DERRY JOURNAL Editorial: 2020 - The year everything changed

How could we have known?

This time last year a handful of people in an area over 5,500 miles away had fallen ill with a mysterious and deadly virus. Within a few months we would all know the name and the story of Wuhan.

2020 started much like any other year. We gathered and hugged in the new year, made resolutions, and put the decorations away; we started making plans. There were seismic political shifts - the new year brought with it a restoration of power sharing in the north. Weeks earlier Boris Johnson’s Tory party had swept to victory, while in February Sinn Féin’s surge in support to become the winners of the popular vote forced Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to form a power sharing coalition of their own. Political changes aside though, life was all so normal. And then it wasn’t.

By early March, in what felt like a nightmare or the plot of a disaster film, we watched as first Italy and then other countries across Europe reported that something called a coronavirus had arrived there and was devastating cities and towns. We read stories, saw photos and watched footage of hospitals overcrowded and health staff and family members overwhelmed and overcome. And as each day passed it became clear it was spreading rapidly towards us.

And yet when it came it still felt like a sudden shock. One week we were getting up and heading to work, watching our kids run care free into the throng and din of a new school day, going to visit our mothers and fathers, grandparents, our children, going to church, the match, meeting and greeting friends, getting dressed up for a nice meal; a drink in the pub; a birthday party, dressing down to go meet up for a walk or go to the gym. We were getting buses and taxis into our towns and village centres and stopping for a chat with those we knew. We were looking forward to St Patrick’s Day, the Jazz Festival, the Clipper. We were making plans for the summer holidays. As the snowdrops withered and the daffodils broke ground, our world was once again full of the joys and possibilities of Spring.

But then everything changed. Rumours started that the first suspected local case arrived via someone travelling into Derry from a different part of Ireland. The shock was palpable. Within days other suspected cases were being reported in the north west, and we watched and listened as the then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar walked towards a lectern in Dublin and announced that life as we knew it was about to change, at least in the south. As some in Stormont dithered along with Westminster, in the north west our local pubs and other venues, our Council and our businesses and organisations took a stand. They were the first to move. Despite facing a massive hit they pulled the shutters ahead of St Patrick’s Day. To their eternal credit, they and the other businesses in the north west reacted with no regard for their own financial well being or future, and long before support packages were assured or that strange sounding word furlough became part of our lexicon. They put us first. Our teachers too, despite resistance from those in power, stepped in front of the children and decided they were shutting down to protect their young charges and their families.

As cases increased and the global scramble began to secure Personal Protection Equipment, we went into lockdown and walked through weeks of bright sunshine, the silence broken only by the noisy chatter of birds. Many rediscovered the joys of cycling and many more wanted to but there wasn’t a bike to be found in any shops, everything having sold out. As the pace of life slowed those of us not being restricted to shielding indoors reconnected with our beautiful corner of the world and rediscovered the power of nature to heal the soul.

By the time the first primary COVID care centre in Northern Ireland had opened in Altnagelvin in late March, across Derry, Donegal and Tyrone our communities were organising at lighting speed. From Buncrana to Ballymagroarty, from Moville to the Moor, from Galliagh to Glengad, and from Bready to the Brandywell, people, politicians, local businesses, community activists, youth groups and an army of volunteers on the ground set up kitchens, delivered groceries and meals on wheels to the vulnerable and shielding, dressed up as children’s characters, dropped off activity packets, and were greeted by estates filled by rows of colourful rainbows created by our children and blue-tacked and sellotaped on to windows and doors along with messages of solidarity for our health workers. Every Thursday in some areas people came to their doors to clap for those on the frontline - the nurses the doctors, the care home workers, the home helps, the pharmacists, the porters, the cleaners, the cooks who selflessly turned up, literally and metaphorically, despite the risks to themselves.

We washed our hands and didn’t stop. We bought toilet rolls where we could find them. We fumbled with masks and tried not to forget them when we left the house. We kept our distance (two metres is six feet, right, got it!) We learned what Zoom was. Many also learned for the first time about FaceTime, Skype and Whatsapp as visits to grannies and grandas, children and grandchildren were advised against.

We saw local firms, schools and colleges adapt to make and donate everything from hand soap and sanitiser to visors and medical scrubs. Offices closed, and some of us took our work home and squeezed ourselves into whatever corner we could find and tested our broadband connections and at times our sanity to the max while others had no choice but to keep working in our shops, factories, transport sector and industries and kept the rest of us going.

First communions and Confirmations became very different occasions and weddings were small affairs too, couples having to alter long made plans and slim down the guest lists. Children born since March became our special Lockdown Babies. Our vocabulary was expanded to include COVID-related terminology, while Robin Swann, Tony Holohan, Chris Whitty, Michael McBride and Anthony Fauci became household names.

