Freddy Gray

Technology can save the world — from South Korea to Singapore to, um, the Isle of Wight. Oh yes. Britain is catching up at super-fibre-optic-lightning speed with the superpowers of tech in its fight against Covid-19. We’ve developed a snazzy ‘track and trace’ app, that's already been trialled at an RAF base in Yorkshire, and the government now intends to roll it out in a pilot scheme on the lovely Isle of Wight and the Scottish Isles, Health Secretary Matt Hancock will announce on Monday. Sod the threats to privacy and liberty — let’s get people-monitoring done! One small problem — the internet on the Isle of Wight doesn’t really work. Mobile telephone reception is notoriously rubbish; so too is broadband. It's a common gripe down here.

‘What did you do in the coronavirus crisis, dad?' ‘Well son, I’m glad you ask. I helped make a very important video, entitled ‘You Clap for Me Now’. It used a technique we call passive-aggression to make people realise what horrible racists they had been towards immigrants. The video was really a poem, set to rousing piano music. The Guardian wrote about it and it got millions of shares. Most of them were 'outrage' shares, from people who hated it, but that's because Britain is racist.' 'Wow dad, you are a hero! Were you a key worker, too?' 'No son, I'm an entertainer and an online 'slacktivist.' 'Oh. Cool.' That, I imagine, is how in the future Tez Ilyas might converse with his progeny, if he has any.

According to psychologists, denial is a common defence mechanism. We humans reject truths which we find too uncomfortable to bear. When reality becomes too painful, we refuse to acknowledge it. The more evidence mounts against us, the more we insist that everything is ok. I fear I might be doing precisely that in reaction to the coronavirus pandemic. Every day I watch the global death toll ticking up — that awful exponential growth we keep being told about. I see the images from the hospitals. I read the tweets of NHS frontline staff saying how desperate things are, or the Facebook posts of people mourning the dead. And I think: it can’t be that bad. Isn’t this all hysteria? Aren’t people always dying in hospitals?

Our daughter Clementine, 5, has just decided what she wants to be when she grows up. ‘A cleaner .... and a mother,’ she says, in that order. Her mother, my wife Taffeta, winces at Clemmie’s ambition. Middle-class rules dictate that we should try to knock such traditional notions out of little girls’ brains. It’s not feminist and therefore bad. But why? If this health crisis has taught us anything, it is that cleaning is one of the most important things human beings can do. And even in our horridly secular age, we all know deep down that motherhood is sacred. We need mothers now more than ever. The most key workers of all are parents — and mothers especially It’s odd.

The media has not covered itself in glory in its response to the coronavirus crisis, it’s fair to say. Yet one well-known journalist who really has excelled has been the Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Not only was he one of the first major TV pundits in the world to take the threat of the virus seriously, he also intervened with Donald Trump by visiting the president at his house in Mar-a Lago to discuss the gravity of the situation. I caught up with my friend Tucker yesterday on my podcast, and we talked about the media’s failings, Trump’s response, how the Democrats are going to junk Joe Biden, and not killing iguanas. Most of all, we talked about death and the theological implications of this terrible problem.