This podcast happened to launch a week or two into the first lockdown in spring 2020, and so for the first year almost all we could talk about on the show was coronavirus. But since normality finally returned last year, it feels like nobody wants to talk about the pandemic again. Yet reconsidering those traumatic, confusing, revolutionary few years might help us think afresh about how the world is changing. In the first of two episodes, we look back at coronavirus and in particular the social, medical and spiritual issues the pandemic threw up. Was lockdown worth it, know we now more about the cost for young people? Were we right to embrace the rapidly-produced novel vaccines as our way out of the pandemic? And why is there a stubbornly persistent excess death rate worldwide, long after the virus stopped killing people in large numbers?