergence of the new Omicron variant. Here, New Zealand has been depressingly ordinary, following many other countries in shutting the border to non-citizens from the nine ‘high risk’ countries in southern Africa, and holding out the possibility of delaying the border reopening plan. While labelled as ‘temporary’ and intended to buy time to learn more about the new variant, this response highlights the continuing reluctance to finally begin living with Covid.

As the pandemic enters its third year, New Zealand might end up with the worst of both worlds: facing the same problems as everyone else, but persisting with an unsustainable Zero Covid approach to them.

That was the premise of EM Forster’s science fiction novella The Machine Stops. Like all good sci-fi, the story can be read in multiple ways. But for me the key thing is what happens when the machine begins, slowly but ineluctably, to break down. Trivially to begin with — strange noises, the wrong music, smelly bath water — but then things begin to get more serious when the food starts to go off, and eventually the machine collapses and everyone is killed.

Yet until it’s too late, these flaws do not make people challenge the machine or wonder whether they might in fact be better off living on the surface of the earth. Although each flaw is resented at first, people just get used to them and begin to think them normal. “Time passed,” Forster wrote, “and they resented the defects no longer. The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that latter day had become so subservient, that they readily adapted themselves to every caprice of the Machine”.

I confess to not having given the story much thought since I studied it back in school, decades ago. But it has clearly been lurking somewhere deep in my memory — because all it took for it to leap out from the subconscious was the right cue.

It turned out that the right cue was Professor Sophia Chan Siu-chee. Professor Chan is Hong Kong’s Secretary for Food and Health, with responsibility for many of its Covid restrictions, and so for those of us living here she is a figure of some import. She is firmly of the Safety First, Can’t Be Too Careful school of thought, to the point where she makes Chris Whitty look like an especially rabid anti-vaxxer.

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This approach served Hong Kong well in the early days of the pandemic. Moving swiftly, and encouraged by most of the population who often urged the Government to take more drastic action, Hong Kong has managed to avoid both mass outbreaks and any large-scale full lockdowns of the sort seen in the UK. The Covid death toll here stands at just 213 — fewer than died from SARS — and there now hasn’t been a locally transmitted case for over a month.

Faced with the choice between remaining Asia’s World City or prioritising Our Friends in the North, it has now chosen the latter, aiming for a zero Covid policy and hoping that the border with the mainland will open again soon. This has resulted in some of the tightest travel restrictions in the world – 21 days in a quarantine hotel for someone from the UK, for example, even if fully vaccinated. In turn, this has had a disastrous impact on the vaccination programme. Vaccines are freely and easily available, but uptake has been slow, with the most vulnerable being the least likely to have been jabbed. The figure for the over-80s vaccinated is still below 20%: when you’ve got zero Covid, and if you don’t want to travel anywhere, why bother?

Yet however frustrating some of this might be — and however much we might wonder if this is sustainable — these are all legitimate policy choices. Given the mainland’s own zero Covid policy, and the importance of cross-border traffic, it’s difficult to see what Hong Kong could really do. Plus, however much pain this causes many foreigners and others with relatives overseas, there’s little doubt that it is popular within the wider population.

All this I can cope with, just about. But last month, Professor Chan claimed that in Hong Kong there is now “local normalcy” — and it was this that provoked my Forster flashback.

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She was trying to argue that however grim the quarantine rules might be, life once here is fine and dandy. This might strike you as a bit “apart from that Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”, but you can at least see her point: if they allow normal life to continue, maybe it’s possible to justify very strict travel restrictions.

Yet life is clearly not normal in Hong Kong, even if we just confine ourselves to the restrictions brought about by Covid. Rather, Chan’s claim is one of the best examples of the ratchet effect in public policy I’ve seen for ages.

Let’s just take just the things that affect me on an almost daily basis. Mask wearing is compulsory in public, for everyone, even when outdoors. There are limits on group gatherings, with still no more than four people allowed to gather outdoors (although unlike in the UK, say, there has never been any limits on private gatherings). Table sittings in restaurants are also restricted, usually to four, although some places are allowed to go really wild up to six, depending on the extent of staff vaccinations. Tracking entry and exit via an app into any public building or restaurant is compulsory.

Most schools are still not back to full-day provision, even though pupils are now in their sixth term of disrupted schooling, and even when at school there are innumerable restrictions on what they can do. Meanwhile, at home, there is routine compulsory testing of areas or groups. These can involve locking down whole blocks with no warning — so-called “ambushes” — even with the possibility of breaking into your home if you don’t answer the door.

