Country Living with Francis Farragher

A few weeks back in a casual social chat with an individual in the business of medicine, I happened to ask the question: “Is there much Covid around these days?” half-expecting a response of “very little’ but was taken aback somewhat with the reply of: “Every second one has it.”

It took me back to the Sunday evening of March 15th, 2020, when I took a rather light-hearted view in the local that the pubs could be closed down for a week or two ‘due to the Covid’. What followed took myself, the whole country, and probably the rest of the world by storm.

In hindsight, it really was the strangest of times as we were limited to five kilometre journeys from our homes – even on bikes – while our little sojourns to shops had to be undertaken behind heavily masked faces.

The strangest of times as we drove to Galway for a day’s toil with the ‘essential worker’ letter placed close to the tax disc, ready to be produced at the inevitable Garda checkpoints along the main roads.

By August of 2020, the whole Covid business had claimed a few major political scalps including EU Commissioner, Phil Hogan; Minister Dara Calleary and Senator Jerry Buttimer. No more of driving around the country as you pleased.

My little medical conversation a few weeks back endured into a second pint and l posed the question as to what was the medical treatment now for the virus, only to be told, that there is none. “A bit of rest and take your beating for a few days, and then it’ll fizzle out,” I was told.

There is of course no more of the daily figures for Covid infections, having seemingly slipped into [thankfully] the ‘Vauxhall Conference’ of worrying medical conditions, and I wondered why or how this had happened. There were though too, the saddest of incidents in the first two years of the pandemic, when elderly parents and grandparents passed away in nursing homes, thinking that they had been forgotten by offsprings who weren’t allowed in to visit them in their closing days: not just right, was it?