We don’t know what to do and there is no plan

It’s the blind leading the blind with this pandemic, but caution is still the wisest approach we have

The Sunday papers were full of stories of how the Government botched the first few weeks of the pandemic, and if they are accurate then the Tories must pay a price. But there are few governments in the world that are truly on top of Covid-19. I’m beginning to suspect that no one knows what they’re doing and no one has a plan.

The blame game makes us feel a bit less powerless: if we can work out what went wrong, maybe we could nail this thing and beat it. But “surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird”. One graph might show that Sweden has avoided a total lockdown and yet has far fewer deaths than the UK. Another graph might demonstrate that it has had far more deaths than its neighbours: Britain is not the country you want to imitate. Fans of testing and tracing point to East Asia for countries that have kept death rates low and, yes, many of them have, but some of them now face another wave of infections. Cases in Singapore have jumped dramatically overnight. Doctors in Japan have warned that their own medical system could collapse.

We cannot decisively prove what works and what doesn’t because we don’t have the data. Lockdown critics argue that we’re counting people who die with coronavirus, not necessarily from it, suggesting that the numbers are inflated. But the UK has also been slow to tally the deaths in care homes, so it’s possible that things are even worse than we realise. Maybe a lot of us have already had it and are over it – maybe not – but we simply don’t know because the UK hasn’t been testing and, even if it did, we’re not sure that antibody tests are reliable or that you can’t be reinfected.

In the absence of reliable information, and when fighting a disease whose nature we don’t entirely understand (remember when we thought we couldn’t shake hands but we could knock elbows?), governments across the world have near-unanimously erred on the side of caution. India has quarantined a population of 1.3 billion.

There’s been a ton of debate in the United States about the proper response, but if you go through the list of what each state has done – those famous laboratories of democracy – what is striking is that they’ve done almost the exact same thing, just with wildly different consequences. New York and California declared a stay-athome order within 72 hours of each other. California has lost around 1,000 residents; New York, which is half the size, more than 13,000. Why? It must have something to do with population density and poverty. Those mass graves you’ve seen being built on Hart Island are not for everyone, as you might assume from images glimpsed on TV – they are for unclaimed bodies. When pandemics hit, rich and poor experience it in different ways. One of the greatest divides in life is between those who have someone to mourn them and those who don’t.

Humanity has seen all this before. As I wrote a few weeks ago, this is not a war with enemy combatants and a victory parade at the end. It’s a pandemic. Pandemics are survived, not beaten, and with the timeless methods of isolation and patience. If Britain did cap its death rate and then lifted the lockdown, we would all fear the damn thing would come back, so any “lifting” that we do enjoy in the next few months is going to be highly cautious and concentrated. Kids might return to school. Perhaps you can get a drive-thru Mcdonald’s. But don’t be surprised if we’re living in a stop-go state of suspended animation for a long time. My gut says over a year.

It leaves us trapped in the most loopy logic imaginable. If the death rate falls, we shall say it’s proof that the lockdown works. If it rises, we shall say that we need more lockdown. In the absence of a vaccine, the establishment seems to have concluded that the lockdown is the only tool we have, or at least that the alternative might be thousands of times worse.

Sorry to be such a negative Nancy, 

but the only way through this is to reconcile yourself to the madness and think as little about it as possible.

That’s why I want to ban the daily press conference. The various ministers they shove in front of the cameras know just as little as you or I, and nothing has changed in the last 24 hours, so as they stand there sweating and shaking, repeating robotically that the situation is under control, all it achieves is to convince us beyond the shadow of a doubt that the situation has completely fallen to pieces. The only useful purpose of the press conference is to show us who won’t be the next prime minister. Dominic Raab springs to mind. The poor fellow is so lacking in charisma that he makes Chris Whitty look like Richard Burton.

Come on, chaps, if you’re going to keep this charade up, at least be as fun as Donald Trump and throw in the odd card trick or something. I’m sure that if they rolled out a mat, Mr Raab would happily demonstrate some of his famous judo moves on Rob Jenrick. Trust me, by week 106, we’ll welcome the entertainment.