A Modern Family: Living the Vida Lockdown

It’s over six months now since I wrote my first thoughts on the realisation that the Covid19 coronavirus was not simply going to be something like SARS or MERS that we would hear about on the news unfolding at a great distance from us, but rather something that was going to impact our lives very directly. Coming up to that weekend the kids had been sent home from school for what turned out to be the rest of the school year and everybody who could do so began working from home. It was a strange, surreal feeling: a little bit like an extended Irish ‘snow day’: that relatively rare occurrence where snow and ice brings most of the country to a halt and people stay at home with their kids, avoiding freezing schoolrooms and treacherous roads. Those are generally happy, short-lived events: this change was laced with menace, the idea that this newly emerging virus could wreak havoc on our health service, dragging people of all ages through life-threatening illness with a relatively high death rate especially among older age groups.

Those first couple of weeks after Leo Varadkar’s St. Patrick’s Day address, in our house we got used to the idea of both parents working from home while keeping our kids balanced between schoolwork, nutrition and entertainment. I’ve had one regular work-from-home day for many years so was lucky enough to have a decent working environment while my wife set up camp in the corner of the sitting room as the kid’s were now using their study desks where she normally set up shop when working away from the office. Working from home while the kids were also at home is a very different proposition. The first bit of coordination was to try to align our working times to share a mid-day lunch break with the kids. The work-from-home-alone version of this story would typically have involved dropping something in the oven or microwave or making a quick sandwich. By contrast, the full production mid-day family meal meant one of us making the time to prepare it while also co-ordinating the aforementioned dining-together-slot with our respective work diaries. While I won plaudits for stepping up in the (extremely basic) family catering department during this time, I was next to useless at home schooling. To be fair our youngest pretty much had her weeks pre-assigned schoolwork received on Friday done by Tuesday but the two boys needed a bit more chasing and spot-checks to figure out if there was actually anything resembling schoolwork going on behind those closed bedroom doors.

Lockdown Rituals

Our evening ritual as we left Microsoft Teams, Zoom and other online meeting platforms behind and closed the lid on the laptops was to congregate as a family in the sitting room for an episode or two of the hit ABC sitcom Modern Family. We had watched it sporadically before Covid but now deep-dived into the seven seasons available on Netflix and Amazon Prime, and followed up by ordering the DVDs for seasons 8 to 10. It became a nice family ritual during that strange time and the quirky family lessons, plots and storylines had something for everyone, even if the whole family were convinced that Phil, the hapless Dad in the series, is firmly modelled on me. Ironically the final episode of the final season eleven aired in the US on April 8th 2020 as we were ramping up our binge: that won’t be available to us for a while so no spoilers please! These rituals made the months between the lockdown and the formal end of school feel like a half-way house between a strange wartime normality and a family holiday: seeing each other for “together time” multiple times during the day with heads down for work in-between. The kids usual active after-school and sports training calendars went on hold during this period: the options narrowed and life became simpler and brought us closer together, albeit in the shadow of a life of restricted movement.

After a couple of weeks of lockdown-light, on March 27th it got real. The whole country went into a more serious lockdown with exercise permitted only within a 2 km radius of home, but otherwise no unnecessary journeys and a wide variety of businesses instructed to close their doors. We heard the term cocooning widely used for the first time as the over-70s and vulnerable were encouraged to stay indoors and not leave their homes for any reason. This initial two-week lockdown was extended on April 10th for a further three weeks with the exercise radius increased to 5km on May 1st.

While we were seeing a lot more of each other in our immediate household, the contrast in our connections with the outside world couldn’t have been more stark. The kids were stuck inside unless going out for a walk with their boring parents. Neighbourhood kids who would otherwise have been ringing the doorbell and playing together on the shared green outside of front doors were staying inside and avoiding each other also as the fear factor took hold. Trips to see extended family outside of the approved radius were off the cards other than perhaps to drop food shopping or other essentials. There was a palpable sense of being constrained. Even trips to the supermarket became tentative expeditions of sanitising shopping trolleys, avoiding fellow shoppers and minimising the chance of reverse contamination on returning home: even leaving non-perishable items to one side in their shopping bags for a few days after the shopping trip to avoid having to wash everything down.

