Back to life

The public mood towards COVID-19, or at least a sizeable part of it, has changed. I don’t mean that the cranks and fruitcakes like the anti-vaxxers and the conspiracy loons have won the national debate. But I sense there is a considerable group of people who want things in Britain to return to ‘normal’. And the argument they use is wonderfully simple, or should I say simplistic? It is to forcibly place the over 65s and everyone with ‘underlying health conditions’ in isolation “so that the rest of us can get on with our lives.” That way at least people could return to work, go to the pub, attend sporting events and gigs and resume holidays. Is it time to lock up the vulnerable for the greater good?

I have seen this argument put forward on social networks and I can see the attractions for those who are not old and don’t have medical conditions. The new normal, with table service in pubs, no live entertainment and sport with no crowds, is a horrible normal. And if you were unlikely to die if you caught the virus, it wouldn’t matter if everyone in, say, the football ground caught it from you. In this world, no quarantine would be necessary either. If you were carrying the virus, but felt fine, just carry on. Open everything up, why don’t you?

The government would have to set out the criteria for locking people up. I would imagine the following groups would need to be forcibly isolated:

• Everyone over 65.
• Everyone with underlying health conditions, including asthma, high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, heart disease and pretty well anything that isn’t going away and has to be controlled by drugs.

There are something like 12 million people – a fifth of the population – who are aged 65 or more. There are 5.4 million people who have asthma and around 13 million with high blood pressure. There are around 370,000 new cases of cancer every year and 7.4 million with heart disease. Many people will have some or all of these conditions, but let’s just say 20 million people fall into the category of old and vulnerable. That’s a quarter of the population. And it includes me.

The government would have to bring in laws to compel us to stay at home. Presumably, it would become a criminal offence for me to leave my front door, just like it’s a criminal offence in some areas to visit someone else in their own home. Given that so many of us who will not be allowed out, it might be cheaper for the government to tag us all, to make sure we weren’t going for a walk. We might have to accept that we would be prisoners in our own homes until an effective vaccine or treatment was found for COVID-19, something that might never happen. Effectively, it would be life imprisonment. I am not convinced that everyone affected would simply stand by and let it happen.

Then, there’s the let it run wild argument. Allow the virus to sweep through society so we could build a herd immunity. That would see off the virus, at least in the short term. It might kill around half a million people, too, but wouldn’t it serve them right for not staying at home when they’d be warned they might die? The hospitals would be fit to burst as well, but what are the Nightingale hospitals for? We could easily open them up and NHS staff could staff them by doubling-up their weekly hours. And anyway, if it’s not my parents or grandparents are dying, why worry about anyone else?  We could go down that road and there are many who wish we would but my guess is that most of them would be only too willing to offer up the opportunity of death to anyone other than themselves.

One key reason people are looking for alternatives is because they have no hope. The government makes policy on the hoof, pretty well every day, U-turning, issuing mixed messages and of course lying to the public on a permanent basis. We’re tired and we want to get back to normal.

If we could have a functioning test, track and trace system, we would have a chance. If we had even a short term plan to get us through the winter, perhaps even cynics like me could be brought back onside. But we don’t. We have none of this. And people have had enough.

We liked the glimpse of freedom in the summer, during which taxpayers were bribed with taxpayers’ money to eat discounted meals, Boris Johnson told us to go out on the piss and said he wanted to see the return of “bustle” on the high street. And now, the same government who said it was safe are now saying it isn’t. They don’t know what they’re doing. Which is why people are coming up with answers that would have all manner of negative consequences. And in the absence of effective leadership, do we really expect people to do anything else? There is an enormous vacuum at the top of our politics and I’m afraid much of it is between Boris Johnson’s ears.

By way of their sheer incompetence, Johnson’s government has presided over the worst death rate in Europe and the worst recession in the civilised world. Is it any wonder desperate people are seeking desperate answers? They want to get on with their lives, just like we all do. Don’t knock or ridicule them. Perhaps they really want to lock up those of us who are more likely to die from COVID-19, including their own family members. And perhaps they have thought through the likely implications on everyone else and concluded there’s no other way. They have thought through the mental health consequences for the nation, they have considered ending the liberty of 20 million people and they think it’s all worth it to return to “normal”.

But the old normal is years away and maybe it will never come back. That, I suspect, is why we are scared. And we will be for some years to come, if not forever.