I was away in Cypress when the UK finally started responding to SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19 in anything like a serious fashion, but after I got home it was another week until today’s butt-load of serious measures, including closing social venues combined with various economic measures to help people and businesses survive. By this point we – the whole of Omnicom globally – had been working from home for a week.
So this seemed a good time to start some sort of virus weeknotes.
At work we’ve been experimenting with open video channels. At least, I say we; I mostly mean that I’ve been keeping a Teams video chat open and other people have occasionally slid into it. Most of my colleagues have lots of other meetings, but some have tried to pop in between them. Self-reporting, these little bits of more social contact have helped. Today we replaced our usual in-office drinks with a video chat happy hour, with people sharing some things they’d been doing outside work, and their drink of choice. A number of people picked a drink that wasn’t from one of our clients, which given we just won the account of a boatload of drinks is pretty shameful.
With friends and family, I’ve been on WhatsApp a lot more than usual, sharing coping strategies and probably being more in touch than I usually am.
At home, I’ve been cooking more (easier to be bothered when I don’t have a commute), and finally putting up pictures I had framed last year but never quite got round to hanging. Here for instance above my desk is a Chris Riddell line drawing that my sister gave me (and on the right a map that she also gave me, but which has been there for a while):
The country is full of crazy and/or stupid people. Just merrily going to the gym, or the pub. Lots of them shaking hands. You can blame this partly on Boris Johnson’s attempts to keep people calm by delaying the introduction of serious measures to contain the spread of the virus, but at least some of those people should be showing more personal responsibility.
I’ve left the house every day or two this week, and the latest government guidance doesn’t say I shouldn’t, but I’ll continue to avoid other people (in case any of them turns out to be nasty, brutish, and short – solitary not really being a problem right now, and poor making no difference).
Stay safe.