If we’re not quite at peak Covid-19 just yet, I’d like to think we’re somewhere near peak stupidity. Perhaps, beyond it. You can but hope. Whilst most of us are adhering rigidly to the government’s instructions on the grounds that we’d like to avoid killing people and indeed killing ourselves, there will always be others who treat rules as if they only apply to everyone else.
I’ve witnessed it myself on numerous occasions from people happily allowing others into their households to couples in the queue at Sainsbury’s lying to the door staff when asked if they are couples in order to go into the shop together. In my little village, where most people know each other, there have been numerous instances of people contacting the police to report some of the most idiotic behaviour imaginable. The police have responded by thanking the complainers, but have pointed out that they are already so stretched it will take days, maybe even weeks, to visit the properties of people who have decided it’s okay to take a chance that a) they won’t get caught and b) if they kill someone, it won’t be a family member. Nice.
There’s worse, though. A friend who lives just a few miles away reports a neighbour holding a well-attended family barbecue where not only did alleged adults mingle freely, they also drove home heavily intoxicated, flouting not just the Codid-19 regulations but the drink/drive laws, too.
The idiotic behaviour of some can be explained, in my view, by the fact that we are only in a semi-lockdown and, for one reason or another, the semi-lockdown is not being policed. I suspect that this is down to political divisions at the heart of government between those who want to save lives and those who regard saving lives as an attack on their freedom. Now that we have a functioning opposition, where we have none for the last five years, we can at least have some degree of faith that Boris Johnson’s bungling, dithering government will now be held to account and that our normal freedoms have only been temporarily suspended until the worst of this crisis is over.
It looks like, according to some experts, we will need to get used to social distancing for at least the next two years, something that rather puts the crisis into context and for every halfwit who ignores the rules, you can add a few days and weeks to that.
