We need to take back our lives from the permanent Covid panic-mongers
Even before the new variant emerged, the lazy and risk-averse were threatening everyone with procedures and precautions
So we’re back here again. We’re heading into Christmas. Families are planning to gather. The worst appears to be behind us. Then a new Covid variant emerges. Government rhetoric shifts. The variant is “of huge concern”, ministers declare, and “we must act with caution”. There’s an immediate travel ban, once again turning thousands of families’ lives upside-down to no obvious purpose. Labour calls ardently for “mask-wearing in public places”. Senior scientists start telling people to get ready to go backwards, away from normality.
But there’s a difference this time: we are not sitting ducks. This country has just implemented an unprecedented mass vaccination programme. The vast majority of people have some sort of immunity, and most of the vulnerable have recently had a booster shot.
Yet, somehow, we are still in “do something!” mode. At the first sign of trouble, the calls for lockdowns, restrictions and vaccine passports rise to a clamour. Journalists fill press conferences with endless rounds of questions about why we aren’t “doing more”. The question of when exactly we plan to return to a normal level of risk appetite goes unasked, let alone answered.
The forever-lockdown crowd have some points on their side, as they always do. We don’t know much about the latest variant. It has a lot more mutations than prior ones, they say, and might be even more transmissible. We don’t know if it’s deadlier or milder. We don’t know whether it will escape our vaccines more easily or not. It could all be a disaster, the end of the world, the wave to end all waves. Or not.
There are some things we do know, however. We know that new variants are now a permanent fact of life. We know that they will find their way here with or without these pointless “travel bans”. We know that fast-spreading variants will soon, like others before them, become endemic. We know that we have seven vaccines and counting in our arsenal.
We also have strong evidence that this country is now highly resistant to Covid. More than 80 per cent of Britons over 12 have had two vaccine doses, 28 per cent have had three and up to 14 per cent are thought to have caught the virus since July.
The recent wave, which was really more of a ripple, failed to raise death rates or hospitalisations to anything like the levels seen at the peak last January. Then it began to subside, even before the booster programme had reached all of the vulnerable. Professor Lockdown himself, Neil Ferguson, thinks we might be “almost at herd immunity”.
Meanwhile, we have limited evidence that measures other than vaccines actually achieve very much. Scotland still requires widespread mask-wearing, yet its case rate rose higher than England’s this autumn. October cases peaked more than a week before school half terms, suggesting school breaks weren’t the reason for the ebb.
Total lockdowns, of the kind seen in March last year, do seem to work, but they also destroy society. And the Sweden debate rumbles on: the country that never locked down and experienced death rates far higher than its Nordic neighbours, but far lower than ours.
Yet even before Thursday’s news about the latest variant, the bureaucratic, lazy and risk-averse were threatening everyone with their procedures and precautions. While most of life has managed to return to some semblance of normality, state-run institutions have been struggling to emerge from the Covid bubble.
Every new headline is an excuse for unions to moan that working isn’t “safe”. Thousands of public sector workers are still sitting at home, depressing productivity, soaking up buckets of fresh public spending and choking the economy ( just think of the DVLA lorry licence backlog). All sorts of places, like public museums, still try to demand mask-wearing, even though the law doesn’t. The administrative burden and expense attached to flying abroad have multiplied with no end in sight.
Schools are among the most prolific spreaders of Covid safety-ism, when they should be the ones fighting hardest against it for the sake of their students. Bans on shaking hands, masking, cancelled nativity plays, draconian sickness policies: everything must still operate in the shadow of the virus.
Worst of all, as The Telegraph reported this week, some schools have even taken it upon themselves to impose “circuit breaks” – week-long “online learning” snooze-fests in which the teachers sit around at home while their pupils fall further and further behind. Such closures should be illegal.
Instead, with news of this variant, these sorts of measures are going to spread. Just when it looked like the Government was being proven right about giving us back our freedoms and resisting Europe’s fresh lockdown fever, the proponents of never-ending Covid panic have regained the initiative. They want to show that liberty can still be suspended at a moment’s notice and society can still be put in the freezer.
It’s already clear that certain aspects of life will never return to normal. We’ll be carrying crumpled up masks in our pockets for years. Travellers will forever be forced to file dissertations of unnecessary paperwork in order to fly anywhere and in many countries will have to show proof of vaccination. Sticking a swab up your nose every so often will simply be a part of life from now on. These things are dismal, but inevitable.
What we cannot accept, however, is that our basic freedoms are now just loans that can be called in at any time. Free societies do not require their citizens to get new vaccines every year in order to live a normal life. They do not allow teachers to shut down schools at the drop of a hat. They do not suspend Christmas or close offices or ban drinking every time something unusual pops up in a laboratory somewhere.
Last year, as the country entered its third and most depressing lockdown over Christmas, politicians supporting the restrictions promised us that liberation was just around the corner. “Let’s not fall at the last hurdle,” they said. “The vaccine is here!” they said. “Just wait for the rollout and then enjoy your freedoms.”
Well, the rollout has happened. The virus is still out there, evolving, and it’s going to keep evolving forever. This is as good as it’s going to get. So we need to know when and how we will switch from “Covid mode” back to “normal life”. With so many panic-mongers resisting the change, it won’t happen without a fight. We need to know the Government actually wants to win it.