And hovering above it all is the ever-present threat of being carted off to a government quarantine centre. Should one of your close contacts tests positive, there’s none of the would-you-mind-awfully-staying-at-home-please attitude here. Instead, you get picked up, with almost no notice, and chucked in a room in a quarantine centre for up to three weeks, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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If you actually have Covid, you are taken into hospital. There is little care for family separation, as with the children taken away from their parents — or the breastfeeding mother separated from her four month old baby, despite the child being unable to take formula milk. (That one was solved only because women donated spare pumped breast milk).

It is common to see praise in the West for how countries like Hong Kong have managed track, trace, and isolate programmes, without being aware of what the reality of the isolate bit often means. We have a bag ready, by the front door, packed with emergency provisions, just in case the guys and gals in Hazmat suits come knocking.

These examples are illustrative, not exhaustive. Everyone in Hong Kong could list others. And remember: these are the restrictions currently in place with the Covid stats down to zero.

Just as when Forster’s machine starts to break down, some of this might be considered fairly trivial, but some of it is not. Some of it may even be justified in the short or medium term. But none of it is normal, and we should not let politicians — in Hong Kong or elsewhere — ever tell us otherwise.

In short, New Zealand’s latest outbreak has merely reinforced pre-existing convictions on both sides of the Zero Covid argument.

But the reality is more complex. While New Zealand has pursued an aggressive elimination strategy, it has — until now — worked, and at relatively low political, economic and social costs. Indeed, the more urgent question now is whether the country’s relative success has lulled it into a sense of complacency, and left it lacking an exit strategy once the pandemic subsides.

Over the past eighteen months, New Zealand has been one of very few countries committed to elimination rather than suppression, with Ardern declaring she wouldn’t put the lives of citizens at risk by trying to live with the virus. The decision was hailed as proof of her leadership driven by empathy and compassion, in stark contrast with the “let it rip” approaches of Johnson or Trump.

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However, while it certainly complemented Ardern’s brand, in reality her commitment was driven by the cold reality of a woefully unprepared health system — gutted by decades of austerity — which would struggle to manage even a low number of cases. A March 2020 audit found New Zealand only had 221 ICU beds for a population of 5 million, while its testing and track and tracing capacity was deemed inadequate.

It was in this context that the Government announced a strict “Level 4” lockdown on 25 March 2020, which closed almost all retail, hospitality and education settings, banned public gatherings, limited the reasons for leaving home and closed the international border to everyone but returning citizens and permanent residents who had to quarantine. Despite being draconian, these restrictions succeeded in eliminating Covid-19 in the country; by 8 June the lockdown ended, with effectively all restrictions being lifted, except for closed borders. In total, New Zealand experienced 1,504 cases of Covid and 22 deaths between February and June 2020. (The UK experienced 4,432 Covid deaths in March alone.)

Having achieved elimination, New Zealand doubled down, vowing to swiftly respond to any future outbreaks with snap lockdowns. It was a wildly popular decision, with Ardern re-elected in a landslide in October, and 75% supporting the government’s strategy as recently as July 2021.

The reasons for this are not hard to understand. Unlike Australia’s disastrous hotel quarantine system, which has resulted in more than 20 instances of the virus leaking into the community, New Zealand has seen limited breaches, which were quickly contained. As a result, since June 2020, there have only been two brief lockdowns in Auckland, the largest city. Indeed, for the past 16 months, New Zealanders have been living remarkably normal lives; while the British recently rejoiced at “Freedom Day” by flooding pubs, restaurants and football matches, New Zealanders have been enjoying these liberties for over a year.

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Similarly, the economic costs of Zero Covid have been relatively low so far. While the initial lockdown initially led to a drastic 11% decline of GDP, a generous wage subsidy scheme prevented job losses and growth rebounded 14.1% the following quarter. Admittedly, the recovery has been uneven, with the tourism sector — accounting for 18% of the economy — hit particularly hard by border closures. Nevertheless, with unemployment at 4% and debt-to-GDP ratio of 33%, the country’s economic performance compares favourably with most other nations.

So it seems that New Zealand’s commitment to elimination so far has been less “a never-ending nightmare” than an understandable policy with overall low costs. But that doesn’t mean that the country is out of the woods. For ultimately, the issue with Zero Covid is the need for an exit strategy — and this is where the current outbreak has exposed NZ.

On paper, the most obvious exit strategy from Zero Covid is for the whole world to follow it, eliminating the virus once and for all. But the fact that the vast majority of countries have deemed this unfeasible has left New Zealand vulnerable. After all, elimination in one country is not viable in the long term without total isolation from the rest of the world.

