Queen Elizabeth II popularised the Latin phrase annus horribilis – which means ‘horrible year’ – when, back in 1992, she delivered a speech marking the fortieth anniversary of her ascension to the throne.

Her exact words were: “1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an annus horribilis.”

That was a year during which three royal marriages collapsed, a fire destroyed more than 100 rooms in Windsor Castle and the peccadillos of the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, and her lover, John Bryan, scandalised Britain and the monarchy.

As 2020 draws to a close, I feel the way the British monarch felt at the end of 1992, what with the misery that Covid-19 has inflicted on all of us since early this year.

For me and my family, this horrible disease is not just something one reads about in the newspapers or watches on TV. My wife and I experienced its symptoms back in July: fatigue, loss of appetite, pounding headaches, high fever, copious sweating, excruciating cramps, body aches, incessant coughing. As I stated in an earlier instalment of this column, when we took Covid-19 tests, my wife’s results came out positive, while mine came out negative. To this day, I believe that was a false negative.

While we did live to see another day, others were not so fortunate; at the time of writing, the pandemic had consigned about 21 500 South Africans to the grave, while the worldwide death toll stood at 1.46-million.

As we all know, the pandemic has caused more than just a health crisis. International borders have had to be closed to curb its spread, while various other measures have been taken to achieve the same objective. The upshot has been job losses on a wide scale. In October, banking group Nedbank estimated the extent of the Covid-19-induced employment bloodbath at about 500 000, much lower than its earlier forecast of 1.6-million, which it published in April. If Nedbank’s projection is anything to go by, it will not be until the second half of 2023 that South Africa’s labour market will return to its prepandemic level.

Now, the Bible talks about God being no respecter of persons, meaning He shows no discrimination between rich and poor. In some respects, Covid-19 has been the same, with both well-heeled elites and those that don’t have two pennies to rub together having been hard-hit. A classic example of this – before nations started easing border closures – was when African politicians and others with loads of cash were no longer able to make a beeline for foreign health facilities should they take ill. Trapped by the pandemic within their country’s borders, they were forced to seek treatment at the very health facilities they have largely neglected for the longest time. And those who are into businesses have seen their enterprises collapse or the enterprises’ profitability curtailed.

Like many people in Mzansi, I’m worried by the possibility of a second wave of Covid-19, with infections in the Eastern Cape province having sprung back above 3 000 a day at the end of November. As many commentators have pointed out, many of us have grown weary of wearing a face mask each time we step out of our homes, sanitising or washing our hands frequently and maintaining the stipulated social distance. With the festive season beckoning, it is conceivable that many are going to drop their guard, with the result that the gains that have been made during the past few months will be reversed and we will see a second spike in new infections.

As a ‘Covid survivor’, my plea is: let’s continue to social-distance, wear our masks and sanitise our hands. Surely, no one wants the new year to be another annus horribilis.