I’d almost forgotten the morbid fascination over those early months with the nightly broadcast of the Ireland’s latest Covid stats by Tony Holohan, the Chief Medical Officer, getting a feeling for how the global understanding of the virus, its treatment options and its trajectory were unfolding. We watched stories of the growing pressure on our front-line medical staff and harrowing stories of loss, and particularly loss that could not be mourned in the manner of pre-lockdown freedoms with limited funeral attendance and a ban on hospital visits. Having lost my own father in 2019 we reflected on how glad we were that he did not leave us during lockdown and we got to say a ‘proper’ goodbye.

There was of course a massive rise in Zoom calls and other online interactions: we had a couple of online neighbourhood quiz nights with people we were living close to, but no longer seeing in person on a regular basis. The same with friends and family near and far. There was a distinct urge to reach out and make contact, to share experiences of the strange times we were all living through, and to remind each other that we were all still here, even if we couldn’t get to see each other in person. I referred to the movie The Bird Box in my original post, but whatever the appropriate movie reference, there was this palpable sense of being held indoors and living in an unsafe, constrained environment because of this unseen, yet potentially deadly virus.

It is important to acknowledge that there has been a wide spectrum of Covid19 impact across society in Ireland (and globally). Clearly there have been those affected directly by illness or death which is at the heart of the pandemic’s impact. Then there have been those individuals and businesses devastated economically by the lockdown restrictions and the changes in human behaviour that have gone with it. There are those who have seen opportunities evaporate, children and other students whose education has been disrupted and all of us who have been shaken out of the sense that we were living in a time of sophistication where nothing as simple as a pesky virus could bring the world as we know it to a halt. Those of us who are not permanently marked in some way by this global challenge when it eventually is declared under control will be extremely lucky.

Green Shoots

In early May the Irish Government presented a coherent multi-phase roadmap for re-opening the country. With foreign holidays long cancelled, the prospect of a short break away in Ireland held as much excitement for our lockdown survivors as a month in Disneyland might have some time ago. Our first time out in a restaurant was a similar and welcome novelty: a feeling that things might be returning to some semblance of normality.

This was a “new normal” with plenty of reminders that we were some way off being back to the way things were before. Hand sanitizers, face masks, queues to limit the number of people concurrently in retail environments. The avid shoppers in my house felt the good being sucked out of the retail experience through the need to queue even for a therapeutic browse. Hotel stays lost their charm and ease: pre-booking slots for breakfast, dinner and pool times for children. Not unlike an occupied territory in wartime, we realised that we were free to go about our business with much greater flexibility than during lockdown but with regular cues that Covid19 was setting the rules that we would live by. All clearly a small price to pay to bring the virus under control, but reflecting a sustained impact and overhead on our greater consciousness and mental health.

Those who did choose to travel abroad against government advice returned to do a walk of shame. Never before did a newly-developed tan raise so many eyebrows: it was as if the steady trade in self-tanning products would be swapped for a tan removal treatment to avoid accusing glances.

It was great to see how the numbers of case reports dropped steadily over the summer, providing a statistical reward for the sacrifices being made by everyone. During the time I’ve been drafting this article the rates of positive Covid tests have started to rise sharply again as the kids have gone back to school and society has started to re-open: landing us back to the heady levels of April. This will leave our Government and society as a whole with some stark choices between the extremes of the earlier lockdown (the New Zealand model) and the stay open approach (the Swedish model). There are significant risks and tradeoffs in either direction.

Looking Back

We’ve been lucky in Ireland to live in a first-world country where our health system and climate has left us largely free for a few generations from worry and anxiety about contagious viral or bacterial illness: the basic levellers that changed European and global societies on an all too regular basis over the last millennium.

Our society had become more sophisticated with rising standards of living and access to “magic” technologies like always on mobile data, content-on-demand and ongoing medical advances that have extended average life expectancy at birth from just under seventy in 1960 to eighty-two in 2017.

If you were fortunate enough to live in that part of society with a roof over your head and adequate income to feed, clothe, educate and socialise with your family then you would be forgiven for thinking that you had it made.

Coronavirus has briefly returned us to a place of fear and uncertainty that generations of our forebears lived through: the idea that something invisible and unseen could potentially wreak havoc in our lives, through something as simple as the air we share with other people around us.

