Like everyone, I ’m so tired of fighting Covid. But we must keep going | Nesrine Malik

The pandemic has given us new kinds of exhaustion, all of them equally draining. Yet there ’s hope in perseveranceDuring the past two years, each stage of the pandemic has brought with it a new species of tired. The first was a heady sort of tiredness, all jittery over-vigilance when the first lockdown happened. The memory of that time has an almost lunar quality: it felt like being marooned in a pod on a hostile deserted landscape but with your lights and radars still blinking, still whirring, powered by adrenaline and restlessness. It was a short, sharp fear, in anticipation of a crisis that would be intense but soon over.And it was soon over. Sort of. And then it wasn ’t. Then it was over again, then around Christmas last year, it wasn’t. And now, after a brief late-summer of almost normal, the emergence of the Omicron variant means that Covid is threatening the holiday season for the second year in a row, asrestrictions tighten around Europe and scientists advising the UK government turn up the volume on their demands formore curbs before the new year.The British experience is distinguished from much of the world by the in-plain-sight element of our government ’s incompetence and corruption. But the uncertainty, the stop-starts, that marooned feeling of waiting to be rescued, the anticipation of life changing overnight, has been a global experience that is still ongoing. Once again, borders are sealed and airports shut down. Once again, infections are r ising and ...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Coronavirus Infectious diseases Science World news UK news Politics Source Type: news