Toby Young:

Arbitrary social distancing requirements that other countries have shunned could derail our recovery

As a long-standing lockdown sceptic, I was delighted when Boris Johnson announced that groups of up to six people from different households will shortly be allowed to meet up. Add the fact that some children will be returning to school on Monday and high street shops will be reopening on June 15 and it’s beginning to look as if an end is in sight. Unfortunately, social distancing rules mean the economy will struggle to get out of second gear.

Take the two-metre rule. For most shops, the only way to keep customers six feet apart will be to introduce cumbersome one-way systems and force them to queue up outside. All very well when the only retail outlets we’re talking about are supermarkets and newsagents, but how will people observe that rule on the pavement when there are queues outside every shop?

For pubs and restaurants, due to reopen on July 4, the two-metre rule will mean that many of them can’t resume trading and those that can will be forced to operate at less than 50 per cent capacity.

What is so absurd about this measure, which will decimate the hospitality trade, is that there is no obvious scientific basis for it and many countries are much more relaxed. In South Korea, for instance, the acceptable distance in 1.4 metres, and in China, Hong Kong, Singapore and France, people are only expected to stay one metre apart.

Indeed, the World Health Organisation says a distance of one metre is more than sufficient. In Sweden, which has had fewer deaths per million than the UK in spite of not locking down formally, there is no hard-and-fast rule. People are just expected to use their common sense.

What about the rule stopping people from playing some outdoor sports, like football and cricket, without restrictions? The England and Wales Cricket Board has announced a further delay to the start of the professional domestic cricket season, with no games to be played until August.

But the chances of the virus being transmitted outside are vanishingly small. In a study that looked at 1,245 cases that occurred across China between January 4 and February 11, only two were traced to contact with an infected person out of doors. In another Chinese study, this one involving 7,300 cases, only one was connected to outdoor transmission.

Then there is all the nonsense being talked about the necessity of stopping products in shops from becoming vectors of transmission. Shoe shops, for instance, are planning to quarantine shoes that customers have tried on for 24 hours before putting them back on display, even though there isn’t a single documented case of the virus being transmitted by footwear.

Last week, Michael Gove warned shoppers not to try on clothes – indeed, not to touch anything we don’t intend to buy. “This is the new normal,” he said.

But the evidence that the virus can be transmitted via clothes or other dry goods is vanishingly small. Professor Hendrik Streeck, a virologist at the University of Bonn, carried out a survey of the disease’s spread in Germany and found “no significant risk” of catching the disease while out shopping. Nor did he find any cases that had originated in supermarkets, butchers or restaurants. These findings dovetail with those of similar studies in China and Hong Kong.

The social distancing rules the Government is expecting people to follow are over-cautious, particularly when you consider that in some parts of the country – such as London – the virus is expected to have completely vanished by the end of next month.

And even if you catch the disease, it may not be much more deadly than a bad bout of seasonal influenza. In the early days of the pandemic, the World Heath Organisation put the infection fatality rate (IFR) at 3.4 per cent. That is, 34 in every thousand infected people would end up dying from Covid-19.

But after extensive analysis of infections and deaths in the US, the Centre for Disease Control now thinks the IFR may be about 0.26 per cent. (The IFR of seasonal flu is between 0.1 and 0.2 per cent). If you are under 80 and have no underlying health conditions, your chances of dying from coronavirus are much smaller. John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, has calculated that under-65- year-olds are more likely to die in a road traffic accident than succumb to the disease.

What about those under the age of 15? Their safety is a concern for parents worried about sending their primary-age children back to school. But so far only two children in that age group have died from Covid-19 in the whole of the UK, which means that if your child is 14 or under they are four times more likely to be struck by lightning than die of coronavirus.

We should dispense with silly, over-cautious social-distancing rules, starting with the requirement to stay two metres apart, and trust people to use their common sense.

Forget about the “new normal”. Let’s just get back to the way things were.