British “safetyism”
There’s going to be the mother of all investigations into the inept handling of this pandemic, said Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph; and everyone in government, from the PM down, is preparing their excuses. Yet they may find the focus of inquiry turns out to be not “Why weren’t we prepared?” – most countries weren’t – but “Why did we let lockdown drag on so long?” The Italians “are back in their piazzas, Germans in their car-making factories, Danes in their schools”. None have seen a resurgence of the virus. Meanwhile here, lockdown is taking a heavy toll – on our livelihoods and our mental health. Yet there’s no outcry because stress and poverty, unlike Covid, “kill quietly”. How bizarre that our PM, once seen as a crazy risk-taker, now looks like “the most cautious leader in Europe”.
It’s not just the British Government that’s being cautious, said Therese Raphael on Bloomberg Opinion. It’s the British people. They may now be thronging in parks and on beaches, but 46% say the recent limited easing of lockdown rules in England went too far; just one in ten say it didn’t go far enough. What we should always remember, said Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times, is that in crises, governments tend to follow public behaviour, not the other way round. Well before Boris Johnson “pressed the panic button” on 23 March, the country “was putting up shutters”: people had ceased shopping; businesses were closing. In the same way, if people now decide they’ve had enough of social distancing and want to resume shopping, businesses will start to open and the Government will have to fall in line. But right now the public wants to stay safe. “Safetyism” may be a very British disease, said Madeline Grant in The Daily Telegraph, but it has been made virulent by the Government’s super-cautious reaction. Why are we one of only two EU countries still urging non-household members to keep two metres apart, when many more have followed the WHO guidance that one metre is safe? One metre could guarantee the survival of swathes of the economy: “shops, restaurants, gyms, theatres, pubs”. Two metres looks set to destroy them.
Why? Because lifting lockdown risks a second wave of infection, said The Economist. “Iran reopened in April but last week designated Tehran a ‘red zone’, as the virus is spreading again.” Perhaps the best way of avoiding this, while allowing economies to recover, is to practise “smart containment” focused on vulnerable groups. Gibraltar, for example, has set up a Golden Hour during which the over-70s can exercise outside in certain spots. Restrictions could also be targeted, said Tim Harford in the FT. In England and Wales, nearly 29,000 people over 65 died from the virus (up to 1 May), compared to only 375 under 45. So lockdown could be eased for the young, but not the rest of us. Or it could be eased for London (where there are now only 24 new cases per day), but not the northeast and Yorkshire (4,000 daily cases). “To save the greatest number of lives while destroying the fewest livelihoods, we may have to start drawing distinctions that make us squirm.”