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I don’t want life to go back to ‘normal’ So much of the pre-Covid-19 world was geared up for the 'gregarious' and merely tolerated by many of us

(Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)


April 15, 2020   6 mins

Obviously I can’t go and check, but memory tells me that the reception of Addenbrooke’s hospital bears the Persian adage “This too shall pass”. The human condition is temporary, and therefore so too is the terror and experience of mortal pain — that’s (I presume) the intended message.

But will it — Covid-19 — pass? Since the “-19” refers to the form of the illness first induced by the SARS-COV2 virus in 2019, then yes, Covid-19 will pass. But Covid-20, Covid-21? I suspect that those people who hope that the virus (and the deformation of ‘normal life’ with which we’re currently wrestling) will fade away are going to be disappointed. We won’t live in social isolation for ever, but neither will we be returning to ‘normal’ anytime soon.

In any case, historically speaking, it was the relatively un-pandemicked century between Spanish flu and Covid-19 that was the statistical oddity, not living with the risks presented by a fatal infectious disease. Human beings are great hosts for fragments of RNA that just want to live, baby! We need a new-normal, not a return to the prelapsarian days of February, 2020. How long ago February seems.

So much of pre-Covid-19 world was oriented for the gregarious and extrovert, and was tolerated by the rest of us (people who need solitude to maintain equilibrium) because the dominance of the herd seemed impossible to overcome. Take the world with which I’m most familiar: the office. Here, the following norms were unquestioningly accepted:

  • Open-plan hot-desking (every morning, hoik a box containing your laptop cables to any flat table in the office, and set yourself up for the day) leads naturally to synergistic interactions (“Hey! Let me, like, totally interrupt what you’re doing and tell you all about my ideas right now!”) These add value to the business.
  • Global teams are better, because they increase diversity, and diversity always adds value to the business.
  • Anyone leading a global team needs to travel incessantly, because physical presence among team-mates increases team cohesion (which is as important as diversity), and adds value to the business.
  • Serious decisions must be made face-to-face, even if half the face-to-face meeting is in one video-conference suite in Philadelphia, with the other half in another room in London.

What have five weeks (I started early) of social isolation taught me? First, that hot-desking is dead, thank God. The idea that you should be forced to spend today at the desk where yesterday Eunice from Chemistry was hacking up her lungs (“Some sort of 24 hour thing”) will be illegal by the end of next year. Everyone who was part of the “abolish private office space” movement should be forced to march through the streets — at two metres separation — with a placard round their necks saying “Sorry for our unwarranted attack on human dignity”.

Do we need offices, at all? I’ve found it easier, not harder, to keep leading my own global team. From 1-on-1 catch-ups, to management team meetings, to seminars and town halls and performance reviews: every aspect of managing a group of globally-distributed workers has been easier to conduct from the study at home than from a hastily-booked “meeting space” cubicle at the fringes of the open-plan hell. In my (pharmaceutical) industry, the only people who actually need to be on site are the lab scientists. The rest of us can work remotely. The company works fine.

It works better than fine, in fact; better than the old-normal. Once the curve has been flattened, and isolation officially terminated, the question will loom: why leave the house at 6am to travel to Stevenage on the train every day, when the same work can be done, more comfortably, from home? Why rush back to the old-normal, the Benthamite Panopticon hell, at all?

How will HR react, I wonder, post-Covid-19, if I tell them “I’m not flying to Philadelphia for work, anymore. It’s not necessary — this we proved, in Spring and Summer 2020 — and it therefore unnecessarily raises both my susceptibility risk for infection, and that of the people with whom such travel brings me into contact?” We’ll see.

That’s fine for you, Archer, middle-class manager in your Barnet semi with its nice wee garden and the impossibly patient Mr Keith as companion. What about people who live in inner city flats. With children.

I’m not proposing that social isolation should be enforced forever, merely that we stop insisting on social mixing for the sake of it. More people are like me than you suspect, if you’ve read my enjoyment of isolation with horror. Many more. And if you give us freedom to be just that little bit more physically distant from now on, well, that just leaves more space for everyone else. (Robbie Gibb tweeted a survey that shows around a fifth to a quarter of us plan to reduce social mixing in the future.)

