They were right, there will be no memorials in every village and town.
It was too traumatic and was too painful.
In the early days of the COVID-19 I looked back to Spanish Flu to see how the pandemic would play out. It will be awful, I read. People will die. But once it eases we won’t want to look back.
In the years after the First World War, 220,000 people died in Britain. There are no memorials and no great art was created.
During COVID even more people died – 232,000. I got my calculator out to work out some sombre facts. Stack their coffins end to end and you will travel the 307 miles from London to Carlisle just passing pandemic victims. I began to work out how long that giant funeral cortage would take if it drove at 20 mph but I’d had enough. I got the point.
Five years today as I write this, it is the national memorial day to the victims of the pandemic. There are no church services in the borough I live in but the council is lighting up the Council House. The post to announce this on Facebook attracted 11 comments. Twice as many have commented about temporary traffic lights in Amblecote.
Too Soon?
When I posted a COVID-era image to a Facebook group I’m admin of the post was met with a reaction the same as if I’d punched a cracked rib.
‘Too soon,.’ one person wrote.
‘Instant PTSD.’
‘no, no. no, no, no.’
Wondering if this was just the public sector comms community I asked my daughter what her memories of lockdown was.
“Bad,” she replied. “All bad.”
It was too traumatic and too painful.
When the theatres re-opened after the plague in Shakespeare’s day there were no plays marking the subject.
It was too traumatic and too painful.
The impact of COVID on public sector communicators
I kept a tracker survey up during the height COVID that measured the impact on public sector communicators.
In the macabre league table, police PR and comms were the most stressed group with civil servants having least faith in their leadership.
I think all those who took part would be quick to say that those who died and their families had it far worse. It would be trite and thoughtless to say any different. My work colleague lost her Mum and I can’t imagine how hard that must have been.
But there’s no doubt that COVID had an impact on teams. Overnight, people had to work from home, wear masks and work a 16-hour-a-day treadmill without end.
People walking off the job burnt out became commonplace.
After lockdown eased and things opened up I was struck by the number of teams who had new staff. A team of 10 may have two or three veterans who had worked through the pandemic and the rest were new.
Me? I went down with COVID in the first wave. My wife was briefly hospitalised and I suffered mild long COVID symptoms that saw me unable to work a full day for nine months.
A common purpose
One thing the survey at the time captured was a lasting sense that people were working for a common purpose.
Without public sector communicators so many more people would have died.
I hope people can bring themselves to remember that when they look back.
Creative commons credit: North John Street, 1988 by Keith Edkins CC BY-SA 2.0
When I decided to take early retirement at the end of 2020, one comment from a colleague made me cry, it was ‘I am sure the communications produced by you and your team saved lives.’ It meant a lot then and still does today.