Optimism fades, like a sunset

I am watching the daily rates of infection go up and mentally preparing myself for Lockdown 4.
Sorry for the pessimism, but I fear that once again the un-rules-following British public and the un-lessons-learning British government are inadvertently conspiring to send up all back down Coronavirus Cul-de-Sac.
It’s never good to project ahead, especially given the ever-changing nature of the pandemic situation as we’ve been experiencing it for over a year now, but I do find myself looking a month or so down the road and seeing a time where I am fielding hundreds of angry phone calls from wannabe tourists who have had their holidays cancelled yet again. I also – admittedly in the dark of night when my soul is at its darkest – find myself looking further ahead still and seeing a time where life in England has taken on an irreversibly altered state and we’re all limited to seeing people who live within a 6-metre radius of our feet. I shouldn’t be so glum, I guess. We’ve survived pretty well up to this point, and it’s not as if the virus is becoming unavoidable or becoming a guaranteed death sentence, but it’s hard not to be dragged down into the Pessimism Pit that is constantly being refilled and stirred by newspapers, politicians trying to make a name for themselves and 95% of the people on social media.
I had a chat recently with a guy who has a Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology, and he was convincingly arguing that SARS-Cov-2 (the actual virus name, he kept insisting – ‘Covid-19’ being the disease it causes, and ‘coronavirus’ being a term for a whole group of similar viruses) could very well be The Pandemic That Ends Humanity. (I’ve capitalised each of those words to emphasise their impact. And because it looks like a cool title for a low-budget sci-fi, or a novel.) He reckons we haven’t learnt enough about it, and we haven’t treated it with the respect it deserves, and we keep assuming we’re getting on top of it, when in reality it may just be toying with us for a while before unleashing a mutation that we’re defenceless against. Or – Option 2 on his Agenda of Happy Outcomes – we have to go on living under increasingly more extreme restrictions, to the point where our modern way of life breaks down and the whole world collapses in the style of the Roman Empire.
I can see it happening, if I’m honest. We’re so far down the road of relying on a certain scope of existence that if that were to be dismantled in some way, we’d be ill-prepared to cope. Am I making any sense now or am I just stringing words together that sound like they’re scientific and well thought through, when in fact they’re just the rambling spoutings of a Man on the Edge of a Breakdown?
I’ll stop typing now, before we find out for sure.

RC 8-6-21