I just spent a somewhat disheartening afternoon with my partners fully vaccinated mum.

I learned she only likes to shop at her local Waitrose now because they still count people in and out of the door. Busy (normal) shops literally frighten her...

...because "you just don't know who's going to be in there and how careful they're being".

She still won't hug family "just in case", even though she was once the keenest hugger I've ever met.

She's not the person she was. She seemed sad. Anxious. Lost.

And variants. Well, yes. There was that conversation too. But it didn't matter how enthusiastically I tried to explain the wonders and complexity (beyond antibodies) of the human immune system they were still, "of concern".

She doesn't feel safe.

Did we really spend a year enacting almost exclusively self-flagellatory policies in the vain hope of protecting the vulnerable and the NHS, whilst hoping for safe efficacious vaccines to arrive, just to end up here?

Rather than protecting the vulnerable we appear to have bombarded them with so many absurd rules and decontextualised statistics that some have been rendered permanently anxious, now only capable of a partial existence governed by perceived covid risk.

I know many will need time to readjust, but it's so hard watching people I care about, spending the time they have left, obsessively worrying about a disease which almost certainly presents a lesser danger to them now than any one of the multiple ailments they already suffer.

Was this the plan, to save lives only to simultaneously extract all the joy out of them?

For every life we hoped to save, how many have been stolen?

I think it's time we gave them the courage to take their lives back, before it's too late.