The other exit strategy is vaccination. Yet here, New Zealand has stumbled, with only 19.79% of the population fully vaccinated, leaving it second-last in the OECD. The main issue has been complacency. With Covid eliminated, vaccination has not been a burning priority. This resulted in not only the Government setting low vaccination targets that it then crowed about meeting, but among the population only 40% gave any thoughts to vaccination in July. Splendidly isolated in their own little bubble, New Zealanders convinced themselves that the pandemic was happening elsewhere, and did little to prepare for its return. ICU, capacity, for example, has only been increased by 63 beds since March last year, and less than two weeks ago, experts warned a Delta outbreak would risk collapsing the health system.

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By Matthew Crawford

Now that the Delta strain has arrived, however, the folly of this complacent strategy has been exposed. As other countries have found, measures that worked in crushing the virus last year struggle with its more infectious variant. Cases have grown every day, and the lockdown has already been extended to two weeks, while experts gloomily proclaim the country is on “a knife edge”.

What this means for NZ’s commitment to elimination remains to be seen. If the Government gets on top of the outbreak, faith in Zero Covid will persist, bolstered by proof of succeeding where no other countries have with Delta. But this will only reinforce complacency, meaning underlying structural issues will remain unaddressed. Once the country finally does start to open to the world again, these will come to the fore; if Covid returns, lockdowns will once again be a tempting proposition, even with high vaccination coverage. Whether the population will remain tolerant of these remains an open question.

If, on the other hand, the lockdown extends into months, the low-cost nature of elimination will come to be questioned, especially as previous successes recede from view, while the rest of the world moves on from the virus. As Australia shows, overconfidence can quickly give way to recriminations once an elimination strategy leads to a never-ending spiral of lockdowns. In this case, New Zealand may find that Zero Covid is a dead end, from which there is no easy way out.

It could be that Arden’s government is starting to realise this. While committed to stamping out the current outbreak, its Covid-19 Response Minister has conceded that the highly infectious nature of Delta raises “big questions” about the strategy, and that “at some point, we will have to be more open in the future”. Whether a government which has so explicitly nailed its colours to Zero Covid can execute such a pivot remains to be seen.

Husband and wife Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley did most of the research for Until Proven Safe before the Covid-19 pandemic struck. Perhaps they felt strangely lucky, then, as the world descended into the current age of lockdowns and self-isolation, their study of “the history and future of quarantine” taking on a sharp new relevance.

Reading the book, there’s a case to be made that the just-to-be-sure quarantining began in fourteenth-century Dubrovnik, where travellers from areas known to be infested with the Black Death weren’t allowed to enter the walled city until they’d spent a month on a nearby small island. Similar schemes were adopted for maritime visitors to Venice, where you can still visit the lazarettos — quarantine hospitals — that were built especially for this purpose. Even lacking the germ theory of disease, the powers-that-be in these ancient cities intuited that separating was a way of protecting.

In the modern era, with a much better understanding of germs, we sometimes quarantine humans when we don’t really believe it’s necessary: recall the famous photo of the Apollo 11 astronauts, having just returned from their successful moon landing, meeting Richard Nixon from behind a window in a sealed metal box. They were quarantined for three weeks just in case they’d brought back some unknown alien pathogen from the moon — even though it was strongly suspected that (as we now know) the surface of the moon was sterile, and no such pathogens existed.

We’ve been less strict when it comes to the animal kingdom, where we can see some of the most drastic consequences of not quarantining playing out. Think of the episode of The Simpsons where Bart sneaks his pet bullfrog into Australia, whereupon it promptly escapes, reproduces, and devastates all the crops in the country. Manaugh and Twilley remind the reader of the UK’s terrible foot-and-mouth disease crisis in 2001, which originated in pigs who had been fed illegally imported pork from Asia. They also describe how Florida’s citrus industry has been in decline for years due in large part to the insect pest known as the psyllid. Only extremely strict quarantine of incoming plants by the state of California has stopped something similar happening to its famous oranges.

And remember the “friendship tree” that Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron planted on the White House lawn in 2018? Being from France, its roots were specially wrapped in plastic so as not to spread anything nasty to the US — and it was immediately dug up and sent for a two-year quarantine as soon as the cameras were switched off. (In a definitely-not-metaphorical development, it died before it was returned).

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Does Long Covid really exist?

