A Timeline Of The Plague Year

Available in audio at the following link: https://anchor.fm/joanna-booth/episodes/A-Timeline-Of-The-Plague-Year-euuu0r

On March 23, 2020, the day that lockdown was announced, I was so nervous paying for my shopping at the supermarket that I forgot my PIN. There was a queue behind me, no masks, no separations from the till, just uncertainty. I had to leave everything at the counter and rush off.

It’s strange to think back now and realise that we knew so little; there was guesswork over symptoms, no tests or PPE available or even whether the disease was airborne or how it spread.

In the Guardian article ‘Which activities are safe and which should people avoid?’ on 14 March 2020, Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia, was quoted saying he would not stop visiting his elderly relatives, that it was OK to visit the pub, and that from the perspective of individual risk there was not a strong argument for avoiding big sporting events. Yet nine days later we were all locked away.

What a difference a year has made to our understanding of Covid-19 but it has also made it easy to forget the details.

For over a year I watched Ian Sinclair and Professor Rupert Read update their timeline on our plague year. They updated Ian’s Medium blog weekly to make sure that the life-and-death choices made by our government and the coverage by our media were recorded. This timeline has aimed to be the most comprehensive record of the government’s response…