I looked at the pictures of people going shopping yesterday, few of them respecting any form of social distancing, and realised three things.
The first is that people have had enough of lockdown.
The second is that this means that a second, and probably larger wave of coronavirus outbreak is now almost inevitable, as the evidence of growing cases in the USA very strongly suggests.
And the third thing is that it is very likely that the entire economic cost suffered to date to try to beat this virus has almost certainly been in vain. We have not in any way achieved that objective, but we have suffered an enormous cost.
I am not saying that the cost in question was necessarily avoidable. Even if the government had not declared a lockdown, the likelihood that many people would have withdrawn from work, taken their children out of school, or simply become sick, was very high. This pandemic was always going to create economic disruption.
But we did, eventually, choose lockdown, like most countries, but have since then managed that process so badly that it is likely that we will have a worse second wave than most countries, and will see almost no benefit as a consequence of the loss suffered. What is more, many more people will die as yet, about which I can only presume that those crowding to the shops are indifferent.
I wonder when people will get angry about this? Or perhaps Cummings was right all along. Maybe cheap T shirts are worth more to most people than their grandparents dying earlier than they might otherwise have done. If so, there is no hope of managing climate change.
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Someone on twitter said ‘ you can’t shop your way out of the climate crisis’ (I can’t remember who so can’t credit them). Equally you can’t shop your way out of a pandemic. All this ‘shop for Britain’ nonsense is deeply worrying as we seem to have learnt very little.
PS I am not wanting to demonise people who need to get essentials or have struggled with lockdown. This is a consequence of the entire way that the Government have handled the crisis
Surely the major problem is that people have lost faith in the lockdown itself and are becoming complacent due, mainly, to the Dominic Cummings fiasco but also the daily ‘briefings’ with dubious statistics which count a nasal and throat tests as two tests and the postal tests sent out as a test completed when they have not yet been returned to the lab for diagnosis, rather than the actual number of people tested, which therefore understates the infection rate which, as examples, has helped to undermine the whole strategy when just being honest would have been more effective.
I realise any government in this situation has to make difficult decisions with the 60,000 extra deaths that have resulted, already a truly horrific number. But a second wave with a further lockdown requested by a government who have seriously lost credibility and trust in their management of the first wave and therefore may not have the same level of cooperation, could have catastrophic consequences.
That is what I am expecting
Forgive me but is “cheap tee shirts” is all that is sold in our shops theses days??.. people want to go and earn a living, it’s human nature. To extend lockdown would have frustrated public opinion to the point the Govt would have had no option but to reopen the economy. It really is a difficult trade off. Of course you just want to make a cheap shot to score points.
I am not making a cheap shot
I was noting what people were buying
I’m still working at home, along with everyone I know who can, and our elder relatives are still sheltering at home as they for 3 months now (although I have some relatives who work in the NHS, or in construction, or in the food industry, who are at work).
As a result, I don’t have first-hand experience of how it is working in practice, but the worst non-socially-distant queues I saw on the news were at a shop selling expensive trainers, not cheap T-shirts. Because everyone needs smart footware at their unlawful quarantine parties.
If you are in your teens or twenties, perhaps (selfishly) it make sense to catch it, as very few are badly affected. As you suggest, the difficulty is then infecting their vulnerable friends and relations, who are much more likely to suffer adverse effects.
@ Joe Hicks
Cheap shot to score points, eh?
“people want to go and earn a living, it’s human nature.”
Absolutely agree, there is a strong drive, within most, to feel useful. Not sure why going and earning a living has to be synonymous with buying ever more stuff and crowding into shopping centres, though?
“To extend lockdown would have frustrated public opinion to the point the Govt would have had no option but to reopen the economy.”
Mmm, probably. But only after a series of government personnel displayed contempt for the lockdown. People are (rightly) used to having freedom, and expecting fairness. The lockdown was working, because of an “all in it together” feeling, until Cummings. I certaily thought that there was, until that point, a general acceptance of lockdown for the greater good (the greater good…)
I do wonder how much the “the public won’t accept this much longer” narrative was a self-fulfilling prophecy?
This is before we even get on to HMG’s utterly woeful handling of the situation:
No tracking and tracing
Very little testing
No border control
It sounds like you want to act as a government apologist? Kindly, go sling yer hook.
“It really is a difficult trade off.”
Evidently not. People have traded off virus suppression for a return to normality. Do I blame them? Not entirely.
To me the actual difficult trade off seems to have been for the government to drop its religious “balance the books, don’t cooperate with the EU” narrative, and do the necessary work of testing, tracking, tracing, isolating, supplying PPE and generally being useful and coordinated. A little bird told me that part of the issue is absolute insistence on centralised track and trask *facepalm*.
