The elusory world of absolute safety is a bigger nightmare than the pandemic

    

Every day when you open your eyes first thing in the morning, no longer certain if it’s Saturday or Wednesday as every day under suffocating oppression feels much the same, take a moment to think about the Britain you are living in

– a Britain in which you must decide whether to meet your mum or your dad in order to avoid being a lawbreaker; in which you may meet in a crowded park but not the vastly less infectious surroundings of private homes and gardens; in which you must go to work but have no schools to take care of your kids; in which you are expected to travel without using any transport; in which sending kids to school is regarded as the experiment as opposed to not sending them; in which despite all this the biggest debate is over which sixth form slogan to use to best encapsulate this for a population of people who now seem to rely on the government to tell them which way to wipe their backsides.

The horrifying authoritarianism of lockdown is bad enough, but worse is the ease with which a grateful public, without so much as a whimper of protest, has adopted the uncritical, robotic mentality of a subjugated people.

“Stay safe,” they cry like demented sheep. “Stay the f*ck at home,” they chastise their social media followers, presumably to pass the time until they find fresh evidence of wrongdoing to lament over.

“When this is all over,” is how they begin any sentence where, in a state of utter derangement, they dare to speculate about life beyond this awful lockdown. They, of course, have no answer when challenged to explain what will change in a few months, since a vaccine is far from guaranteed and in any case can’t be scaled up in anything like that time.

They also can’t give a straight answer as to what it will take for them to feel ‘safe’ once more. Perhaps it’s when master of duff slogans Boris Johnson tells them. The key point, though, is that they have no sense whatsoever that this just might go on for years.

Hysteria is a luxury. It suited the government to whip it up in the mistaken belief that terror would be necessary to enforce compliance. Now, afraid to challenge it or encourage anyone to emerge from their denial, it continues to spout rules and guidance that are so rife with absurd contradictions because the goal of making something look like an easing whilst not actually being one is impossible.

Bluntly, to get people to open their eyes to their hysteria, we need to increase its price tag. The first step must be ending the furlough scheme now, not extending it until October.

If people won’t voluntarily quit their hopes of a frightening fantasy land of absolute safety and social distancing at all times, we must take away the cushions that allow them to behave in this way.

The real difference between those supporting and opposing the lockdown, is that the opponents have got to grips with reality, and recognised the need for us to be honest with ourselves about the fact that this virus isn’t going away. It rises, peaks and falls just like every other pandemic.

That’s why Sweden has got its R-rate down to 0.8 (comparable to ours) without a shutdown. That’s why there is no link between shutting down and fewer deaths – the UK, Spain and Italy all imposed strict lockdowns and have the worst death tallies in Europe.

In the UK, deaths peaked on 8 April and hospital admissions peaked on 2 April. Given the timescales from infection to hospitalisation and the sad outcome of death, this clearly points to the fact that we had hit the peak and started to come through it before the lockdown was even announced.

We were told that the NHS would be overwhelmed, which it wasn’t. About half its critical care beds are now empty and the Nightingale hospitals are already a thing of the past.

Yet on and on it goes, all because people are spooked out of all proportion and no-one has the guts to call irrational fear out for what it is. Still we congratulate them for standing outside every Thursday, clapping and banging pans for an NHS that we’ll never be able to fund to the tune they want because of the economic collapse their lockdown will create.

On and on we go insisting that we are saving lives whilst we are, in fact, simply delaying deaths. Many will get this virus, and some will die. It’s just an inescapable fact of life that not all of us will make it through this pandemic.

But if we defer opening up our country needlessly for many more months, the inevitable increase in infections will occur right in the midst of bog standard flu season which itself causes a minor annual NHS meltdown and with a population whose immune systems are weakened by weeks of inactivity and unnatural isolation.

It’s time we go to work, shops, cafes, cinemas, swimming pools etc. It’s time we go into each other’s houses and behave like normal people. It’s time we start living again.

It’s time we recognise what we can and can’t control. It’s time we stop letting fear rule – the elusory world of absolute safety is a bigger nightmare than the pandemic.