But what about those millions on whom you depend: the health-care workers and delivery drivers and postmen and policemen and soldiers and … the backbone of the country. People who can’t work from home. What changes for them in the new-normal?

As the cheering from our doorsteps every Thursday demonstrates, the value of labour and the dignity of the labourer has — at last — been re-valorised. If we care less about what the university-educated think about Brexit or immigration or anything in the next few years, then good. Having a degree in something useless from somewhere rubbish never made your opinion more important than that of the bin man; in cost-benefit terms, each bin man is worth more than a thousand psychology graduates from North London Tech.

I’m married to an electrician. It’s Keith’s experience of globalisation that has ever shaped my politics: transcontinental supply chains (so he can’t choose to buy parts from people he knows and trusts, because his company finds cheaper alternatives from strangers he’ll never meet in countries he’ll never visit); open-doors immigration (so anyone’s qualification from any EU country had instantly the same jobs market value as his own); the downward pressure on wages — in our household, hatred of Blairite globalisation was never theoretical.

If you’re a middle- or senior-manager in a MegaCorp, you’ll know the pressure to offshore and outsource, in putatively British companies, is real. I hope that the new-normal resets this a bit. It’s too much to hope that the Labour Party (a sack of anti-Semitic rats fighting enablers of anti-Semitic rats, both of them dependent on the votes of those psychology graduates) will change. But the Conservative Party has noticed: we are kept alive by the labour of those whose opinions are despised by Labour.

Meanwhile, there has been a collapse in trust between citizen and journalist — and no wonder. The political lobby, in particular, has behaved lamentably, clinging to their dreary, invented gotchas, and indulging in preening displays of scientific ignorance, even as the old-normal paradigm shifted from under their feet. They remind me of backbench MPs at the time of the expenses scandal: in complete denial that anything needs to change. “But this is how things are done, you see,” they puff, as the sandcastle of self-belief they’ve carefully patted into proud existence is washed away by reality’s tidal wave.

Not only the media’s deficiencies have been on daily display. The official from WHO pretending not to hear the question about Taiwan will haunt that intergovernmental quango. I signed a petition from the sort of organisation I’d normally avoid, demanding action against “wet markets”. I don’t think animal welfare will be left to student activists anymore, not when the link between global pandemics that kill millions and the torture of sentient beings for unnecessary meat is so startingly, unavoidably visible. SARS-COV2 wasn’t the first zoonotic jump; we all know who’s responsible. I don’t think we’ll tolerate either health quangos or corporations looking the other way any longer.

Not only geopolitical outfits and MegaCorps will change in the new-normal. More parochially, perhaps we’ll weigh up the costs of devolved assemblies. An email last week from Sainsbury’s CEO told me the company is ready to match up its customer lists with the database of English citizens felt by the government to be most vulnerable and in need of food deliveries, but: “We are waiting for the databases for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and will contact vulnerable customers in those areas as soon as we are able.”

In the name of God, why are there four lists to do one thing across One Nation? “To give Sturgeon material for a press conference” isn’t a good enough answer — not with national GDP likely to drop by around 35%. Like asking a gynaecologist to take time out from visiting her multiple homes to give you advice on immunology, devolution is an expense whose cost cannot easily be justified.

My 74-year old mother is in Scotland and has the sort of lung condition that would make her death from Covid-19 a near certainty should she become infected with SARS-COV2. That she could have had food delivered safely, last week, from Sainsbury’s, if only we hadn’t spent decades indulging the psychological inadequacies of Salmond and Sturgeon, feels pretty fucking unacceptable.

Wishing viruses out of existence has been one of the hallmarks of my life, since HIV first reared its hideous head, but ‘wishing’ didn’t defeat HIV, any more than shouting GOTCHA! at a government press conference. Don’t die of ignorance warned Sir Norman Fowler, and while too many did, most of us didn’t, and not accidentally. Decades of pharmaceutical research and changes in (sub)cultural norms created a new-normal era that ran from the late 1990s until roughly four weeks ago.

You probably didn’t notice those changes, that coming-into-being of the new-normal, unless you’re roughly my middle-age, and gay. But the same focus on pharmaceutical research — on science, darling! — and effecting changes in cultural norms: that’s the way we’ll defeat SARS-COV2.