By Stuart Ritchie

It might seem to be stretching the term, but we quarantine some non-living objects, too: containers of radioactive waste are “quarantined” deep underground until they’re no longer dangerous. That, as Manaugh and Twilley explain, might be a very long time — long enough that scientists have tried to develop universal signs and symbols to communicate with civilisations thousands of years in the future who might have languages very different from our own: “there is bad stuff here – it is dangerous”.

So, animal, vegetable, and mineral: we routinely quarantine them all. Until Proven Safe argues that quarantine is a fundamental part of how societies deal with uncertainty. The lazaretto, the quarantine greenhouse and the concreted-over mine facility full of radioactive waste are, as the authors put it, “what results when abstract arguments over risk are given architectural form” — our best attempts at seeking the certainty we so badly need in the face of terrifying, and sometimes existential, dangers.

But the book left me with one massive unanswered question. If quarantine is such a well-understood process, with such a long history, how come we fumbled it so badly during Covid-19?

The will-they-won’t-they history of the UK Government’s decisions about border quarantine is recounted in a long document by the Home Affairs Select Committee from August 2020. As the disease began to spread outside of China in February last year, our government put in place some relatively light measures: those who had been in Wuhan, Iran or some parts of South Korea were asked nicely to stay at home after arrival at a UK airport, even if asymptomatic; those who had been in Northern Italy or a few other locations where cases had been found did “not need to undertake any special measures” unless they had symptoms. Even though there was to be no UK lazaretto, at least there was a gesture towards keeping incoming high-risk guests apart from the population at large.

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The Covid dissidents taking on China

By Ian Birrell

Then, on 13 March, this advice was completely dropped. As the outbreak began to spread into Europe, our government decided to remove some of its advice for border quarantines. As a Select Committee report five months later put it: “The decision to lift all Covid-19-related guidance for international arrivals on 13 March, just as other countries were expanding their border measures, is inexplicable.”

It would be 10 days until the first lockdown began in the UK — ten days in which thousands of people with Covid-19 entered the country and wouldn’t have had to isolate at home (as everyone would, when lockdown later came in), and certainly wouldn’t have to be tested as they arrived at the border. Even after lockdown began, there wasn’t the slightest question of us instituting a mandatory quarantine, despite other countries at the same time requiring incoming travellers, few though there were by this time, to stay locked in a hotel or other special facility for periods of as many as 21 days (that being, at one point, the length of the mandatory quarantine in Hong Kong). Incredibly, the UK only began a mandatory hotel-based quarantine on 15 February 2021 — and only for some countries — more than a full year since the first Covid case arrived on our shores.

Calling the decision inexplicable is understandable. But let’s try to explain it. Perhaps some thought that, since border measures like quarantine wouldn’t stop all cases, they weren’t worth instituting. This all-or-nothing argument has certainly been made in other contexts — for masks or even vaccines — and it betrays a magic-bullet mentality: defeating a contagious disease takes a lot of different measures, none of which will ever be 100% effective. Manaugh and Twilley note the irony that if a quarantine works — if it stops disease transmission — then it will in retrospect be seen as an overreaction.

Was quarantine thought to be a bit too disruptive, a bit too difficult, to institute? Perhaps, though of course we did eventually end up instituting it, and if the story of vaccines has shown us anything, it’s that we can move mountains to get something done if we feel we really have to.

Were some scientific advisers, and perhaps politicians, unable to decouple the idea of border quarantine (or indeed travel bans) from politically-unpalatable views in their minds? The authors of Until Proven Safe do note the political angle: treating foreigners, immigrants, or refugees as if they were carriers of disease (or were a disease themselves) has been the preserve of authoritarian, racist, populist leaders. Could an innate aversion to being like those bad people have skewed the experts’ judgement?

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How the experts messed up on Covid

By Stuart Ritchie

There is some evidence for this, with Sage fretting early in the pandemic that border measures would need to be “draconian” to hold back the spread — a choice of words that clearly indicated disapproval. In fact, those measures may have been the proverbial stitch in time that would’ve saved, well, a lot of lives — and to draw comparison between actions taken during a pandemic emergency and those in “normal” times is irrational in any case.

Or maybe there’s an even more disturbing explanation: that quarantines weren’t instituted because, at the start of the crisis, the UK’s scientific advisers thought it would be a good thing if as many people as possible caught the disease. The idea that a strong quarantine system could render the “herd immunity” plan unnecessary doesn’t seem to have occurred, even though it did to policymakers in Hong Kong, New Zealand and elsewhere.

