Cartoon credit: Cartoonstock
Lionel Shriver’s column at The Spectator is titled “Never Has Virus Been so oversold: I’d like to sign on with COVID’s agent. What a publicity budget.” She sets forth the grotesque trade-offs we are seeing in both the US and the UK – with no end in sight. An extract:
The more relentless these
micro-managing policies of ‘social distancing’ (an expression I’ve come to
loathe), mandatory masks, continued closures and capriciously restored regional
lockdowns apparently on the basis of a miserable uptick of 14 extra cases, the
more we relocate what had lurked far at the back of our minds to the front:
other people are sources of contagion. We used to live with that fact. But this
on-going risk of mixing with other human beings we’re now, apparently, to find
intolerable.
I’m currently in New York, where
the medical paranoia is sustained, and social life is nearly nonexistent. This
week, a rarity, a couple came inside our house. They didn’t sit down, didn’t
stay long, and were careful not to touch anything. When they left they were
clearly relieved, and immediately doused themselves in hand sanitizer. I don’t
think it’s going to be any different next summer. Google, for example, has
already advised its employees to work from home for the next 12 months.
The graph of new cases in the UK
roughly leveled off throughout July — but it has not plateaued at zero. The PM
gives every indication that only zero will do. Thus as long as the coronavirus
persists, the fearful prophylactic measures will continue. In trade for this
valiant vigilance on our behalf, we merely have to sacrifice: our friends. Any
new friends. All live performance — music, plays. Restaurants. All occasions,
like proper weddings, funerals, birthdays and extended-family celebrations.
Travel. Colleagues. Any search for love. Any moving communal experience, like
festivals. Dentistry. A functional National Health Service. Oh, and the economy
— and in case you need translation, that means the country, full stop.
Boris’s ‘nuclear option’ of another
total national lockdown remains on the table. Why on earth? The one
constructive conclusion to draw from this debacle is that long, indiscriminate
national lockdowns to suppress infectious disease are a catastrophe. Yet the
most horrifying consequence of COVID-19 could be that lockdown — which once
applied only to prisons — becomes officialdom’s established knee-jerk response
to any new contagion.
There will be a new contagion, too,
and a new one after that. How many times can you send the national debt
soaring, devastate small business, paralyze government services — including
healthcare — and cancel for months on end the civil liberties of an erstwhile
‘free people’? In preference to this repeated carpet-bombing, a literal nuclear
option might at least get the agony over with fast.
Read the full column here (h/t Instapundit).
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