Have Faith And We Will Defeat This Deadly Virus

One by one, the happy signposts of spring are being lost to us this year. Mother’s Day was spent in lockdown, the clocks going forward turned the normal promise of languid, sunlit evenings into a taunt rather than a delight.

And now Easter, the most significant landmark, will be experienced not as a moment of celebration but as a time for steeling ourselves against the coronavirus epidemic.

The past week showed us that any hope we might have had of avoiding the sort of appalling daily death tolls endured by Italy and Spain was a forlorn one. This disease does not discriminate between countries. Any lighter toll in one nation compared to another is most likely to be explained by the different stage the epidemic has reached in different places.

In Britain, we may face the peak of our outbreak at Easter time. The joy felt every Easter Sunday by Christians will be tempered next weekend by intense feelings of grief in the here and now. And the wider cultural celebration of Easter, with its holiday excursions, is effectively cancelled too.

It is hard not to be bludgeoned into numbness by unfolding events. Only a couple of weeks ago the notion of 100 daily deaths was traumatising. But so much worse has the epidemic become that losses on such a scale would now be greeted as a sign that we were out of the woods and heading into sunlit uplands.

So the Queen’s address to the nation, to be broadcast this evening, marks one of the most sombre moments of her 68-year reign. Her Majesty’s message has been awaited for some time but was always intended, from the moment of its conception, to serve as a rallying point for the nation as it confronted the darkest point in the crisis. That it should be broadcast today tells us that moment is very close at hand.

As someone who lived through the Blitz, the Queen is one of a select band who can say they have stared worse foes than coronavirus in the face and come through. There is almost nothing else in living memory that has brought death to these shores at such a rate.