Shortly before the first British lockdown, the Italian novelist Francesca Melandri wrote an open letter to the UK describing our soon-to-be coronavirus future. At the time, Melandri had been under lockdown in Rome for three weeks and cemeteries in Lombardy, in northern Italy, had run out of plots to bury the dead. “We are but a few steps ahead of you in the path of time, just like Wuhan was a few weeks ahead of us,” Melandri warned. “You [will] hold the same arguments we did until a short time ago, between those who still say ‘it’s only a flu, why all the fuss?’ and those who have already understood.”
Melandri’s predictions proved spot on. As British ICU wards filled with coronavirus patients, some commentators dismissed the measures as a media scare, arguing that Covid-19 was no worse than the 2009 swine flu. Others, grasping the urgency of the situation, offered to get the shopping in for elderly neighbours while cursing panic-buyers and joggers who refused to keep their distance.
