Kelly’s Eye

YOU can sense the disappointment in some quarters that we haven’t experienced a second wave of Covid-19 yet. It’s a similar phenomenon (and probably includes a lot of the same people) to the Remain hardcore, devoutly wishing for any sign of economic woe that they can hang on Brexit. For those of us irresponsible people on the beaches and in the pubs, read the Leave voters who didn’t understand the issues.

Well, the economy is certainly teetering on the brink of smouldering ashes after months of lockdown. And the second wavers will one day have their moment: there are bound to be periodic flare-ups eventually as with any other respiratory virus.

But no sort of meaningful economic bounce back will occur for as long as eating out and socialising remains a compulsorily supervised experience and public transport is avoided like plague pits. Nor will the legions of office workers return to fuel our cities’ withered service and retail sectors.

Making face masks mandatory instead of a matter of choice will merely delay that recovery further. We are losing the habits and memory of freedom while being scolded and regimented in our everyday existences. It is the consequence of a fundamentally flawed public information campaign which told us we were all equally at risk of dying from Covid-19.

That wasn’t true, but millions remain sufficiently spooked by it that the Chancellor is now reduced to bribing us with our own money to pay one another to eat out.

Lockdown has been a failed blunt instrument. In answer to claims it should have been introduced earlier, it was in Belgium and their death toll is even higher than ours. It wasn’t in Sweden and their mortality rate is lower and economy less scarred. Japan locked down briefly and its testing was desultory, yet it too has suffered fewer deaths.

Covid is not the Black Death. Treating it as such while chanting the “stay safe” incantation is only storing up an even greater calamity.