In any case, few of the lessons from history described in Until Proven Safe were applied during the history we’ve just lived through. The simple idea that “keeping people in quarantine, even if you’re not sure they’re infected, helps to hold back a contagious disease” seems to have been lost in the morass of counter-intuitive thinking that swirled around the start of the pandemic.

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Are we free on Freedom Day?

By Ed West

Maybe we can learn the lessons for next time: what of the future of quarantine? Manaugh and Twilley say that it might not look like quarantine at all. They discuss DARPA’s Prometheus project, where the idea is to develop a way of predicting whether someone, once infected with a disease, will be contagious. One of the nastiest things about Covid is, of course, that people can still spread the disease before seeing any symptoms — if they get symptoms at all. Such a system could help us pinpoint the people who need to be isolated — and would, to return to the theme, help reduce a big source of uncertainty.

But anyone who’s had a visit to the pub cancelled because of the UK’s “pingdemic” should know that technological solutions are wont to go awry; we can predict endless angry debate over the rate of false-positives and false-negatives from a Prometheus-like system should it ever come to be used. Far from putting all our eggs in technology’s basket, we should be open to the central point of Until Proven Safe: although the low-tech idea of setting possibly-contagious people apart could be made more effective, more equitable, and more humane — we wouldn’t have a history so full of quarantine if it didn’t really work.

As soon as it safe I will be boarding a train to North East England where I will rush to my mum and dad and wrap my arms around them both. We would have been going on holiday next month and spending precious days together.

I moved away from home when I was just 16 years old, looking for jobs and opportunities to get involved in feminism. It meant sacrificing time with my beautiful mother and missing out on so much that we could have done together as I approached adulthood. But Maureen, my mum, encouraged me to live life to the full, partly because so many opportunities, as a working-class woman, had been denied to her.

Over the years I haven’t seen my family as much as I have wanted. We are all very close, and everybody but me and my niece still live in the North East. Not only did my mum encourage me, despite the sacrifice to her, to fly the nest, she also started to bring my niece Jo to London to visit every year from the age of seven. Maureen knew it would mean eventually saying goodbye to Jo, but she wanted her to have better opportunities than the North East can offer.

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The Yorkshire Ripper fired up my feminism

By Julie Bindel

The last two years we have spent Christmas together in London, but my dad is disabled and travel is difficult for him. I have long been wanting to spend more time with them, but something always got in the way. Whether it’s a long-haul trip to investigate violence against women, or another book that takes up my time and energy, that time was often on hold. It won’t ever be again.

I don’t mean this to be sentimental, but if I have any regrets it is not spending as much time with my mum in particular. We have had some wonderful times though: I took her to Paris for lunch for her 79th birthday. It was her first ever trip to the city. For another birthday I treated her to a trolley dash around TK Maxx and afterwards a tapas lunch where we examined her swag.

I already knew how much I love my family well before the pandemic, but it has made me realise how precious time is. In the future, my work trips and book deadlines will come second to my family.

Go to a restaurant
Sam Leith

“When this lousy plague is over,” to adapt the First World War song of complaint, “No more lockdown food for me./ When the restaurants re-open, oh, how happy I shall be!/ For bland, thrice weekly pesto pasta, coronavirus thanks a bunch./ As soon as real life makes a comeback, friends, I’m going out to lunch.”

Already, only three weeks into lockdown, the diet is grinding me down. We’re eating hearty whole-family stews of panic-bought pulses and bland, thrifty, carb-heavy meals made of easily available ingredients and designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, aka my culinary fusspot of a six-year-old.

The house is a miasma of sloth and fart gas, table manners are chimp-style and the conversation — mostly centering around the weekly appearance of the Beano — makes up in volume for what it lacks in interest. And the cooking, the wiping, the clingfilming, the drying, the hoovering…

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The joyful anachronism of kid lit

By Sam Leith

I shall never again take for granted the utter pleasure of choosing your own meal, in an environment where someone else does all the work: a meal where deep frying is expertly done and won’t burn down your house, interesting spices and unusual flavour combinations abound, and where you can linger past three o’clock, if you’re on the skive, in good company and with a glass of something in your hand.

Imagine a sushi splurge at Nobu! A plate of mince on dripping toast from the Quality Chop House, garnished with peppery watercress! A battery of crispy duck or salty chilli rice in a Chinese joint! A bellyful of K-Pop burger and Sichuan aubergine at Chick n’ Sours! Hell, at this stage I’d gratefully settle for a ginger chicken udon from Wagamama or an American Hot from Pizza Express.

