Rather than endless speculation about which leisure activities are likely to return, and when, and what it will be like to dine out again, go to the pub etc, I’d like to see a lot more real talk about how many lives we as a society might be able to save by March.

I’ve thought about this a lot and I think that two things are needed if we’re to have any hope of a better world: love/compassion for everyone in the world, and a hatred of all the trappings of the world we have now.

As far as I can make out, COVID has revealed to us that we have exactly the opposite: deep love for the trappings and rituals of contemporary life, and nowhere near the level of compassion for others that we claim to have.

Worse, I think we use our love of all our material habits as a proxy for our love of others, and a smokescreen for our lack of compassion.

As a society, it seems to me, we’ve found it easier to talk about saving businesses, institutions, and certain deeply ingrained leisure habits than saving lives.

After all, we were offered pretty much a straight choice: cling to the texture of daily life we find so comforting, or put all our effort into making sure people didn’t die from COVID. We chose the former.

The reason we were able to do that, I think, is because we very quickly, on a large scale, sublimated the reality of death in favour of the mirage of a return to all the behaviours and activities we’re so attached to.

We could still turn that around. With a vaccine now rolling out, there’s a time limit on how long we will need to do the difficult work of protecting each other. It’s absolutely achievable to have a last push at saving as many people as possible.

And yet every day all I’m seeing is more waffle about the return of a system of living that was already depressing, unhealthy, unjust and unsustainable.

The truth is that we effectively made our choices through over a decade of austerity - a project which not only deprived people of basic protections, but ingrained the belief that there was simply so way of doing better.

Then COVID arrived and we just kept thinking according to exactly the same pattern: protect wealth and leisure, and let those who we should be taking care of go to the wall.

COVID is not the first thing to reveal to me the extent to which the system of living we’ve chosen depends for its success on wide scale suffering, but I think it will prove to be the most irreversible.

I’ll be coming out of this with so much compassion for the people I share a world with, and such a profound hatred of the death machine we have determinedly built together. Reconciling those things will be a lifetime project for everyone, I think.