There’s nothing special about the virus; it just wants to live.  The universe co-inhabited by the viral and human genome couldn’t care less about the outcome, so shaking your fist in anger and insisting on the supremacy of the way we lived until February 2020 won’t, to put it mildly, be efficacious.

Instead, let’s start the conversation about what needs to change, to maximise the probability of human success. The fight for the (new) good life starts here. Don’t die of nostalgia for the old one.


Graeme Archer is a statistician and writer.

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Benedict Waterson
Benedict Waterson
4 years ago

” I’m not proposing that social isolation should be enforced forever ” — Well I’m proposing that it should.

Paul Rogers
Paul Rogers
4 years ago

Superb. I find myself agreeing with all of this.
I worked in Pharma (as an IT supplier) for many years and circled the globe many times needlessly. I now delight in not doing the dreaded daily commute into the City. It was bloody awful.
Strangely, my kids are completely comfortable with the new world. My eldest even had three months in the city, hated the commute and left. Very wise.
There is a new normal coming for many (not all) of us. The transition is accelerated by current events.

Johanna Louw
Johanna Louw
4 years ago
Reply to  Paul Rogers

I am fortunate that I can work from home and have financial support but it is clear that the lives of millions of people have been blighted by this crazy commuting, particularly in London and the South-East. Most office work can easily be done from home using modern tech.

Mark Corby
Mark Corby
4 years ago
Reply to  Johanna Louw

Many more lives will be “blighted” by the panic and hysteria that has gripped the nation thanks to Chinese Death Flu, would you not agree ‘Rob Roy’?

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago

A great article that excoriates all the right people and groups – not least the press – and thank you for expressing that which so many of us have known for so long:

‘Having a degree in something useless from somewhere rubbish never made your opinion more important than that of the bin man; in cost-benefit terms, each bin man is worth more than a thousand psychology graduates from North London Tech.’

Ironically – given that your partner is an electrician – perhaps the most intellectually curious person I know (apart from myself) is an electrician who is part of my wine tasting group. Although Dutch he reads great English writers in English and is far better read than all the graduates I know, most of whom are preternaturally dim.

John Ellis
John Ellis
4 years ago

Graeme, I could not agree more. I suspect those who have done very well from the status quo will make any change from our old norms as difficult as they can – but it’s definitely a splendid chance to make some much-needed changes to the way we live. I certainly intend to follow many of the suggestions you make here, particularly regarding working from home and valuing local labour and locally-grown produce.

Lee Johnson
Lee Johnson
4 years ago

Difficult to improve upon Graeme’s superb post.

But I would just like to add two things to the list of ‘These add value to the business.’
1. Team activity days (bonding by sweating together)
2. Office Christmas parties (bonding by getting rat-faced together)
3. Pre-meeting banter and repartee (setting the hierarchy in order of extrovertuity (?))

David Waring
David Waring
4 years ago

Has anyone heard of or even read ” Quiet

The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
by Susan Cain
Perhaps the human race would not be in this current pile of poo if leaders considered matters before leaping in and creating chaos.

Patrick Cosgrove
Patrick Cosgrove
4 years ago

The lessons of the Coronavirus pandemic could create good arguments for shifting away from our present model of globalisation. The inevitable move to greater national self-sufficiency could work alongside redrawn international alliances on more of a north-south basis. To some extent they are already there. North and South America have strong cultural and linguistic connections because of the Hispanic populations. They are also physically connected. China, S.E.Asia and Australasia are already closely linked for trade and, like it or not, China will be wanting Australian coal for a while yet. Europe and Scandinavia are already well connected. They are also dependent on seasonal labour from North Africa for the supply of fruit and vegetables. Russia is firmly entrenched with Iran, and do we really want to keep trying for that impossible peace deal? I’m not suggesting hermetically sealed silos, but north south trade is kinder on the environment than shipping goods from anywhere to anywhere, and time differences are almost irrelevant. Dividing the world into slightly easier chunks might also make it easier to resolve the north south poverty divide as the enlightened self-interest involved is easier to understand being a bit closer to home.

wgeoff.56
wgeoff.56
4 years ago

A very interesting article nd I share the same sentiments. However, I think it will take a significant amount of sustained pressure to overcome resistance to changes in the business and social models that prevailed before the lockdown.

d.tjarlz
d.tjarlz
4 years ago
Reply to  wgeoff.56

Yes, the inflection point will need to be bent to our will.