When we went through the Global Financial Crisis c. 2008, there were those who reminded us of Black Friday in 1987 and the Great Depression of 1929: reminders that we are quick to forget lessons and learnings from relatively recent human experience, reminders that history can and does repeat itself, but also carrying a hopeful message that life goes on afterwards.

This pattern has been repeated with the Coronavirus. We are reminded of the Spanish Flu epidemic following the First-World War and it is eerie to see the photos and newspaper articles of the time echoing our current experience. It is likely that the vast migration home of soldiers from the theatres of war provided a transmission vehicle approximating our modern connected economy. According to Dr. Ida Milne, the Spanish Flu claimed 23,000 lives and infected 800,000 people in Ireland over a 12-month period. The death rate was likely significantly heightened by the absence of antibiotics. Can we imagine the fear, uncertainty and doubt that prevailed in a world that lacked the scientific understanding and diagnostic capabilities we have today?

A vaccine for polio was not routinely available until 1957 while our last recorded case was in 1984. It’s also easy to forget that TB was a significant menace in Irish society in the first half of the twentieth century. According to this Irish Times article someone contracting TB had a fifty-fifty chance of surviving before a vaccine was developed. Sanitoria (TB isolation hospitals) sprang up all over the country and there was a great stigma associated with contracting the illness. It was one of the leading causes of death in Ireland in 1916, while negligible in 2014: dropping as a cause of death from 12% to 0.1% over that time.

We’ve developed amnesia for the long (and recent) history of pathogens of different sorts becoming prevalent and impacting our ability to conduct our lives without worry or concern. It probably doesn’t take a heavily qualified psychologist to explain that this lack of control and self-determination and introduction of uncertainty, brings with it at least a background level of anxiety. It may even cast a pall of darkness and shadow over the otherwise “first world problems” of continuing to live our lives of relative privilege while needing to manage closely our interactions with others.

The upside of re-visiting history is the understanding that we have come through these crises time-and-time again, emerged stronger to happy, fulfilling and ultimately better lives. That should be of comfort to humanity as a whole, but will understandably be of little comfort to those who lose loved ones or experience long-term health or economic impacts before it passes.

The Human Impact: Saying Goodbye

One of the cruellest of the lockdown measures has been the limits placed on celebrations of happiness and sadness such as weddings and funerals. Limited wedding celebrations are unfortunate, but can be rescheduled or offer a chance for a top-up ‘do over’ later on. It’s difficult to re-capture the timing of supporting a loved one, family or friends in the grief of bereavement. A close mentor and friend of mine passed away in July, after two months in hospital following a difficult procedure: I couldn’t visit him to say goodbye nor attend the funeral in person. We lost a close work colleague and friend more recently and I attended the funeral remotely via church webcam (sitting at the same home office desk I’ve been working at since March). That level of disconnection from other human beings at a time of loss and grief will I think be one of the saddest marks of our generation’s pandemic experience and probably mirrors at some level the past generations of diaspora who left Ireland for foreign shores and dealt with bereavement and other losses at long distance without the benefit of in-person, human contact.

Looking Forward

Life as we know it has changed both a little and immeasurably in the past six months. We’ve experienced the type of drastic state interventions that were probably last seen during the Emergency of the Second World War (a war, unlike Covid, in which Ireland played a supposedly neutral part).

Some of this will have brought our families closer together and created lasting memories, whether your own family rituals have involved Phil Dunphy or something else entirely.

It is now highly likely that at least some element of working from home will became a core part of working practice globally for office-based industries. Time will tell whether this is the beginning of a positive work-life balance shift and support for a greater geographical distribution of workers (and wealth) throughout Ireland: or the beginning of the disintegration of human interaction at work.

It is possible that the mammoth global effort to find a Coronavirus vaccine will create medical science breakthroughs that may impact other variants of the flu virus, the common cold or who knows what? Certainly the economic damage caused by the continued protective measures creates a fertile funding source and drive for the effort.

And last but not least, there will be those of us left with indelible marks of one form or another, from this period as has been the case throughout history. Here’s wishing you well during the next phase of this virus’ path and hoping that we emerge rapidly into the new (and brighter) normal between this and the next challenge the world throws at us. 

Thanks for reading.

Barry

p.s. Interesting article on How Pandemics End from the BBC