The pandemic’s invisible victims

I sometimes pick up some food at Tesco for an 86-year-old pensioner who lives a few streets over. At the weekend, I brought him milk and cornflakes. He opened his front door; I put the bags down, retreated the required two metres, but when I looked up he was in tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, quietly. ‘I’m just so lonely at the moment.’

Should I have moved closer, put my arm around him? At the moment the risk of passing on the virus is low in London. I’ve had the bug (I think) and I used hand gel after leaving the supermarket. It’s been said of the recent protests that distancing is irrelevant because racism is a deadlier epidemic than Covid. If that’s true of racism, isn’t it also true of loneliness in the old?

Perhaps I should have hugged my friend. I didn’t. Cowardice and uncertainty kept me stuck on the top step. I just stood there grimacing like a vicar, trying to show that I felt his pain and saying: ‘I’m so sorry.’

The truth is, until that moment, I hadn’t much felt his pain. I’d read the astonishing surveys that say the old are faring weirdly better than the young. Although coronavirus is catastrophic for the very old and for the most part a pretty minor bug for the very young, nonetheless 65 per cent of those aged 16 to 19 say their wellbeing has been affected, vs only 34 per cent of over–seventies. Go figure. At any rate, I’d given myself licence not to worry, quite forgetting all the elderly out of reach of polls.

Just as pre-existing conditions can exacerbate the virus, so almost every downside of an unlucky old age has been exacerbated by lockdown. If you live alone (that’s more than a million older men and women), you’ve been cut off from contact: no cafés, churches, social clubs.