Toby Neal: A handy guide for those a little coronafused.com
Confused? You will be.
As there is clearly a demand for a handy cut-out-and-keep guide to help people know what to do during the current unpleasantness, I’m happy to oblige.
1. Wash your hands often. This is guided by the science, which has shown that washing your hands promotes hygiene.
2. Don’t breathe on people. You may be spreading germs and they won’t like it.
3. Don’t let them breathe on you. This follows on logically from 2.
4. Treat your fellow human beings as if they may be carrying a potentially deadly virus. In other words, keep your distance.
5. If in doubt, look up the rules on the internet.
You see, a lot of it is a matter of common sense. And unlike everybody else I have sympathy for Boris Johnson in his gotcha moment when people gleefully jumped at the chance to point out that he doesn’t know the regulations he has himself drawn up.
It’s very much along that theme where you ask an agriculture minister the price of milk, or when Emily Thornberry, at the time Labour’s shadow foreign secretary, was asked who the French foreign minister was. There are now so many local and devolved variations in the application of the coronavirus rules that I would challenge anybody to know what they all are, although admittedly Theresa May, with her famous grasp of detail, would have had chapter and verse at her fingertips.
We have seen this week that both former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Boris’s dad haven’t followed the most simple of rules – the rule of six in Jezza’s case, and wearing a face mask while in a shop in the latter instance.
If confused by the rules the obvious solution is to check how they apply in your particular area.
But I sense that what’s really behind all this is that there is a growing tide of fed-upness with coronavirus and the impact it is having on people who haven’t got or had coronavirus, which is the vast majority. I’ve even heard people predicting increasing civil disobedience.
During its height in the spring, where at one point nearly 1,000 were dying each day, people went along with the strict lockdown and could see the point because they didn’t want to die too.
Now, the consensus and the public consent is starting to become more fragile.
That is partly fed by the dramatic fall in the number of deaths which gave some hope, which is now being crushed again as the number is rising once more.
One person interviewed during the summer when there was all that Bournemouth beach fuss said he didn’t know a single person who had had coronavirus.
In other words, he didn’t see why he and his family should be deprived of a break because of something which had had no impact on anyone he knew.
Maggie Thatcher was famous for her There Is No Alternative mantras, which led to her attracting the nickname Tina. However, there is always an alternative. The alternative to doing something is to not do it.
Gloomy
Collectively the nation is moving to a psychological crunch point where it has to decide whether the massive damage to lives and the economy which flows from measures to combat Covid-19 is worth it.
That sounds strange when lives are literally at stake, but I get the feeling that more and more people, including a number of MPs, are moving towards a position in which they see the remedy as more damaging than the disease, and that the population and businesses of an entire nation are being “punished” unnecessarily.
It may be that some of those who do not follow the rules over the winter will not be “confused,” or “making mistakes,” but are in effect rebelling by wilfully ignoring what they consider over-the-top measures.
I am just a little gloomy about the prospects of gamechanging success for test and trace and that app, irrespective of testing capacity or how many tests are carried out, which have assumed an almost mystical importance among politicians and commentators.
A little while ago a town in our patch discussed a scheme where dog owners were invited to register on a database.
This could match the DNA in illicitly deposited dog poo to the registered owner. When I read about it I wondered what was in it for the dog owner. So far as I could tell the chief benefit for dog owners in volunteering to register was to put themselves on the radar for any potential subsequent prosecution.
Test and trace fails the dog poo test. A survey has shown that almost nine out of 10 people told to self-isolate for 14 days do not do so. That will be because they don’t want to wreck their lives when they’re not ill (so far as they are aware). For these people there is an incentive to avoid being traced. If nobody can trace them, nobody can order them to self-isolate. And if they don’t know, how can they be fined?
In late March and April, Britain was in a bad place public health-wise, but a good place when it came to community compliance and political consensus.
Approaching the critical winter, we’re in a better place health-wise, relatively speaking, but a worse place on the unity front.
