The debate about lifting lockdown restrictions for controlling coronavirus transmission in the UK is intense and challenging. Elements of the current discourse are unsettling, not least for people deemed ‘vulnerable’. In late March I received a letter from the NHS placing me in that category – at risk of more severe COVID-19. I had not waited for the government to warn me – I had adopted stringent personal shielding several weeks before. I attended scientific meetings on COVID-19 in February and the accounts from China and the sense of unprecedented scientific uncertainty did not leave me with any doubt. This was not a virus I wished to get. Most especially not during this time of enormous unknowns and no tested treatments.
Taking it personally
The lack of UK government action only made this realisation more acute. The ball was in my court. Reading as much as possible about COVID-19 across my research domains was now not limited to an academic exercise to ‘stay abreast’, but a matter also of protecting my own health. I tried to extract nuggets of certainty from the emerging picture. Indeed, uncertainty was no longer just an interesting conceptual hook for thinking about the limits of pandemic preparedness, but an existential reality in my personal life.
I have in the past offered criticism of the emphasis of global health interventions on the ‘silver bullets’ of vaccines and drugs, to the exclusion of the complex social contexts of disease outbreaks. But in this new reality, I found myself buoyed by the news that Oxford was trialling a vaccine and that trials of treatments were under way.