With the likely and probably irrecoverable collapse of much of the restaurant industry, I realise with a pang that many of those places simply won’t be there when we emerge. To extend the analogy, it’ll be like coming home from war to find that your wife has run off with the postman while you were at the front, and that your mistress got bombed to bits in the Blitz. How I regret, now, every Pret sandwich drearily munched al desko: a never-to-return opportunity missed.

But as a matter of morale maintenance and selfless service to the recovery of the economy, I intend to lunch like mad. Friends — sorry, important business contacts…. — who’s up for it?

Return to Venice
Tanya Gold

When it is over, I want to go to Venice, to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, near San Toma vaporetto stop. I would like to go the whole way by water, from Penzance to Venice. I have been going to Venice since I was 17, at least once every two years, and I am enthralled by it, probably because it is preposterous, as people are preposterous. It’s a stupid place to build a city, especially a city filled with great art, and I find that touching. We make wars and genocides and plagues, but we also make this. We are strange.

Venice is a mistake: the people who became the Venetians ran away from the tribes pouring into Italy when the Empire collapsed, hid on sandbanks and, due to luck and situation, grew rich.

And, in this city of wonder — this paradigm, this error — the Scuola is the loveliest thing I have found. It is an early sixteenth century building of two stories in the classical style. It was a meeting place for wealthy Venetians, built in gratitude for surviving plague, and dedicated to Saint Roch, who offered protection from plague.  It is small for a Venetian public building and quite remote. Most tourists, stuck on the track from St Mark’s to the Rialto Bridge, do not find it.

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Woody Allen's brilliant betrayal

By Tanya Gold

They should: it is filled with paintings by Jacopo Tintoretto. If you have not heard of him — for me, the painter of the Italian Renaissance — it is because his masterpiece is a room in an idle corner of Venice and cannot be moved to Paris or New York for exhibition. Most people call Titian the master — Charles V once knelt to pick up his paintbrush — and Tintoretto was apprenticed to him for a few days, then left to teach himself. Titian’s Assumption is in the Basilica dei Frari next door, and it is perfect. It is too perfect. Tintoretto is more grandiose and thrilling. His nickname was The Furious.

You walk up the stairs, and they are here, on every wall and ceiling. The room is shuttered and dim; the floor is polished. They seem to glow and throb, as if the bright paint is still wet: Jacob’s Ladder; God Appears to Moses; The Pillar of Fire.

There cannot be a more astounding room anywhere. If art is consolation — and this is consolation specifically from plague — there cannot be more of it than this.

Stay at home
Justin Webb

Well I’m not going near the Maldives, I can tell you that for free. The world — When This Thing Is Over — is going to be doing, with knobs on, all the things we currently read are gone forever. My kids are already fretting about the purchase of new phone cases from Wuhan so all that piffle about No More World Trade will probably amount to not much, and of course for all the talk of hearth and home travel to exotic places will spike.

Not for me. I may go to Bath for the day and watch a rugby match under the floodlights at the Recreation Ground, with the Abbey for backdrop and the smell of wood-smoke and beery breath on the air. But otherwise actually I quite like this life.

Not, of course, the sadness, the fear about relatives and the knowledge that so many are suffering so much. But as a (lapsed) Quaker I am completely at home with silence and the simple life in which online groceries provide the only clue that we progressed beyond the Neolithic. Well, that and Netflix I suppose.

Anyway: travel is what I do not miss and do not want to do. I shall go nowhere when it is over, and thoroughly enjoy it.

Introduce my children to Old England
Niall Gooch

I can’t wait to get back to dragging my children round old stones in fields.

One chilly afternoon in January, in those far-off days when a disease outbreak in provincial China was the third-listed story in the foreign news section, I was sitting amid the ruins of St Augustine’s Priory in Canterbury with my two small children, trying to explain the Dissolution of the Monasteries. My account must have made some impact: on the train home my three-year-old daughter announced that on Monday she would tell her nursery teacher that Henry VIII was bad because he wouldn’t let people go to Mass.

I don’t know how much they took in at St Augustine’s. They liked the clever animation showing its centuries-long development from simple Romanesque chapel c.600 to vast medieval monastic complex with huge Gothic priory church and one of the finest scriptoriums in Europe. However, they did not seem to share my excitement about the graves of the early archbishops of Canterbury. Perhaps that will come.

Before coronavirus, I had intended the Priory to be the first instalment of a busy year of historical visiting. Having fulfilled the middle-class stereotype and left London for rural Kent in my mid-30s, last autumn I leaned into early middle age and bought an English Heritage membership.

