Part of the answer is that virtually everybody has either been triple vaccinated, and/or gained natural immunity by contracting covid. As a result if they do become infected again they are appreciably less likely to die or become seriously ill. So the element of fear for most people has considerably diminished. There is also a general acceptance that because the Omicron variants are so contagious any curbs or restrictions on behaviour are pointless as everyone is now vulnerable to infection despite the precautions. So the question that now needs to be asked is whether the lockdowns and restrictions were ever necessary in the first place? Could we not have responded to covid in the same way as for flu and stayed at home for the period when we felt ill?
The truth is that a large part of the media, politicians and the public succumbed to a mass hysteria generated by the alarmist fears of a very small coterie who claimed an expertise about how best to handle the response to the pandemic. In the UK this source was the tiny but highly influential group of people on the Government’s SAGE committee who were allowed to impose their outlook on the rest of the nation. They asserted that they were ‘following the science’ with the result that politicians, media and public were unable to challenge their recommendations since, in a climate of fear, they were all unwilling to overrule the perceived authority of this supposedly expert elite.
In reality the science of covid was very uncertain in the early stages. Nobody really knew how contagious it was, who it was most likely to affect, what caused the spread of the virus, or how serious it would be when caught. The panic began in Italy with images of people dying on trolleys after hospitals were overwhelmed. The Italian government imposed a national lockdown, and similar lockdowns were quickly implemented in other European countries. By the time the virus caught hold in Britain the media and opposition parties were all clamouring for a lockdown. In March 2020 the government duly imposed a national lockdown for three weeks to ‘flatten the curve’.
It would be pointless with hindsight to criticise the government for this decision, as they were under enormous pressure faced with a new virus of unknown severity. They quickly introduced a number of new temporary ‘Nightingale Hospitals’, but in the event these were scarcely used. Meanwhile the NHS prioritised treating covid patients, thus creating the current lengthy backlog of cases as the treatment of patients with less serious medical conditions was delayed. It would be nearly three months before the lockdown was lifted and restrictions were gradually relaxed during the summer 2020.
Infections fell to a very low level in summer 2020 but bizarrely the government chose that moment to mandate the use of masks on public transport and in shops. No reason was ever given for this change, and no evidence has been provided since that masks make any difference to the spread of the virus. This was confirmed by the Danish study, the fact that infections decreased rapidly in the spring of 2020 without masks, the fact that they rose sharply in the autumn of 2020 when mask wearing was compulsory, and later in the pandemic, when Scotland retained compulsory mask wearing when it had been abandoned in England, yet Scotland still suffered the highest rates of infection in the UK. More disturbingly mask wearing became a virtue signalling fetish for those on the left of politics. Witness the absurd spectacle of the opposition benches fully masked up after the restrictions were lifted, at a time when the Conservative benches were almost mask free.
We are supposed to be living in a freedom loving democracy but during the period of covid alarmism the government was able to impose the most draconian restrictions on the population at the stroke of a minister’s pen. What was worse was the almost total compliance by the public who accepted all the restrictions on their freedom with relatively little challenge. Anyone unwilling to conform to this agenda was quickly denounced as a ‘covidiot’, someone supposedly prepared to take risks with the public’s safety for their own selfish ends.
There was little debate as to whether the restrictions themselves might be a bigger threat to the public than covid. Adverse consequences were ignored such as delayed diagnoses and operations, loss of education to school children, permanent damage to the economy, the loss of many small business in hospitality and retailing, the devastation of the travel industry, the adverse effect on the mental health and wellbeing of the nation, and the curtailment of living a normal life for a whole population placed under what amounted to house arrest. The fear generated through covid alarmism trumped all of these concerns.
Yet despite all these adverse consequences the government imposed two further damaging lockdowns , aided and abetted by the opposition parties and the BBC who all wanted earlier, deeper and longer restrictions. The Welsh authorities imposed a well publicised ‘circuit breaker’ which achieved nothing but this did not prevent the alarmists calling for England to follow their lead. The Scottish regime as a matter of principle consistently imposed longer and deeper restrictions than England but in the end they made no difference to the eventual outcome.
So all the evidence shows that the lockdowns, social distancing, mask wearing and endless testing made little difference to the eventual outcome. Infections in Britain were close to the average, Sweden with far fewer restrictions did better, Peru with some of the severest restrictions ended up with the highest level of infections in the world. The death rate was about 0.3% of the population, almost all of whom were over the retirement age or suffered from long term conditions such as obesity or diabetics. So the government should now ‘do the right thing’ and issue an amnesty for all those convicted of a breach of covid regulations and return their fines.
The most disturbing element of the covid hysteria was not so much the totalitarian nature of the government’s response, but the self abasement of the public, happy to collaborate in their own subjugation. The explanation for this mass aberrant behaviour was the campaign of fear drummed up by the government, the opposition parties and the mainstream media, most particularly the BBC. The ramping up of fear has been the playbook of totalitarian regimes throughout the ages, and the authorities had no qualms about employing this technique to impose their will over covid.
The biggest danger for the future is that the political establishment, now realising how easy it is to manipulate the public into compliance with their agenda, will regard the covid response as a precedent and employ similar authoritarian measures in the future. So expect campaigns from vocal woke obsessives demanding similar levels of state control on such issues as the climate change hoax, homosexual proselytising, delusional transgender beliefs and still further capitulation to militant feminists, Islamists and black activists.
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