What if Covid had struck in the 1970s?

We have reached Covid-19’s first anniversary in the UK — and I really think we should do something fitting to mark the occasion. The actual date is pretty much a moveable feast. The first patient in the UK known to have died of the disease was Peter Attwood, aged 84, on 30 January. But we didn’t know then that he had Covid, finding out only about six months later. On 4 February, the government instructed all Brits living in China to get the hell out and return to the UK sharpish and breathe all over us, as I believe the press statement had it. On 11 February, the little baby was actually christened Covid-19.

Perhaps we should commemorate the anniversary of something more down-home and folksy. The first time you had to clean your bottom with the lid from a sardine can because hordes had stockpiled all the lavatory paper, for example? Or the very last time you used a cash machine? The first time Matt Hancock addressed us as if we were disobedient puppies? The first time Professor Neil Ferguson got his hyperbolic calculator out? Maybe we should vote on it. Whatever, I think we should sacrifice a goat or something out of respect to the change this smallish parasite has wrought on the country. It might bring us all together.

Or maybe not: Covid was delivered to us largely through Londoners, freshly returned from their skiing trip in Italy, or from taking Oli, six, and Poppy, four, to see the Great Wall. For quite a while London was the only place affected (especially SW1). But Covid had its most lethal effects upon Brexiteers — the poor, the elderly and especially poor and elderly northerners. We Leavers had spotted one or two downsides to globalisation a long time before some bloke called Wu Han decided to make a rich and nutritious soup from the spleen of a pangolin and shortly after dropped dead.