The Sunday Post view: 2021’s sucker punch may have left us reeling but 2022? We go again

We used up all the IM Jolly jokes this time last year but, even if we hadn’t, there’s no good way of saying it’s been another helluva year.

Rikki Fulton might have found a new punchline – “Do you want super Covid?” “Well, if it’s all the same to you, I’ll have the soup” – but for most of us the joke’s worn thinner than Boris Johnson’s excuses.

Exhausted after another year of living in limbo we were staggering but just about on our feet when a sucker punch in the last round left us reeling around the ring again.

Is Omicron less serious than Delta? Well, it looks that way, according to the latest science, but a lot might depend on how many jags you’ve had, if any. We already know it’s a viral wildfire, however, and, if even a tiny proportion of the new cases need intensive care, there won’t be an emergency bed left in the country.

So it’s beginning to look a lot like lockdown and the national mood seems more febrile than festive with the needle, for most of us, stuck firmly in the red between fed-up and furious.

Our first minister has every right to be as frustrated as the rest of us, incidentally, but irritably rubbishing newspapers’ stories and sneerily dismissing journalists’ questions is not particularly helpful. She did it three times last week and three times the stories and the inquiries turned out to be justified. To (wrongly) encourage the idea our mainstream media somehow cannot be trusted is ill-judged at a time when she has a public health message to deliver and trust and good faith in our public life could not be more critical or under more scrutiny.

But that’s just our gripe, everyone has their own, although most have an awful familiarity. From families apart at Christmas to loved ones in care homes, from shielding the vulnerable to children’s education.

Most pressing of all, perhaps, is the economic impact on those industries, retail, hospitality and the others, which were desperately hoping for a turn at Christmas, hopes broken by Omicron. For staff, it is a desperately worrying time. The short term is treacherous and the medium term doesn’t bear thinking about. Some kind of furlough is needed and needed urgently.

We are getting better at Covid though. Our knowledge is deeper and wider; our vaccines are working; and lessons are being learned. There will be other variants, since the world’s richest countries continue to pay only lip service to vaccinating the poorest. There will be more moments of peril.

However, we are moving forward and, whatever happens, we press on. Elsewhere in the paper, we return to the care home we visited this time last year where the residents are as stoic and inspiring as any first minister, prime minister or president.

One of them, Jane Boston, 95, sums up their spirit: “My advice? Make the best of the bad days and enjoy the good ones. We have a bit more living to do yet. Tell yourself we have got this far and we won’t be beaten.”

So do what Jane does and, in the meantime, from all of us to all of you, have a happy new year.