'Come on Guernsey, we can do this'

‘DISCIPLINE’, ‘common sense’, ‘positivity’ and ‘mutual assistance’.

These should be our watchwords when acting as a community to crush the latest outbreak of Covid-19 in the Bailiwick.

Luckily the Guernsey community (or most of it) tends to have those qualities in spades. Add in a quiet determination, and a desire to act together as one, and I have no doubt we can and should quickly get on top of the situation.

But we should never take that for granted. Guernsey hasn’t been given some sort of ‘divine pass’ on this pandemic. Our destiny is in our own hands. If it didn’t sound so cheesy I would be tempted to issue the rallying call: ‘Come on Guernsey, we can do this’!

While we are no more exempt from Covid-19 than any other community, luckily we do have lots of natural advantages. We are an island, surrounded by water, for one. Unlike most other islands of our size we also have autonomy and therefore can control our own borders.

Then there is our excellent Public Health department and our outstanding track, trace and isolate team. Add into the mix good testing capacity and our community spirit and we are in a supremely good position to rapidly move back towards ‘Covid-elimination’.

What role does fear play in that arsenal of weapons against the latest local outbreak? Difficult question.

No one wants islanders to be scared, and there is no reason to panic.

At the same time a healthy apprehension over the clear dangers of not treating the situation seriously is no bad thing.

I know some people will have looked at the rapidly rising numbers over the past week and thought ‘this is out of control’. It is not.

Most of the new cases reported will have been infections which happened before lockdown.

Of course, if Covid-19 was circulating in our community and we were all living cheek by jowl, with no restrictions, then it would have spread rapidly.

Things are now different. However infectious it may be, the only way the virus can spread is if an existing host comes into close proximity with a potential host. We locked down quickly and we locked down hard. So if we all play strictly by the rules, the virus will very soon find itself with nowhere to go.

So please don’t panic.

Remember how an outbreak in Jersey saw a peak of 1,000 positive cases but they got on top of that situation, despite acting less quickly than we have. So the balance is to stay positive, don’t be afraid, but for the next few weeks do act as if you might have the virus yourself. That way in the unlikely event that you are infected you won’t spread it. Let’s make this lockdown short and sharp. After all, we all want to get back to normal as soon as possible.

Oh and for goodness sake let’s focus our energy on getting out of this mess, not finding scapegoats. If someone has broken the Covid restrictions then the proper courts will deal with it. We don’t need trial by social media.

OK, let’s step back from the current flare up and consider how well Guernsey has handled the pandemic over the last 10 months. Pretty well.

In fact so much so that after the end of our first lockdown, last June, we gradually started to take normal life for granted again.

About the only thing we couldn’t really do was travel.

This was an irritant for those of us who really like going to foreign places and a much bigger issue for those whose families live outside Guernsey.

But in the big scheme of things it was a very small price to pay for the privilege of living normally while others suffered severe restrictions.

We had a bump in the road with an isolated cluster a few months later but our superb track, trace and isolate team quickly jumped on it and brought it under control.

So, of course, it came as a bolt from the blue when on Saturday 23 January we were suddenly told that four unexplained positive tests had occurred and Guernsey was going directly back into full lockdown.

The wisdom of this prompt action was shown graphically over the coming days as the number of islanders known to be infected with Covid-19 rose rapidly.

Clearly the virus had entered the general population in a way which had been avoided for more than half a year. We shouldn’t really have been surprised.

Firstly, we nearly all watch the national news and the official death toll from Covid-19 in the UK is more than 100,000 and rising. The true figure is almost certainly higher.

What we might not see so clearly is the deteriorating global situation.

Our national media are far too parochial to focus much on countries outside the UK, the USA and, to a lesser extent, Europe. But the world situation is dire.

This virus is called a pandemic for a reason.

The first million deaths took really quite a long time to register, although I suspect that was partly due to under-testing and under-reporting.

The second million deaths around the globe came up far quicker. And from that point the next quarter million came about in a heartbeat.

Globally we are still far from the nadir.

Is the answer vaccination? Almost certainly yes, but that gives rise to both moral and practical problems. Particularly for those small-minded enough to believe that charity should begin and end at home.

Not only is there a humanitarian case to act internationally against the pandemic but until the developing world is fully vaccinated it will act as a reservoir of living virus from which fresh mutations will emerge. Globalism is not a dirty word.

In the meantime, what about the here and the now?

Calm heads, discipline, no panic but appropriate respect for the dangers we face.

That recipe should get us back in a good place fairly quickly.

Cheesy or not I can’t help it – ‘Come on Guernsey, we can do this’.