Now that I type it, it *does* seem like a difficult trade off to make \s.
Take two ingredients a population where many show an inability to do joined-up thinking and a Libertarian government obsessed with market fundamentalism and you were never going to get a society willing to exercise much discipline in regard to containing the Corvid-19 pandemic.
I despair and apologise in advance for this general feeling of pessimism and despondency.
Earlier in one of your blogs you mentioned just how difficult things are right now and how holding on to hope for a better a future, is far from easy. I totally understand where you are coming from.
I think yesterday, together with the violence and scenes on the weekend (and the general mood of the nation at this moment in time) is a very sad reality of the times we are currently living in.
It is becoming apparant that hard and tough lessons are not being learnt by most of us and all the evidence over the last month or so, shows that there is little to no sign of any actual progress, reflection and serious change being made by the wider society at large, authorities, individuals, and companies.
It seems that people actually genuinely believe in, desire, and now want to return to the pre-covid era; damn it as quickly as possible and nothing (not even death) will get in the way of that.
Unfortunately, it looks like governments, institutions, companies, individuals will also sail through this and other crises wholly unaffected. Dare i say it, they may even become more emboldened and use events like yesterday and the whole crises to justify, strenghten and spread their mantra and doctrine and force the issue, despite the huge damage and consequences which lets face it only some of us (not everyone) will have to live with for many many years to come.
I think there is something very wrong and the hope of removing and elimnating inequality, climate change, social and economic injustice, are fading rapidly.
Forgive me setting off on a tangent, but the consequent anger might differ across the UK. The second wave you fear would likely be an “English” wave, one the devolved nations’ efforts to resist would be hamstrung by Westminster – if Westminster’s preoccupations remain the same. Dissolution of the Union becomes a matter of self-preservation for a few more of us on the fringe. Perhaps a majority.
“If you don’t know where you are going any road will do”. There is little (none in my opinion) thought in government about where UK should be going. The impression is of a blindfolded child at a party trying to pin a tail on a donkey. Thrashing around without trying to integrate the various conflicting stresses in the economy is a sure recipe for failure. Buying a cheap T shirt does not got many of the necessary buttons.
“The first is that people have had enough of lockdown”
This has been the case since day three of the lockdown (in some cases day one) this is why I keep stating things like the Green New Deal and tax reform etc… will ever take off, selfishness and the worst aspects of human nature gets in the way.
Case in point is that many people are now thinking about buying a car to travel to and from work because they are concerned about catching Covid-19, and do not seem to think about what damage the increase in air pollution can and will cause many problems.
See also the queues for McDonald’s etc…
I cannot do anything except agree with the title of this post.
But we are where we are because there is no viable test and stay at home policy from the Government.
And as we have seen in other countries, Covid is creeping back even in those places that responded well to it.
God only knows what our second wave will be like.
Grim
In reply to Joe Hicks, when you said “people want to go and earn a living, it’s human nature”, that’s something of a bold claim to make about what is human nature!
My sense is that we’re arriving at multiple converging crises, climate, ecological, economic, social, political, and so on, because we have never truly addressed any of them, and are still not addressing them. I think the business-as-usual response to protests and particularly to riots, which is to infiltrate, attack, suppress, undermine, vilify and so on, underscore the absence of action to address problems in favour of ignoring them and hiding them away as far as possible. The media silence on deaths caused by deliberate austerity is another glaring example, as is the near-silence on massive deforestation, and the usual “phew, what a scorcher” front pages of red tops when we experience abnormal weather patterns, as well as the way in which slavery in the US never really ended, but was continued in ever more inventive ways.
At the heart of all this, I would argue, is how we organise socially, economically and politically. Currently, everyone has to make or do something for others in order to survive, in many cases barely, and the media deify those who amass the most money, and money becomes the sole metric of achievement, worth, status and success. As Joe Hicks points out, everyone [has] to go out and earn a living – whether human nature or not – or face destitution, vilification, denigration and so on. The way out of this has to be a new relationship between people, between people and the state, and between people and political decision-making (massive decentralisation would be my preferred option – we’ve trialled centralised power for long enough now to know that it’s a dud). Otherwise, the world will die because people had to sell widgets to survive and support a system of breathtaking inequality.
