Five weeks into Boris Johnson’s half-arsed semi-lockdown and this weekend I think large parts of our country lost its collective mind. Dominic Cummings’ slogan ‘Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives’ seemed to be forgotten as the warm sun lit up the country. And as the number of deaths in hospital alone soared past 20,000, it was as if they never happened.
Huge queues at stores like the Range, that sell anything but essential products, huge numbers of joggers – more than I have ever seen, even in pre Covid-19 times – some covering vast distances, matched by huge numbers of cyclists, family BBQs, sunbathers, picnickers and, from what people are saying, far more cars in our roads. I’m not at the ‘why do I bother?’ stage yet, but I suspect many people are.
It is now particularly raw in our family, having lost a very close member whose funeral we attended on Friday. I have also lost couple of friends and I know of friends who have lost their relatives and friends. Yet, it seems to me that some people are actively creating opportunities to not stay (at) home. Whatever the reasons, whether it’s sponsored events or fundraising, I cannot see for the life of me how this fits in the with the instructions of government.
We have never really had a lockdown, have we? Not like in New Zealand or Spain. Whilst our lives are undoubtedly different in this semi-lockdown, for many it has barely changed at all. Joggers still jog, cyclists still cycle. And I suppose I can’t blame them. In New Zealand, where they have managed to almost completely contain the virus, they are relaxing their genuine lockdown to the levels we are at.
The government says we can take one period of exercise a day, so people interpret that how they like. How about running a marathon, over three or four hours? Or cycling into the middle of the countryside and enjoying a mid-cycle break in the most beautiful of places. Then, the rest of us, for one reason or another, are restricted to the same boring walk we do every day, if we can even manage that – many can’t. Except that we can actually drive somewhere to exercise if the exercise we take takes longer than the journey itself. Presumably, then, I can drive to Weston Super Mare from South Gloucestershire, have a long walk along the front, with a government approved rest along the way, and then drive home again? But I don’t want to do that. I want to do what the medics and scientists are saying. I want to stay at home because it really does save lives.
The experts are still saying that as this is a new virus, they don’t know much about it. So, their advice is safety first. We know it is wildly infectious, we know it can be virulent in its effects, we know that some people have had the infection but don’t know they had it. We don’t really know for sure whether a sweaty, wheezing jogger or cyclist is spreading the virus, if they have it, further and wider than anyone else. Defying the government’s requests – you can hardly call them instructions – could have catastrophic consequences. We just don’t know.
For once, I am hoping for cold and wet weather in the hope that it restores some level of sanity to our country. If the government doesn’t have the bottle to impose a strict lockdown, then we can but hope that the weather imposes a virtual one on us.