Martin Terrell
Martin Terrell
4 years ago

Thank you for this – I hope we all remember that some jobs are more equal than others. Agree of course, but one query. Many of us office types can work from home some of the time but probably not all of the time. In which case, how do we use our expensive office space efficiently?

Scheherazade Smith
Scheherazade Smith
4 years ago

It’s been a very long time since I have loved anyone’s writing as much as I love Graeme Archer’s. This is yet another witty and insightful treasure from a tremendous mind. Thank you.

motardanglais
motardanglais
4 years ago

Very little to disagree with there. I am now retired, my younger wife has worked from home for years. It’s wonderful not to be bothered by the the inane chatter and unpleasant odour of the television, football, and celebrity loving masses. And we are less likely to catch their diseases.

Victoria victoria.cannon
Victoria victoria.cannon
4 years ago

Loved this article. Agreed with everything I read. My favourite bit was obviously the bin man and the ‘graduate’. So true. A degree in something useless from somewhere rubbish …. there’s a hell of a lot of those around now. And having one certainly does not make your views on Brexit and immigration more valid or important. 10/10 Mr Archer.

Joe Smith
Joe Smith
4 years ago

“In any case, historically speaking, it was the relatively un-pandemicked century between Spanish flu and Covid-19 that was the statistical oddity, not living with the risks presented by a fatal infectious disease.”

Only if you ignore the annual flu!

d.tjarlz
d.tjarlz
4 years ago

“Team player” means whatever the middle management “captains” want it to mean. No thought given to the idea that not every player should play in the “scrum”, or that some might do better on the “wing” or as “full back”.

Jacquie
Jacquie
4 years ago

Bit of a sweeping statement there! It is not so much that the world is/was attuned to the gregarious and the extrovert, as it is the failure of all common sense and the existence of a common fragility. A lot of what you might classify as ‘extroversion’ is in reality just the fragility of our (technologically) constantly on, constantly connected world. Modern generations have not learned to be alone, or just be, so the constant pressure to be connected is just a manifestation of their personal emotional and psychological fragility.

I am a team player for exactly as long as it takes to get a job done, and then I want my own space, company of my own choosing, and activities away from the herd. To my mind, being an ‘extrovert’ – in today’s world – is a skill that can be learned. Don’t let my Blanchard-esque ‘O’ fool you – I do know the definition of the word, and I still think it can be learned. We are all playing at games all of the time. You just have to gain the (social) skill, and ‘get good’. Perhaps that is the ambivert in me speaking, I have the best of both worlds. If I don’t feel it, I can fake it … it gets the job done.

As for your life outside of work – you only have yourself to blame for that one. 😀

Jacquie
Jacquie
4 years ago
Reply to  Jacquie

introverts/extroverts are likely born not made

Not exactly accurate – genetic to a degree, but flexible and open to change based on environment and nurture.

with roughly 40% having some degree of introversion.

too many outgoing types see their temprament as the norm

As you yourself point out, only 40% have a degree of introversion – the norm is therefore extroversion.

As a child I was so painfully, dysfunctionally introverted that it manfiested in an inability to participate in simple, fun stuff like a four year old’s birthday party. My broken and dysfunctional family life should have exacerbated that, but if you met me today, you would class me as an out and out extrovert. I learned that, and I am completely comfortable as an extrovert. It is a skill, in the same way that you can learn ‘class’ skills like how to behave in ‘polite society’.

I think introversion has more to do with genetic physical attributes. Do you now any good looking people who aren’t extroverts?

Jacquie
Jacquie
4 years ago
Reply to  Jacquie

The answer to my question is already established in many academic fields – better looking people are by-and-large more sucessfull in life, have an easier time of things, and are, again by-and-large, extroverted. Of course there is an exception to every rule.

I am not offering a remedy for introversion, your’s or anyone’s – but neither am I looking for a cure for my now extroverted character.

You can paint introversion in whatever touchy-feely coulours you like in the name of social equality. But consider this … Research shows a consistent positive association between extroversion and reproductive success, and since extroversion is the norm, one would almost say it is a biological imperative. Humankind would not exist without it. Introversion is a flaw in temperament, at least from a biological perspective. Just own it. We all have flaws. I am rubbish at sport. I own that, and I don’t let it diminish me. Don’t worry, I rubbed my magic ‘I-am-just-stating-the-obvious’ talisman before I typed that last bit.

