After WTF (Matt Hancock’s Twitter feed) announcement that if you were a Muslim from the north Eid was cancelled, the very next day it wished all Muslims a happy Eid. It felt a bit insensitive to me but I don’t have Party food for my whole extended family rotting in my kitchen. I hadn’t spent days cooking a feast and buying presents only to be told the whole thing would be illegal in the morning. Maybe he was hoping that they would have forgotten.
During the announcement, journalists were confused and angered. They couldn’t understand the reasons. They had looked at the data. Yes, there was a little uptick in infections but there was more testing and there were not more hospital admissions and daily deaths (by date of death) were decreasing. They were angry on behalf of the public.
The government said that it was because young people had their priorities all wrong. They were focused on finding a partner and getting too close to them. It seems as though the primeval desire to procreate is stronger than an instruction to keep 2 metres distance to stop a virus that isn’t likely to kill them. Nature’s a bugger like that. Those poor fifty year old epidemiologists must be tearing their hair out.
The journalists were not completely convinced they understood but they caved really quickly. By the evening news last night, all the reports were back to explaining how everyone needed to do the right thing, showing pictures of people doing the wrong thing and getting cross about it, even though they still haven’t effectively had their questions answered by the government. Even the ONS is confused. They are happy to point out our death rate as a country has been awful but can’t really see the evidence of regional rises.
Last night’s news showed packed bars in Manchester, where groups of young people were out, drinking, flirting and enjoying themselves. A journalist interviewed on group of girls, clearly hoping to catch them out.
“We’re all staying in the same house tonight,” one of them said.
“Oh bless!” I said the the LSH, “they don’t understand.”
Then her friend nudged her and said, “After lockdown we moved in together. That’s allowed!”
She looked straight at the journalist/camera and her friends twittered similar responses in panicked defence.
I don’t think the government stands a hope in hell of getting young people to stay apart from each other. it’s just not realistic. We might all join in with the new song, “Hands, face, space, get a test to track and trace” but it’s human nature to get close to people and I say that as someone who believes in a 2 metre space around me at all times. I hope you appreciate how I fixed the song there. Hands, face, space, get a test just didn’t scan properly.
I do like the new colours. It’s like a party or fiesta. I can imagining us all on a Spanish beach, singing ‘Hands, face, space,” with the dance and a jug of sangria.
I have a theory about what is going on. I’m not talking about from a scientific point of view. The virologists are just terrified people. They see bugs and therefore death everywhere. They would rather that everyone walked around in hazmat suits and stopped breathing germs into the environment. They would have preferred lockdown never eased in the first place. I’m thinking about the government’s response, which is always driven by populist thinking. We expected something more dramatic. We’ve forgotten (already) what it felt like to be locked down but we still have a little of that residual fear. Somehow, we felt that for something that made us that scared it should have been worse. Many of us don’t know anyone who had the illness, let alone died from it. We feel a bit cheated., so we are expecting a second wave. The government have used a few Northern towns to send a warning that, young people will ignore. I’m hoping that we are wrong and that we can quickly forget our fear. I might be being overly optimistic but a virus that isn’t killing loads of people is just what we live with all the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment