Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Unite and ignore the rule of Vic’s
SOMETIMES it’s hard to see the wood for the Christmas trees.
Presenter Victoria Derbyshire has just apologised for revealing that she planned to violate coronavirus rules. In a recent interview, she said: “If the rule of six is still in place at Christmas, we’re breaking it to have the rule of seven. We just are.”
Victoria has now realised her mistake, but what’s more important here is that she said it in the first place. A respected, upstanding person – the thinking nation’s sweetheart – being comfortable not just feeling this but openly announcing it, exposes so much about where we now are.
As do the f irst re pli e s to Victoria’s mea culpa tweet: “You were only saying what everyone is thinking and doing. No one’s following any rules now”, and, “Yes we are actually and cavalier attitudes like yours put everyone at risk”.
We are a country divided – the r ule f ol lowers and th e r ule breakers. We’re even divided about how restricting the restrictions should be, as evidenced by a p o l l on th e l ett ers p a ge of yesterday’s paper.
Government ministers are considering cutting the quarantine period from 14 to seven days, so more people comply with it.
We asked you if isolation time
should be halved, and the results were, somewhat astonishingly, perfectly equally split – 50 per cent no, 50 per cent yes. A resounding ng dunno.
What it seems to be c omin g down dow n to is, should the he rules follow the people, le, or should the people follow the rules? The answer to that surely rely has to be the latter. Even if we e do all feel like fully qualified epidemiologists idemiologists at this point, we aren’t. en’t.
Being on the same me page gives us our best chance e of controlling coronavirus. Everyone ryone is capable of making a difference. fference. Every action has a consequence. onsequence. If we pull in opposing sing directions, nothing moves an n inch.
At one end of the he spectrum are the extreme examples xamples – the attention-grabbing ng protests, the angry rioting against inst lockdown in Europe – but, turns urns out, every little helps... Covid-19. d-19.
The majority of non-compliance inv involves small infringements wh where people “stretch” tretch” the rules for their own convenience, nvenience, says
Professor Linda Bauld, a public health expert at the University of Edinburgh. So far, so pre-apology Victoria Derbyshire. But the professor then explains: “The choices we make affect whether the virus spreads or not. Things like additional travel when it’s not advised , not wearing a face c o v e r i n g e v e r y w h e re w e’re supposed to, visiting friends indoors in areas where that is not advised, or adding more people to an indoor gathering.”
The restrictions, just like those who set them, are about as far from perfect as it is possible to be. But they’re y all we’ve g got. They y aren’t just rules for rules’ sake – they are rules for survival.
Our best hope. If we don’t follow them, we make it worse for everyone and ensure this goes on even longer.
Of course most of us want to be with our families for Christmas but if it turns out that we can’t be, I’m afraid we’ll need to accept that. No one has to grin, just bear it.
Otherwise, who knows, maybe we’ll be having this same conversation in 12 months time, about next Christmas. And no matter how divided we are,
I’m pretty confident no one wants that.
Restrictions are far from perfect but they’re all we’ve got