Now we listen to our instincts rather than the edicts of the state

Vaccines, the doctor told me, are not something that should be rushed. When it came to Covid-19, he wasn’t counting on anything appearing this year.

“There ’ s that Will Smith movie about a vaccine,” he added with gloomy emphasis. “They get it wrong and things get very bad.”

At that moment he was called away, leaving me wondering if I’d missed an early Smith film, perhaps

The Fresh Prince of Mal-Airia.

And then I understood. He’d meant the 2007

I Am Legend, blockbuster in which Smith plays a lone scientist marooned in a post-apocalyptic New York after a virus, created to cure cancer, turns everyone into albino cannibal zombies. So pretty much the Meadowridge Tops on Monday morning.

My doctor, being much more interested in medical science than computer-generated zombies, had remembered the film as being about the disastrous effects of a well-intentioned but incomplete cure — a plot device that plays out in the first 30 seconds of a 100-minute action flick.

It was a perfect reminder of how our perspectives and priorities are formed by our experience and field of expertise; of why it is that two people, seeing the same event at the same time, can interpret it in such radically different ways that they might as well have been on different planets.

Last week, a feature in the New York Times explored how Covid-19 is being experienced in “red” and “blue” states, that is states that voted for US President Donald Trump in 2016 versus those that supported Hillary Clinton.

That these two groups are experiencing very different pandemics will surprise nobody. Since the start of the outbreak in the US not a month has passed without some headline-grabbing display of blasé disregard by residents of a “red” state.

For the citizens of American cities or states with appalling outbreaks — or to residents of London or Brussels or Milan — such behaviour no doubt reinforces stereotypes about selfrighteous, fact-resistant rednecks.

What the New York Times piece suggests, however, is that a great many people in “red” states are simply basing their response to Covid-19 on their own personal contact with it. And for millions of Americans in small towns, scattered across sparsely populated states and spared the worst ravages of the virus, that contact is often zero. Wearing a mask and practising physical distancing might seem like the most basic common sense to a New Yorker or Londoner, but to a resident of a small town in Texas, where nobody knows anyone who has tested positive, let alone died, such precautions can easily start looking like the product of media hyperbole, or, if they prefer their politics a little more angry, the state creating a crisis to give itself draconian powers.

Of course, a great deal of the pushback is overtly political and cynical. We are by now all familiar it ’with s true: having the claim to wear that a being required to wear a mask is an attack on our rights. (Technically, mask is most definitely an attack on our right to be an entitled solipsist.)

Many of those branded “deniers”,

however, are probably just reacting as people have always reacted: by looking, listening, discarding evidence that is inconvenient or supported by people they dislike, and then drawing conclusions that are generally favourable to life continuing more or less as it did before.

On Monday, millions of South Africans officially entered that world, the one in which we listen to our instincts and senses rather than the edicts of the state. Many had started earlier. The lockdown was over many weeks ago. The brutality of the police and military obliterated its legitimacy as a plan to keep us safe. Then came the shambles with the cigarettes, now clearly an attempt at social engineering rather than anything to do with combating the virus. The opening of the churches, apparently without the support of the clergy, was the coup de grâce.

On Monday, however, it all got a little more complicated. Because on Monday, the single, clear, objective, scientific and political fact of Covid-19’s existence splintered into 58-million subjective personal experiences of it.

In the coming weeks these lived experiences will contest our shared reality. For those who live or work on the Cape Flats, the new epicentre of the outbreak on the African continent, the virus will be as selfevident as the masks on colleagues’ faces. For the residents of Orange Farm, who last week refused to be tested because they won’t believe it’s real until someone dies from it, it will remain a fairytale.

One reality, however, can no longer be supported, and that is the one inhabited by police minister Bheki Cele. The state must demobilise and stand down. Because all it can do now is call out to us, like an ineffectual au pair, and beg us not to wade out too far.

The state must demobilise and stand down. Because all it can do now is call out to us