Deeper into communal panic

It’s beginning to look, er, not like Christmas. The apparent overwhelming support for Tier 4 restrictions is not shared by shopkeepers, pub landlords, cinema and theatre managers, or any businesses dependent on them: all those struggling to pay the rent and rates and staff wages and national insurance with no income. Now it has got worse.

The worldwide perspective is hard to grasp. There must be a worldwide view, and we do hear stories of mismanagement and government cruelty from Victoria, American states and from foreign lands too, but this plague has driven us inward, out of the wider world, out of society, to see only that which at our own front door. There is a global perspective, but now I just want to know if I can take a Christmas cake to my mother. It is hard even to consider the grim actions of the Welsh devolved government, because it is just over the horizon and fewer of the family are caught in it.

The nation sighed and accepted the first COVID-19 lockdown when we saw bodies piled up in the hospitals of Italy, and Professor Fergusson declared that it would scythe down a quarter of a million, and on the assurance that it would last just until the spring warmed up. It was nonsense; all nonsense. The disease is cruel to some, deadly to some, unnoticed in most. Its cruellest aspect is the relentless logic of the lockdown. It drives public policy to its own reductio ad absurdum.

A lockdown seems to slow the spread, but not to eliminate it. Now the virus has adapted by natural selection to spread more effectively, adapting itself to the lockdown. All the while the statisticians keep their eyes on the R-number, the reinfection rate, forgetting what it means in practice, which is that the epidemic continues, and will continue, which will justify (in their eyes) keeping in place the restrictions on freedom which are making it continue.

Now we have new restrictions, in the main commercial regions of Britain, and in Wales, based on blind statistics, and thus the epidemic continues.

If the lockdown slows it, that just means that the epidemic continues for longer: if it had ripped through the population it might be over by now. Even in the Middle Ages, in days when communication was at walking pace, the first Black Death epidemic was over and done in two years: we have managed to extend the COVID-19 epidemic so it could rival it in length.

We must still eat, and must still work to create value, which is the essence of man in active society. Faced with unworkable rules, the only thing to do is not just to find the limits of the new rules but to scrape them, to tread along the edge. We must ignore the restrictions as far as possible: it is your social, patriotic duty.