Ms Freeman is right: you are not exceptional
IMAGINE you could be a lifesaving superhero by donning a onesie and lying on your sofa watching back-to-back trash on Netflix. That, in order to effect real and vital change in the world, you could just sit on your behind, let your blubber settle and do absolutely diddly squat all.
Imagine no longer! Your country needs you to be as lazy as humanly possible.
Just... stay in your house. Covid-19 can only be quashed if we self-isolate and socially distance ourselves.
And yet, and yet. People still seem incapable of taking the advice fully on board.
At the weekend we saw city dwellers flocking to the countryside to take advantage of the lovely weather, and to hang with any germs they might be carrying with them to the remoter parts of the country.
There were umpteen social media posts from those who just couldn’t bear the pubs being shut on a Friday night and so went to hotels to drink at their bars, and never mind about the bar staff who had to serve them or the housekeeping staff who had to clean up after them.
Snowdonia’s National
Park
Authority announced yesterday it has closed its main car parks “following the busiest visitor weekend in living memory”.
The sunshine was part of the problem. Here we’ve been stuck indoors over a long and storm-laden winter. Now, finally, the weather has turned and we had two beautiful, crisp, sunny days to play with. Yet we weren’t meant to play with them. We were meant to stand at the window and gaze out at them, forlornly.
The government advice is that a walk outside is good for you so, like others, and understandably, I tried on Sunday to go for a walk. The park was hoaching with people and keeping a solid two-metre distance was not possible – so I returned home.
That’s part of the problem with social distancing – it only works if everyone gets on board. If some of us are weaving about and leaping out of the way like Jumping Frenchmen of Maine while others wander blindly in our path, it’s not effective.
The messages from the English and Scottish governments are also conflicting. Late on Saturday night – far too late – Boris Johnson advised that people should not visit their mums for Mother’s Day. Stay put, he advised. Scotland’s National Clinical Director Jason Leitch, who is excellent, calm, measured and clear, gave his three-step advice for Mother’s Day. Don’t visit, he said, or try to have a video call with mum. But if you do visit then wash your hands, have mum wash her hands and stay two metres away from each other. The upshot was everyone translating the advice differently – some insisting you can’t visit your mother at all, others saying it would be fine. On Friday night, Mr Leitch appeared on BBC Scotland’s The Nine and said visiting the hairdressers was fine, as salons tend to be one of the more sanitary places you can visit. On Monday Nicola Sturgeon said hair salons should close. The messaging is not straightforward. “Social distancing” is relatively meaningless. I saw a great tweet asking why the messaging isn’t “the two-metre rule” – much easier to grasp.
What really is easy to grasp, though, is that we should stay at home unless for vital journeys or a bit of solo exercise. All else is paused for now.
If you have symptoms and live with other people then 14 days at home and don’t cross the doorstep. I’ve come across people who have symptoms and are going out and about as usual. That is unconscionable. Why are they doing it? Because they don’t think the rules apply to them and, while they have symptoms, they don’t believe them to really be Covid-19.
It’s really moot, for the purposes of the behaviour of the general