Embracing life and taking risks is what being young is about
Oh wicked, selfish youth. Look at them, with their enviable thighs in impossible shorts, sitting in the sunshine all hugger-mugger, drinking and laughing and even snogging. It’s not your imagination: a new survey by University College London has found that less than 50 per cent of people under 30 are complying with strict lockdown rules.
This might explain why, according to figures from Public Health England, they have the highest rate of infection of any age group in the country. In early April, when the epidemic reached its peak in the UK, 11 per cent of people aged 17 to 29 were found to be carrying the virus, compared with just 7 per cent of over-60s.
And yet I find it hard to summon up much intergenerational wrath. Young people have always felt themselves to be immune to death – it is one of their most attractive, useful, and occasionally troublesome, qualities. In this particular instance, they’re not far wrong. For people aged 10 to 29 who contract Covid-19, the risk of dying is approximately 0.0069 per cent – or one in 14,492. The over 70s, for whom the risk is roughly one in 23, have good reason to be afraid. But the young are being asked to give up everything that makes youth enjoyable – freedom, adventure, sex, friendships, parties – because of something that poses no meaningful threat to them.
You could argue that they should do it for communitarian reasons, selflessly putting their own lives on hold to make the world safer for the rest of us. That, indeed, has been the logic of the lockdown. But hasn’t it cost them enough already? Job prospects have been shredded. Student life has been stripped of its pleasures. Several universities, including Cambridge, have announced they will only offer online lectures until
September 2021. In which case, why bother leaving home? Paying thousands of pounds in rent and tuition fees to live in a strange city with no social life and lessons on Zoom seems an unpromising formula for the supposed Best Years of Your Life. No wonder one in five of the students who were meant to be starting university in September say they want to defer their place.
This virus has snatched the future from a generation. Who can blame them for seeking a little joy in the present?
On Wednesday a
horrible bubo erupted in my armpit (the result, I suspect, of wearing a sports bra all day every day in anticipation of the run I never quite manage to go on). I rang my GP surgery, and was told that a doctor would call me back for an online consultation.
Having had bitter experiences of NHS technology in the past – the online booking systems that rebuff all attempts to log on, the endless computersays-no confusions over appointment times and locations – I had low expectations.
But it turned out to be the most painless doctor’s appointment of my life. The doctor texted me a link to the NHS version of Zoom, I logged in without difficulty, explained the problem and showed her the eruption on my cameraphone. She then Googled my nearest chemist and sent them a prescription for antibiotics, which I collected an hour later.
A fast, efficient, sameday consultation, with no sitting about in waiting rooms leafing through greasy copies of Take a Break. From disaster, miracles are wrought.