Thanks to Graeme Archer for taking a well deserved swipe at the chummy, genial and utterly shallow world of the extravert.

You call extroverts “utterly shallow” like you somehow won the medal for deep thinking because you are a social shrinking violet. Seems more like deep navel-gazing from over here. And look, here we are having a deep and meaningful converstion about what is apparently an existential crisis for introverts – how to live in an extroverted world.

I know ‘fringes’ of society want to be treated equally with those who form the bell of the curve, but nature isn’t so forgiving. We may have tried to demolish ‘pecking order’ in our allegedly advanced human societies, but instinctively we all know who the ‘alphas’ in our society are – and they are never introverts.

Victoria Cooper
Victoria Cooper
4 years ago

Excellent piece Mr Archer (don’t you wish also that we could drop the christian name epidemic?). I could have written it myself (only, obviously, I didn’t). Particularly agreed with the re-evaluation of the what I now deem to describe as the helpful society. As a species we will never be drone-equal but we should all be valued equally.

jesse.j.wheeler
jesse.j.wheeler
4 years ago

I too in pharma (formerly GSK). My entire family lives in Upstate, NY, yet for the last 15 years I’ve lived in Boston, MA as I’ve been OBLIGATED to come in to the office with some regularity. 100% agree that my function in Clinical Development could be done entirely remotely. Looking forward to seeing the impact of some of the changes that will come once this “inadvisable enemy” is destroyed.

Jamila Smith
Jamila Smith
4 years ago

I heartily agree with your assessment regarding working from home. The concentration of jobs in major cities or coastal areas (US) has depopulated areas. A shift would revitalize some of these areas as well as provide much more affordable housing. And other businesses would spring up to cater to the increased population. This is the type of redistribution I can get behind. My concern is that companies would try to offshore these jobs.

georgeguyfolger
georgeguyfolger
4 years ago

Great article Graeme. The thought of having to commute daily again scares me and I’m one of the fortunate few to be able to walk or cycle in. I think some kind of situation where you go into the office once or twice a week, or even once or twice month, would be more feasible.

I like the fact there is no more ‘facetime’. I don’t have to make any embarrassed excuses when I log off versus when I left the office at 6pm whilst my colleagues made sure they stay an extra 30 minutes to keep the facade up. I don’t need to pretend to be working at 4pm on Friday when I could actually learn something interesting or have some justified downtime when it’s as bit quieter.

The main difference I’ve noticed is that work becomes more ‘output’ based. Can you meet your deadlines and do the work you’ve been given? If yes, then great, you’ve passed the test.

This equals macro management by default. As long as you’re conscientious (and want to keep your job) you should have the motivation to do the work set to you. If not, then maybe you need supervision. The tiring thing about the office is all the corporate BS; showing your hard work, staying late, ‘grafting’. It really does feel like such an antiquated concept.

If anything it should lead to much greater efficiency. The workers that can stay productive (or at least meet or exceed their output) without supervision will do well. Those that can’t will either have to adapt or stay in the office. Physical office space will be reduced. I know I’ll be looking for future opportunities that are part of this dynamic progression towards working from home.

I’m by no means a Marxist but I can’t help but think Marx would be turning in his grave given the potential for a ‘workers revolution’ of epic scale after this unprecedented societal upheaval. Interesting times.

Johanna Louw
Johanna Louw
4 years ago

Fantastic article until he started attacking the legitimate devolved governments of the Celtic Nations. If Graeme is a Scot then he does not understand the history of his own country. Scotland is, after all, an older country than England as a unified polity. There was massive support for the creation of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. If the devolved assembly of Scotland were abolished now there would be significant political and social unrest in Scotland, and rightly so since Parlamaid na h-Alba is a lawfully constituted assembly whose power is fundamentally democratic, which is more than one can say for either Westminster (both houses) and the unelected Windsor clan. The poor performance of the SNP in health and education is an argument FOR full Scottish independence as it demonstrates that the assembly does not have sufficient authority. In this sense, it cannot be held fully responsible either for its successes or failures since it does not have full budgetary and/or political control of the devolved functions.

What a disappointing anti-Scottish diatribe in an otherwise excellent and insightful article.