The death of George Floyd in the US was the tipping point that saw Black Lives Matter campaigns take off here and across the world, with demands for justice, equality and rights, too long denied or ignored, forcing a re-examination of, and exposing, racism, colonial history and changing the world for the better.

We watched church services online, TikTok videos and singers, entertainers and artists give up their time despite losing their own livelihoods to keep us entertained and keep our spirits up via live shows on Facebook and YouTube videos. Earlier we had watched shaky videos of apartment block residents in Italy - in lockdown long before we ever were - come out on balconies and stage impromptu concerts and sing-alongs in a powerful message of resilience and solidarity with one another. We watched the ultra bizarre documentary series Tiger King on Netflix and it seemed somehow fitting that it arrived during a year when the world was turned on its head.

We read every incredulous and bizarre ‘plandemic’ ‘scamdemic’ conspiracy theory under the sun as some proposed that governments, big pharma, media types, tycoons and so on had somehow got together in a secret pact to invent, organise, unleash or cover up this plague/ nonplague upon the world and were trying to subjugate the masses through face masks.

Back in the real world, we listened in horror about the situation unfolding in our care homes as the virus took a terrible toll on those among us who had lived through and loved more than any of the rest of us. We listened in shocked silence as heartbroken relatives spoke of how they couldn’t be with their loved ones as their lives hung in the balance or as they passed away. In some cases the only hand the dying had to hold in their final moments belonged to those same health care professionals who in many cases had cared for them for years and become their good friends, and had to keep turning up despite their own grief and trauma while families were reduced to watching these devastating events online.

Some suffered the deaths of loved ones, friends, old acquaintances whose wakes and funerals we couldn’t attend due to restrictions. We couldn’t for a time even visit their graves.

We lost a giant in John Hume and while the tens of thousands of people from Derry and across Ireland and beyond that wanted to pay their respects would have to settle for being there in spirit, we saw a dignified and moving service and people gathering while apart to applaud Derry’s Prince of Peace on his final journey. And as darkness fell, candles were lit in living rooms across Ireland symbolising just how much ‘our John Hume’ meant and how much his legacy lives on in our hearts.

We read stories of miraculous COVID recoveries and it gave us hope. We read tales of courage and selfless acts and it gave us hope. We read of how the world’s scientists had rallied like never before and it gave us hope.

In a summer like no other we stayed put. We holidayed close to home if at all, with travel abroad off limits, while people from across Ireland discovered or rediscovered the charms of Derry and Donegal. As the summer weeks passed by we witnessed the first wave subside. Our world, while forever changed, began to take on a semblance of normality again as restrictions eased. We had been through the ringer, we all had bad days, bad weeks, we struggled, we adapted, we were encouraged to eat out to help out, some shops and services reopened. The hospitality sector pulled tables apart, rearranged interiors, did all they were asked to at a moment’s notice.

But the respite was brief. There were early warnings about the second wave, but when it came back it was more like a tsunami than another wave. Many people have been ill. Most survived and recovered, but not all.

Testing was ramped up. Some hard lessons had been learned and thankfully we knew a little more about this virus this time round, but within weeks of schools resuming the cases kept rising and too many families will have spent this Christmas with one, in some cases more than one, vacant chair at the dinner table. They weren’t statistics. They were people we loved dearly. They were our own.

The streets were empty for Hallowe’en and the Christmas Lights Switch Ons but parents did their best to raise the spirits of children, dressing up at home with their little ones and decking the halls and living rooms far earlier than normal to bring some familiarity and Christmas cheer to their neighbourhoods.

We shopped local to help local while the US election and the antics of Donald Trump provided some respite in November amid the fluctuating rounds of lockdowns, circuit breakers and easements continued.

And then the great breakthrough arrived in a tiny frozen vial. A vaccine. It was emotional. It was the light at the end of this rabbit hole we have been forced down, but the good news was followed by more bad, and we were forced back into lockdown as confirmation of aggressive new strains came through.

And as we face into a new year, a new Spring, fresh restrictions but with renewed hope, we will never forget those for whom that hope has come too late, or the sacrifices and risks so many made day and daily in our hospitals, care homes, our schools, our shops, our communities, our chemists, our taxis and buses, the refuse workers, the factory workers, the tradespeople, the construction workers, the media, the artists who kept us entertained, and the mass of volunteers who did so much. When the world went dark, they were the torches that kept hope alive. We will also never forget how most people did and continue to do their level best to stay at home and stay apart to protect each other. Best wishes to each and every one of you for the year ahead. Let’s hope when the bells toll at midnight on New Year’s Eve that the worst is indeed now behind us.