James Asquith

This week is one year since the WHO declared Covid-19 a pandemic. To mark what we’re calling the Pandemiversary, Time Out is looking back at the past year in cities around the world, and ahead to what the future may hold. I’ve been flying pretty much constantly for the past year. Having taken more than 140 international flights during the pandemic for work, it’s been surreal to see the world shut down, then open up, then ebb back and forth and settle somewhere between the two. I’ll never forget the eeriness of April 2020. There was a genuine fear of flying. Most flights still operating were for repatriation; people were desperate to get home. I flew through Los Angeles, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and London that month, and it would have been fair to describe those cities’ usually-bustling airports as ghost towns. In May, planes were still empty. But there was growing optimism as the northern hemisphere approached summer. Through June and July, I headed on work trips to Lombardy in Italy, which only a few months previously was considered one of the early epicentres of Covid-19. Cafés were desperate for business, but there was a sense that the worst was over. We all kidded ourselves into thinking so, didn’t we? During the second and third waves at the tail end of last year, restrictions quickly came back into force, and travel was pretty much back to square one. Since then, there hasn’t been any substantive reopening of borders outside of perhaps Dubai, Tulum and the Maldives. So, now wh