Joyce Fegan: Lockdown Take 3 - 'This is getting in on top of all of us'

A closed sign outside a shuttered shop. There is no sugar-coating your way out of disappointment, depletion and despair as Lockdown Take 3 bites. You just have to feel your way out of it as we move into a state of recovery rather than disaster management.

“This sucks, let’s be truthful” — this week, neither on the steps of Government buildings nor on the RTÉ’s Six One news, but in an Instagram video, Simon Harris summed up the mood of the nation as news hit of a third lockdown, right as most of us are about to down tools and gather with loved ones after months and months of hardship and isolation.

The timing could not have been worse.

This summer, an article called “Your ‘Surge Capacity’ Is Depleted — It’s Why You Feel Awful”, by science journalist Tara Haelle went viral.

“Surge capacity is a collection of adaptive systems — mental and physical — that humans draw on for short-term survival in acutely stressful situations, such as natural disasters,” wrote Ms Haelle, who spoke to various doctors, scientists, and psychologists about why our resiliency bank was running low on credit.

That was August, this is December and we are no longer just running low on resiliency, a lot of us are running on empty.

Christmas is the salvation of many, a retreating, but a gathering, and an indoor gathering, with loved ones, to take stock and take comfort after a long year.

And this year, two lockdowns and much loss, grief, and sacrifice later, many of us looked forward to a reprieve, a reprieve spent with people we had missed all year long.

Then news hits on December 22, of 970 new cases of Covid-19, and Taoiseach Michéal Martin takes to those granite steps once again.

The news is that all bars and restaurants, as well as hair salons, will shut from Christmas Eve. There will be no Christmas sales. Travel between counties is banned from St Stephen’s Day. 

Home visits by members of two households can continue until December 26, but will then be reduced to just one household. After January 1, home visits will be banned completely. And this lockdown could last until March.

Can we really do this all over again?

Back in March, it was a novelty, backed up by solidarity. Back in October, we had the light of Christmas. Now in December, it feels like we actually don’t even have the much looked-forward-to Christmas.

“This is getting in on top of all of us,” said Minister Harris, now in his brief of higher education, as opposed to health.

We hoped “we’d be in a different situation”, he said.

“We are asking people to reach deep at a time when people are shattered,” he added.

But how do you reach deep when you’re feeling shattered? How do you reach deep when you’re flatlining resilience?

The thing about surge capacity, our ability to pull on reserves in times of crisis, is that the length of the crisis, emergency, or disaster is historically short-lived. There are not many incidences in history where we have lived in a constant state of flight or fright for 10 months in a row, with the all-consuming threat being an invisible one.

So there is cause for hope, but that still doesn’t make it any easier, nor does it suddenly replenish our empty resiliency bank.

Minister Simon Harris summed up the mood of the nations when he said the need  for a new lockdown "sucks". Photo: Gareth Chaney/Collins

But while we may feel utterly depleted and almost institutionalised by adherence to social distancing and isolation, there is actual concrete hope.

December 26 is different from March 27, or October 29.

There is now a vaccine.

People in nursing homes and the medical workers on our frontlines will start to receive the vaccine before the year is out.

In January, thousands of more doses will arrive.

The plan on those lockdowns was a circuit-breaker one, we were building fire roads as the fire raged. Now the fire is raging and we finally have the water to stop in its tracks.

So there is cause for hope, but that still doesn’t make it any easier, nor does it suddenly replenish our empty resiliency bank.

While this global pandemic is a history-making one, there is one area we can look to for a playbook: disaster recovery.

Many times in humanity we have recovered and repaired after times of disaster, be they earthquakes, wars, or terrorist attacks.

And while the destruction and discord are never to be appreciated, the opportunity for communities to work together, after a disaster and towards a common goal, is.

“The world of post-disaster recovery becomes a different world, where the community does not function as it does in normal times or in normal places. Self-help can sometimes facilitate reconstruction more rapidly than governmental assistance can,” reads a report, called After Great Disasters, by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

The report looked at different recovery efforts in six different countries.

The report looked at earthquakes in China, Japan, and New Zealand, the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York, and the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia – one of the deadliest of human disasters in modern times with 230,000 deaths.

For each disaster, there was a recovery and there were lessons too.

The response team in Indonesia shared 10 lessons. The importance of pacing oneself was one of them, as was the idea to “build back better at every opportunity.”

This idea that we don’t go back to normal ways of being, working, and consuming has been repeated a lot in 2020.

Do we want to continue adding to carbon emissions? Do we want to continue our housing and homeless crisis?

Do we want to return to our rat race where parents race from the bed to the school gates to the office and back again that evening?

Because in times of recovery, we can build something better.

More a lesson to take hope rather than heed from, the reconstruction from the 2001 earthquake in the Indian state of Gujarat, left people safer and better off financially.

“The post-earthquake reconstruction created significant improvements that would not have occurred otherwise: upgraded rural and urban infrastructure, increased seismic safety of new and retrofitted buildings, new regional economic development initiatives, a resolute culture of disaster risk reduction, and, for many, a sense of empowerment,” reads the After Great Disaster report.

“These improvements better positioned the region for economic growth,” it adds.

The power of positive thinking was in vogue for a while, but psychologists were quick to point out that you can’t affirm your way out of disappointment, depletion, and despair. You have to feel your way out, you can’t sugarcoat it.

The same is true here, 2020 has been difficult for many, terrible for some, and actually fatal for others. There’s no hiding it. 

And there’s no point hiding it. But a vaccine is on its way and with it, is our move into a state of recovery, as opposed to disaster management.

What kind of recovery would you like?