Covid restrictions continuing means we’re frozen in the emergency mentality
If the Euros facilitated a brief reprieve from the logic of a socially distanced world, temporarily bringing back the thrum of life to our city centres, with beer-soaked masses squeezing onto terraces, around bars and into the backrooms of pubs, then since the unfortunate dénouement of the competition, the paranoia has reasserted itself with a great deal of ferocity. The government’s grand reopening – aka “Freedom Day” – is perversely set to solidify the practice of social distancing into next year at the very least via social pressure and the maintenance of the test and trace system.
After 16 August, self-isolation rules will lapse for fully vaccinated people if they come into contact with a positive case. A step in the right direction, you might think. But just as the law will now treat the vaccinated and the unvaccinated differently, the government has urged businesses to request certification of Covid negative status as a condition of entry.
Bringing in vaccine passports for gatherings was “a matter of social responsibility”, Boris Johnson said at a press conference on Monday. The hospitality industry has so far resisted calls to enforce a new “Covid secure” system of checks and certificates. But come the winter, come a new variant, or if cases continue to spiral, expect Boris’s gentle nudge towards “social responsibility” to transform into a big government-backed shove.
It is implicit that in Britain we are not going to treat Coronavirus as we do as the other respiratory viruses that circulate widely every winter. We are not going to go down the route of replicating the GP-led flu surveillance system for Covid. We will mass test. We will track and trace. And we will enforce quarantine. There is even talk now of treating flu in the same way. A government-commissioned report by the Academy of Medical Sciences entitled “Preparing for a challenging winter 2020-21” recommended expanding the Test, Trace and Isolate system to include screening for influenza and other seasonal coronaviruses.
Preserved by health checks and certificates, social pressure, and the heavy hand of the State, “Freedom Day” will usher in a socially distanced settlement, generally accepted by a terrified public who are wedded to the general belief that it is “better to be safe than sorry”.
And yet we stand to lose an awful lot in the process.
One of the most significant joys of life is serendipity. You don’t find life hidden deep inside – it’s on the road, on the avenue, in the faces we see around us, the flashed smile, a head thrown back in laughter. It’s Larkin’s “frail travelling coincidence”, Dylan’s “heading for another joint”. The joy of experience – that sheer quality of sound and sight and noise, this mysterious force that draws the soul out from itself – no longer sustains itself in a socially distanced world. Checking, masking, sanitising, booking, adjusting – somewhere along the way the richness of experience gets lost.
We will, of course, be living with the after-effects of this pandemic for years. At some point, the disease will reach an endemic state in the UK in a vaccinated population causing less serious illness and reduced mortality. Although the Spanish Flu did not live on in the popular imagination like the First World War with its war poets, “brutalised Tommies”, and shell-shocked young men, it still pervades the literature of the twenties – the themes of disease, illness and convalescence pop up all over the place – even Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) is suffering from “Long Spanish Flu”: “an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes.”
My fear is that society will not go through the process that followed the Spanish Flu pandemic – once the mass deaths are at an end, Covid will not pop up occasionally in the motifs of our literature or as just a nasty virus that we occasionally get at wintertime. Rather, as a result of an unhappy marriage of social pressure and empowered bureaucracy, we will remain frozen in the emergency mentality of 2020 that tells itself that we must avoid infection and death tout court and that almost any cost is justified to that end.
A socially distanced settlement makes it harder for society to work through the after-effects of the pandemic. Social capital is maintained by chance meetings and encounters – that quick chat in the office leading to a coffee, a joke shared with a complete stranger. We will find it far more difficult to work through the dire experiences of 2020 without this quality of life returning in its full force. If we find it again, the process will be tough but bearable. Without it, we will find ourselves stuck, rooted to the spot, albeit with our masks on, hands sanitised and vaccine passports at the ready.