The GND seems like a good start to this, but I am deeply concerned that this will never deliver what is needed as long as we have a concentrated centre of power. I can’t recall who said it (it was on a radio programme and I’m paraphrasing), but they said that the transition to a new way of living within the limits of the world for everyone, will either be managed by us, or will be forced upon us by the limits of the world and hence catastrophic. It kind of looks like we’re taking the latter route because of the interests of those in power. And too late they will discover that they also live on Earth, and not some kind of Elysium.
In the ‘me first’, and largely materialistic society what else can we expect.
Viewed in risk and reward terms this is a curious pandemic because most, particularly younger, people who are reasonably confident of their own general health do not feel greatly threatened so it really is a test of our social solidarity. A callous disregard for the rest of the population is not surprising given four decades of that being the governments’ direction of travel.
What has been a revelation is the extent to which a majority HAVE shown a sense of social cohesion and responsibility despite, I think rather than because, they do not feel personally to be at mortal risk. Obviously some people feel a considerably greater affection and responsibility for the welfare of their elderly and infirm family members than others, but we knew that.
The risk could run the other way of course.
A young person not mingling among those outdoors doing some shopping this week could end up increasing Grandma’s chances of dying before her time when we all move back indoors when the clocks go back.
That’s crass
I keep reading that a second wave, bigger (higher peak) than the first, is inevitable if we open up too quickly.
However, I can’t understand how that is possible (btw I’m not saying it isn’t possible, just that I can’t see how. I’m willing to be educated) given that the first wave was as a result of a time period where no preventative measures were in place.
If we opened up absolutely everything tomorrow at 7am with no restrictions on anything, there couldn’t be a larger wave as people will i) naturally take precautions due to the fear instilled over the first wave; ii) the population will have some level of immunity; and iii) hospitals and government will have (we can only hope) taken lessons in how to treat cases.
Now could there be a more prolonged wave? Potentially; but you’d hope that the health care system is geared up to cope with that. I mean without a vaccine we don’t really have much of a choice but to get life somewhat back to normal?
The longer we stay indoors and away from peope, surely the economic and psychological
ramifications get worse by the day?
I do talk to epidemiologists
Those I know suggest a second wave very likely
Almost all pandemics have waves
Why will it be worse?
The NHS is worn out
People are no longer taking precautions
We have no effective track and trace unlike most countries
There is very little immunity as yet – a very small proportion have had it
Could it be much worse than the first wave as a result?
Yes, is the answer I get
The results from Sweden are in : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4SQ-NOV-iU
Take home message : herd immunity project is a disaster. Expect up to x10 fatalities before it’s achieved, and the consequential knock on effects to the economy, delayed operations (I have two cancelled – one to prevent 40-75% risk of a 90% deadly cancer), the workplace, schooling etc etc
This is offset by some very important news yesterday from the PM. A UK-AU trade deal is being negotiated. He bragged that we will be able to buy Tim Tams and Vegemite at lower prices. I know we’ve all been waiting for that news!
Is the PM trolling us with junk food offerings??
Most importantly – damn the Vegemite and I hope you get the operations and they go well
Thank you Richard I really appreciate that.
May I add though – I am one of many people in such a predicament – and the backlog is growing.
And I’ve just read that the treasury is blocking plans for NHS patients to be treated in private hospitals. I’m not an economist, but that screams false economy.
On this occasion it does to me too
That, and indifference
Big bounce in US retail sales in May, up 18%, twice that of consensus expectations.. I for one hope the UK numbers follow a similar path.
You’re hoping Covid cases rise as fast in the UK as the US then too?
“You’re hoping Covid cases rise as fast in the UK as the US then too?”….and you call previous comments crass!! Is that what all the scientific evidence suggests? No it does t
Are you suggesting we stay in full lockdown??? I imagine if that was the case now you’d be complaining about the economic impact. You really do create the impression you could start an argument in an empty room..
Significant lockdown is still required – unless you want many, many more deaths
China is the latest evidence
I heard today that government spending on covid 19 is still only half of that spent bailing out the banks after 2008. Is this true? Still a way to go yet. At least , this time, it’s going into people’s pockets through the furlough scheme.
For all sorts of reasons these comparisons are genuinely hard to make
And this time we have a very long way to go
Including bank failures to come…..
You may be right but of course it depends what the objective was (not what it should have been) in assessing whether it has been achieved. I consider that the objective was always only to not overwhelm the NHS and it could be argued that this was by and large achieved, albeit at a huge cost to the lives of some and mental health of many doctors and nurses.
The level of infection will increase which the government knows will, and are happy to let, happen in the belief that the NHS will cope and eventually we will get to herd immunity or a vaccine.
Easing the lockdown is for political purposes; isn’t that all politicians really care about?