SCOTTISH PERSPECTIVE

Bill Jamieson doesn’t feel relaxed about going out – despite doubts cast on effectiveness of social distancing

Scotland’s daily forum for comment, analysis and new ideas

Where are we now on the Covid-19 Fear-o-meter? Is your partner a timorous Beastie or gung-ho virus warrior? With the easing of lockdown and the re-opening of “nonessential” shops, we’re supposed to feel more relaxed and confident about going out. But not in my household – and I suspect in many others.

It’s not easy to relax after all the caveats, warnings and stern admonitions with which we’ve been bombarded over the past three months. In millions of households, lockdown living has become routine. We’ve kept contact beyond our homes to a minimum, foregone shopping, kept clear of bus and rail journeys, washed our hands to a permanent state of inflamed pink, and maintained social distancing.

All of this has been reinforced by warnings reverberating daily through the airwaves of a second wave of the pandemic round the corner and reports from countries of a renewed spike in Covid cases – just when they thought they were rid of it.

Reports in England of a sharp fall-off in shopping trips after the surge on Monday did not surprise me. Far from relaxation, schools remain closed and we remain in suspended apprehension.

Our household has barely relaxed. Mrs J insists on all Amazon cardboard parcels being left on the doorstep for 24 hours and only then opened after a vigorous wiping with disinfectant.

The same regime applies to letter post. Last week she subjected a letter from the HMRC to a vigorous squirt of Dettol. I said this was futile: no amount of anti-bac wipes or submersion in a vat of Dettol for a week would kill the deadly HMRC virus. The same precautions will apply to a letter imminently expected from the UK Secretary of State for Health, Matt Hancock, for the 2.2 million, including me, put on “shielding”.

Back in March I received a letter, jauntily signed off “Yours Ever, Matt”, betraying the dark content. It confined me indoors, with no visitors and movement beyond the garden gate forbidden. And all this to continue indefinitely without an end date.

Thanks, Matt. Now his next letter (don’t worry, we’ll spray it with Dettol till all the air bubbles have gone) will rest on top of the quarantined Amazon box birdseed delivery until we are less fearful of opening it. Who knows? It may even allow me a home visit at a distance of two metres. Matt – what a pal!

Meanwhile, I have enjoyed the nearsilent roads, the ease of online shopping (once a delivery date has been tracked down) and interrogated the food delivery vans over the garden gate (“Any chipolatas today? Farmhouse cheddar? Is that cauliflower for real?”).

I’ve even fantasied about buying a bicycle with my trekking poles strapped across the handlebars, if I’m ever allowed to walk.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has been prominent in resisting calls to relax the two-metre physical distancing rule, saying it would hit businesses harder if the virus were to start spreading out of control again.

Yet three months in and questioning about the protocols of lockdown and the social distancing regime grows in intensity. The Government says it is “guided by the science”. But instead of a consensus view about the efficacy of many of the restrictions, there is a cacophony. Was all this really necessary?

Only this week, Carl Heneghan, director, and Tom Jefferson, honorary research fellow at the Centre for Evidence-based Medicine at the University of Oxford, have questioned whether there is any evidence that keeping our distance makes any difference to catching Covid.

The influential Lancet review provided evidence from 172 studies in support of physical distancing of one metre or more. “However,” they wrote, “all the studies were retrospective and suffer from biases that undermine the reliability of their findings... More concerning was that only five of the 172 studies reported specifically on Covid exposure and proximity with infection. These studies included a total of merely 477 patients with just 26 actual cases of infection. In only one study was a specific distance measure reported... The result showed no effect of distance in contracting Covid.”

Meanwhile, the true cost of national lockdown – not just in economic but in human terms – continues to mount. Warning that “the disastrous lockdown can never be repeated, even if the virus returns”, former Conservative leader William Hague says the coming tsunami of redundancies and lay-offs will be “a personal catastrophe for hundreds of thousands of people”. Then there is the rising roll of undetected cancers, deteriorating mental health – and the development of millions of young people severely damaged.

Social distance rules and prolonged shutdown may relax in time. But I sense the legacy of this dreadful pandemic is set to result in elevated public fear and apprehension for years to come.