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THE WEEK IN RETAIL ISSUE 20
EDITOR’S COMMENT
THE SOUND OF A SECOND WAVE GROWS LOUDER
It’s not a subject too many people want to contemplate, but there are increasingly disturbing signs that a dreaded second wave of coronavirus may be on the horizon. Being a Glasgow resident myself, it was sobering to see a BBC news update pop up on my phone as I went to bed last night announcing that Nicola Sturgeon was enforcing what could be termed a mini lockdown for the city’s 800,000 residents following a recent spike in positive tests.
Cue a frenzied hour of phone calls trying to establish what that meant for childcare provisions, holidays, haircuts, work trips and all manner of other things that we had only recently started to take for granted.
The latest local lockdown follows the highly publicised shambles in Aberdeen as well as similar local lockdowns in major cities in England and is a very stark reminder that coronavirus is far from over.
It’s clearly tempting for everyone, after six months of being cooped up, to go out and live a bit again – but letting our guard down at this stage seems like an act of folly of monstrous proportions. We have to see this thing through to the end, to the day when coronavirus is eliminated from this island. Yes, the wider economy is in tatters and the UK has more public debt than it has ever had in its entire history but to fail to see the job through completely would only risk a second wave that could be more catastrophic than the first.
Interestingly, to me at any rate, if you do a little research into all of the great pandemics that we have reasonably reliable data on, most of them follow the same alarming pattern: phase one spikes then is eventually brought to a plateau, but phase two – and there is almost always a phase two – sees an even bigger peak in cases than in phase one.
A second major wave of coronavirus hardly bears contemplating and we all have a role in helping our communities ensure that we see this job through to the end.
