Are we but lemmings?

Contrary to popular opinion, lemmings (the cute arctic hamster-like rodents) don’t suffer mass hysteria and jump into the sea in vast numbers to drown. It was an early example of fake news spread by Walt Disney Productions in a 1950s movie called White Wilderness.

However, history is packed with stories of mass hysteria by humans. While tulip mania was relatively harmless, the majority of other instances, including preacher Jim Jones’s poison party in Guyana, or all those otherwise reasonable Germans who followed a psychopath to the very gates of hell, were not.

It is always easier to identify mass hysteria looking back than when it is actually happening. We should have been alerted by the completely irrational purchase of toilet paper, and the monotonous justification from our leaders that the best scientific advice was being followed.

It’s not that I am a Covid-19 denier. This virus has killed many people. But apocalyptic clips from Italian hospitals, the Imperial College model and daily doses of death-rate reinforcement and warlike jargon on news channels have panicked governments and the rest of us into accepting total lockdowns.

Now the temporary insanity is beginning to clear. Dr Neil Ferguson’s firing from the UK’s ironically named “Sage” scientific advisory group for breaching his own social-distancing regulations shows how important he really thought the rules were. US university studies are showing that far more people have survived the Covid-19 infection than was previously understood. The muchcriticised Swedish approach has suddenly become the darling of the World Health Organisation.

As we start to survey the unnecessary economic destruction with saner eyes, maybe some leaders will mutter: “Oh God, what have we done?”

James Cunningham

Camps Bay