Time to accept coronavirus isn’t anyone’s fault
We know more about the coronavirus than we did two months ago. We have a clearer idea of how people get infected and of who is most at risk. It is starting to look, for example, as though outdoor transmissions are rare. It is also starting to look as though certain groups of people are unlikely to suffer severe symptoms. Women seem to be less susceptible than men, thin people than overweight people, young people than old people and so on.
Had we known at the start of March what we know now, we would doubtless have done things differently.
There would have been more emphasis on the shielding of hospitals and care homes, less on preventing casual outdoor meetings. There would, I suspect, also have been less pressure to close schools: each new study adds to the evidence that children are neither at risk themselves nor likely to infect others.
Governments working with incomplete information will, inevitably, make mistakes. But our entire political culture is based around denying this obvious truth.
Everything is seen through the prism of imagined culpability. Each day, at the briefing, broadcast journalists pass up the chance to ask interesting questions about the spread of the disease, possible mutations or levels of immunity. Instead they line up to accuse ministers of changing their tune, failing to foresee some development, or saying the wrong thing.
Behind such questions is the implicit assumption that the number of fatalities is primarily determined by government policy. But how likely is this? Might not other factors, such as population density, demographics or climate, matter more?
We don’t like to admit it, of course. All human beings place themselves at the centre of the universe and, by extension, we overestimate the impact of all human behaviour.
Our remote ancestors could not believe that plagues simply happened. Something as awful as a pestilence had to be someone’s fault. Perhaps the population at large had committed a sin, or perhaps it was all the fault of a religious minority or some other unpopular group.
We like to imagine that we have outgrown such superstitions, but have we? Is our determination to apportion blame any more rational than our reluctance to buy Corona beer?
Our leaders are well aware of our anthropocentrism: they know that they, rather than climate or geography, will get whatever praise or blame is going. So, understandably, they overreact. Politically, it is better to squander billions than to be accused of inaction.
The longer the lockdowns endure, the more they take on a momentum of their own.
We might not have closed schools knowing what we now know. But that is not the same thing as being able to reopen them once the status quo has shifted.
Commentators talk about “a new normal” after the lockdown, but the horrible truth is that we have already normalised the restrictions. See how easily we accepted the formulation of five tests for the closures to end, rather than five tests for the closures to continue.
Seven weeks ago, I wrote on this page that the restrictions would be easier to impose than to lift. Though there may not be much correlation between the strictness of a lockdown and the spread of the disease, many of us are now primed to blame ministers for every fatality. It is not just the virus that is keeping the country locked down. It’s us.