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It's time to reverse the Beeching Axe

By Niall Gooch

We are now within striking range of several important sites, including a Roman fort, and my children are of an age where they can begin to understand Our Island Story. One of the gifts I‘ve always wanted to give them is to know that they are, so to speak, from Somewhere.

I’d like to help them to understand that this is an old country; to know that to be born in England is to be born into a magnificent, sprawling, globally important saga, and a rich heritage of art, architecture, language and landscape. I want them to be able to look at Dover Castle or HMS Victory or a Jacobean manor house and to know that it is in some sense theirs, a part of who they are.

When I tweeted pictures of the children at St Augustine’s, a Twitter friend commented “What a privilege to grow up and play in the midst of such deep history”. That captures my feelings exactly, and I’m looking forward to showing them Old England up close when the current unpleasantness has passed.

Play cricket
Tom Holland

To love cricket is to be as alert to the rhythms of the season as any ancient pagan. The year is divided into two halves: the months of darkness, of grey rain, when leaves lie thick on the outfield, and satellite television, with its sun-baked images of Australia or India, serves the cricket lover as a bonfire once did the celebrants of the winter solstice.

Then, of course, there is summer: six months when the patterning provided by a good fixture list can make life itself seem rich, and vivid, and dappled. To anticipate a match that has been played at the same ground, against the same opposition, on the same date, over many years, is to embrace the joys both of familiarity and the unknown: the reassurance that an English summer will always be an English summer; the promise that this year, rather than getting out for a duck or being hit humiliatingly out of the attack, everything will come together, and all shall be well.

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Plague and the comforts of history

By Tom Holland

Except that this year, of course, things are not going to be well. This year, everything that normally serves to herald the coming season — the warmth of spring sunshine, the song of returning birds, the back pages of a newspaper — serves as a kind of mockery. Authors CC, the team I play for, will not be heading to Wiltshire to play what for years now has been our season’s curtain raiser. Fixtures lovingly inscribed in diaries back in January will slip by unplayed. Our cricket bags will lie untouched in attics. Bats will remain unsheathed, whites unworn, scorebooks unfilled.

Of course, there are palliatives. Authors CC are currently in the midst of a virtual tournament, the Rathbones Cup, organised by the distinguished sportswriter David Owen, which has seen our various teams pitted against each other on WhatsApp.

The matches — which are determined by complex rules that nobody aside from David quite understands, but seem to feature a Gallimard edition of Proust, and can generally be done and dusted in 20 minutes — have us all properly gripped.

Yesterday, I am proud to report, my team of Anglo-Saxons triumphed over a 1990s Hollywood XI. Hengist took five wickets, and Alfred the Great, after catching Winona Ryder in the deep, then sealed victory with a quickfire 87.

It is not cricket — but it gives us a flavour of cricket. This, as clear blue skies look down on empty pitches, is the best we can hope for. A reminder of what has been — and a promise of what, when this hellish time is over, will be all the more precious for having been so very desperately missed.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu
Louise Perry 

When lockdown finally ends, we will presumably be returned to normal life in dribs and drabs, with the most essential activities prioritised over the least. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) classes will, quite rightly, be at the very bottom of the list. This is a form of martial arts that demands intimate physical contact with your opponent — more than once, I’ve had another person’s sweat drip directly into my eyes or mouth — and right now it’s hard to imagine even shaking a stranger’s hand. Nevertheless I’m desperate to get back to a sport that is entirely incompatible with social distancing.

Full disclosure: I am terrible at BJJ. Six months in, I’ve learnt the hard way that strength and fitness will only get you so far. This is less a sport and more a mechanical engineering problem. The task is to work out how to use your strong muscles against your opponent’s weak muscles, and to do so both quickly and surreptitiously, with the goal of making them submit via a chokehold or a joint lock. Every session I get slightly better, but every session I’m humbled by how inept I am.

While I’ve been able to cobble together home gym sessions by taking HIIT classes on Zoom and squatting my grudging 36kg German Shepherd, there really is no way of replicating a BJJ class at home. Other people on my BJJ WhatsApp group (yes, there is such a thing) are desperate enough that they’ve been making ‘grappling dummies’ by stuffing an old gi with rolled up towels and jumpers. But thrashing around with a mannequin is a poor substitute for the real thing, in all its exhausting, joyful, disgusting glory.

Have some time to myself
Polly MacKenzie

I want to be alone. It seems churlish of me, when I know millions of people are struggling with loneliness right now. But loneliness is the one thing I know I’m safe from. There are six people in my household, three of whom are children and therefore have no concept of personal boundaries. The closest I get to isolation is the two metre separation in the queue at the supermarket.