Steven Roberts
Steven Roberts
4 years ago
Reply to  Johanna Louw

What a disappointing anti-English diatribe!

Johanna Louw
Johanna Louw
4 years ago
Reply to  Steven Roberts

Not anti-English. Anti-union. There is a difference and you must learn to understand it.

Mark Corby
Mark Corby
4 years ago
Reply to  Steven Roberts

You have obviously touched a raw nerve with Thales, or as we should call him, Rob Roy.(RR). Well done!
However, all is not lost, for despite his obvious anger with Graeme Archer’s damming essay, he does acknowledge the “poor performance of the SNP in health and education”.
The statement “significant political and social unrest in Scotland” is presumably a bombastic threat of no consequence.
Finally do you happen know what RR means by ‘Parlamaid an h-Alba? Because I’m dammed if I do.

Mark Corby
Mark Corby
4 years ago
Reply to  Johanna Louw

What a disappointment that you should conclude your response to Mr Archer’s splendid essay with a rant on behalf of the SNP. The malice of your comments make you completely unworthy of the pseudonym Thales of Miletus, might I a suggest a change to Rob Roy?
However you will be delighted to know that the enormous cost of this Chinese Death Flu (CDF) epidemic will mean, as Lord Jonathan Sumption so accurately predicted, a massive increase in public debt. It will be a perfect opportunity for ‘England’ to cease subsidising the parasitical ‘fringe’, eg: Scotland, Ulster and perhaps even Wales. Ulster alone with 80% of its jobs in Public Sector costs more annually than the late EU. Scotland, which never seems to have stopped whinging since the Darien fiasco, is still in receipt of the Barnet dole, and much other largesse besides. Additionally the three ‘National Assemblies, that each of these peripheral areas enjoy, represent yet another layer of parasitical bureaucrats that England is expected to pay for.
Perhaps CDF will be your salvation, but beware of what you wish for.

Johanna Louw
Johanna Louw
4 years ago
Reply to  Mark Corby

We’re in agreement then – Scotland must be an independent nation and take responsibility for itself. Then Wales, Cornwall and Northern Ireland can follow.

Johanna Louw
Johanna Louw
4 years ago
Reply to  Mark Corby

There was nothing ‘rant’ about it. I expressed an opinion that you did not like and it made you angry. In any case, I clearly said that I enjoyed the rest of the Mr. Archer’s article and I am in fundamental agreement with him. In a free society we are free to express our opinions as we choose – even if it upsets you.

Dave Smith
Dave Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  Johanna Louw

The monarchy is no love of mine but surely we in England were lumbered with the Stuarts from Scotland and had to cut off the head of one of therm to make them see reason. When we eventually got rid of them in 1688 we were still lumbered with Mary and Anne and even George One was a distant relative of the clan. Then unelected or not the Scotch connection is to an Englishman not one to celebrate.
When you get full independence you can keep them .

Mark Corby
Mark Corby
4 years ago
Reply to  Dave Smith

Well said. As I’m sure ‘Rob Roy’ will confirm, the Stuart’s were originally descended from an Anglo-Norman thug called Walter fitz Alan.
When the last proper Scotch, King of Scotland, the drunken sex pest Alexander III fell off his horse, at night, in an inebriated state in 1286, the Scotch crown was fought over by five leading families, all descendants of Anglo-Norman thugs, with Robert the Bruce emerging as the eventual winner. However the Bruce’s were soon to be succeeded by the fitz Alan’s by now renamed Stewart.
Later still this would turn into Stuart.
England’s greatest mistake was to ‘restore’ this wretched family, thanks to the treachery of General Monk, in 1660. We have had live with the ‘corrupt’ consequences ever since.

Robin Bury
Robin Bury
4 years ago

so anyone’s qualification from any EU country had instantly the same jobs market value as his own); the downward pressure on wages “ Well no actually. Immigrant labour from the EU does low paid work UK spoilt welfare state people refuse to do and these immigrants have downward pressure on their wages. You seem at heart a nationalist and this virus has brought out the worst in the increase and spread of the virus of nationalism worldwide.

Jacquie
Jacquie
4 years ago
Reply to  Robin Bury

Nationalism would have slowed the spread of Covid-19. Open borders on the other hand … Just saying …