Dr Kristopher Lovell

I find it extremely hard to write about Covid. On the eve before the outbreak of Covid-19 I found myself unemployed after quitting a job. In hindsight, it was a very dangerous and risky move as the news about the virus was still coming in. However Covid inadvertently presented an opportunity. Strangely enough Covid was what was able to allow me to break into a job that I am not sure I would have been able to get otherwise. As the financial services sector rushed to move everything to work from home I already had all the equipment required and thus I was able to leverage this to obtain a job I never would have considered in the past.

That is not to say that the Covid pandemic has been all good. The biggest impact that it has had has been the utter decimation of my social life. As an introvert, my social life was something that I found very hard to develop and took years to cultivate. As the pandemic continued to drag on, things began to slow. Friends who I had known for years suddenly became harder to talk to as we couldn’t see each other. Messaging each other, which was something to do on the side of things, became a regular occurrence as the restrictions tightened. Conversation topics slowly began to exhaust as we talked to each other day after day trying to figure out ways to entertain each other, and it became a chore rather than something to do for fun.

However, what was truly shocking has been its affect on mental health, something that is often overlooked. I have seen parts of my family that I would never have considered as being susceptible to issues of a mental nature stumble. It is truly a humanising moment, when somebody you can sometimes view as invincible, buckles under the pressure and is struggling to work through the crisis.

Covid will likely define the coming decade as the damage will leave both seen and unseen scars on the world. In a post-pandemic world I would hope that we hold much of the initial attitudes that were brought out in the earliest days of the pandemic. That we are all in this together. That we need to support each other and extend help to those who need it. The cynical part of me believes that will not happen and that we’ll all want to pretend this never happened. That we’ll cover up the cracks that Covid has exposed instead of taking positive steps to fix them. I realise that the pandemic is but a fleeting moment in history and that nothing lasts forever, I also realise people who it has effected will last far beyond Covid’s brief span. There has been no talk as to how to help people in the long term past Covid and this worries me.

If we could capture the attitudes which we met the outbreak with, of empathy, willingness to help and co-operation then we really can build a post pandemic future to look forward to.