So when this is over I want to go away for a whole weekend and climb in the hills, all by myself. Nothing challenging; I’ll be content wandering through the Malvern Hills I roamed as a child. Even the Worcestershire Beacon, the highest point, stretches to only 425m above sea level. But it’s not the climb that I crave. It’s the silence. The bracken and the trees and the gentle slopes.

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A Covid death is not a good death

By Polly Mackenzie

I will be staying away from popular places and well-trodden paths. I shall get up early to avoid even the hint of a crowd. I shall climb, and rest, and climb and rest, never fearful for a moment that a police officer will complain that I am not exercising hard enough and should stop relaxing. I shall roam the iron age earthworks at British Camp and feel the eternal presence of history. Totally alone and therefore able to hear the echo of thousands of years of humanity and our neverending battle to protect ourselves and survive.

I shall run down the steep slope of Happy Valley into the wooded pathways below, hurtling as I did thirty years ago at a pace just a tiny bit too fast to be confident of stopping safely. I shall remember the way my father used to catch us, arms open, at the bottom. And I shall remember that other people are not, really, a pain to be tolerated, but a blessing. One that I shall be ready to return to, after just one more night of solitary peace.

Go to my local second-hand book shop
Daniel Kalder

Here in Texas there is a large chain of second-hand bookshops called Half Price Books, and I am fortunate enough to live within a short drive of not one, not two, but three of these stores. I visit them all regularly, too regularly in fact, and often swing by one of the stores in the evenings after work. But the typical half-price discount is not enough for me; I like to trawl their book clearance shelves, $1 CD racks, junk vinyl and “quarter bin” comic boxes.

Many are the strange and wonderful books I have found going for a song, such as James Ballou’s Arming for the Apocalypse, Sukarno’s autobiography, a super-rare album of photographs by a Stalin-era Uzbek photographer, and George Chapman’s translation of The Odyssey. The $1 CD racks contain lots of pop/rock dross — U2, Coldplay, Sting, Garth Brooks etc. — but I can usually find some exceptional recordings of classical music on prestigious labels; I discovered Mahler, Bartok and a great deal of other amazing music through HPB’s clearance shelves.

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Nineties Russia prepared me for coronageddon

By Daniel Kalder

As for comics, I once found a complete run of Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg! for 25 cents a pop in the quarter bins, not to mention a 3-D Steve Ditko comic, and some rare Richard Corben undergrounds that were worth a lot more than what I paid for them. Those are probably not names that mean a lot to many UnHerd readers, but if they do, you will understand the excitement I felt.

HPB tried to stay open when the shutdowns were getting into gear, but eventually had to close the doors of its physical stores. Currently they bombard me with discount vouchers for their online shop, but it’s not the same.

Successful browsing in a second-hand bookstore first requires the bookstore to be physical, and in addition is a skill that takes time to acquire and which must be practised often. It requires time, and patience, and knowledge of which types of things turn up in different neighborhoods. And I would like to get back to it, please.

Have a pint
Ed West

I had a dream I was in the pub the other night. It was like an old gin palace and crowded with people, drinking, laughing and way within the government-approved distance of 2metres away from each other. It was so beautiful, when I woke up I wanted to cry. It was like that episode of Black Mirror where people suffering from dementia are allowed to head into a virtual reality world where they’re young and healthy again.

I imagine when I first head back into a pub I’ll feel the need to get down on my knees and kiss the ground, tears in my eyes.

I’ve spent a lot of time this past week wondering about where I’d like to go when this is all over, assuming anywhere is open and we haven’t resorted to barter or descended into a Mad Max-like dystopia. I fear I’m not very well-adapted to the 21st century digital economy but I imagine I’d be even less useful in a 5th century skull-based economy.

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Coronavirus coverage is making me feel ill

By Ed West

In a parallel universe somewhere, one in which mother nature didn’t strike us down with this disease, I was supposed to be in west Cork this week, close to the heavenly Gougane Barra national park.

It is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever set eyes on, and the most spiritual; it’s associated with early Christian holy men and women. I’ve also promised myself I’ll take the kids to Italy again, but strangely the lockdown has also given me a real desire to explore England more.

I was tempted to join a friend in an insane-sounding bike ride from the Cumbria coast over to Whitby this month, and although I might not do the cycle, there is so much of my own country I haven’t seen. The thought of a walk around some Pennine villages followed by a pint, without having to steer into the road to avoid people or obsessively wipe down every surface like I’m Howard Hughes, sounds like heaven right now.