Lockdown, once again?
With the turn of the new year being just hours away now, the UK populace has found itself in the familiar position of needing to come to terms with yet stronger lockdown restrictions. Traditionally this time of year would be one of joy, celebration, colour, and eagerness for all that’s to unfold in the year to come. In our present state of affairs however, it’s hardly needful to say that such feelings are largely absent, and are likely to remain absent for quite some time.
What exactly should we make of the most recent UK government announcement? Well, it would firstly be sensible to think of it as but one feature in a very troubling series of developments. The national consciousness has hardly recovered from the Christmas blow it was recently dealt, where families had to learn that some newly concocted policy forbade them, on pain of legal consequence, from enjoying the festive period in communion with one another. This, mind you, after several weeks of incessant promises being made from all establishment quarters, that a fractured Christmas would under no circumstances eventuate. Neither am I the first to notice that such news coincided almost perfectly with the announcing of preparatory plans for a mass-vaccination rollout, which is scheduled to have greatest effect in the early part of 2021. Such parallels in timing are of course anything but coincidental, and only now is the question being raised by many, whether it’s possible that these increasingly burdensome restrictions are indeed calculated to push the people to a point of buckle.
Now before I proceed onwards, I want to preface by making one particular point as plain as can be. I am not an ‘anti-vaxxer’; nor should it be thought that I hold to any similar view. The medical vaccination, along with many other triumphs of modernity, has helped to save an untold number of people from the ravaging effects of diseases of all types. It is even arguable that without an ability to inoculate, the human race as we know it wouldn’t have lasted as long as it has hitherto done. This recognition however, shouldn’t preclude me from being able to point out when public policy is being used, arguably, as a means to rid people of their remaining doubts concerning the new vaccine(s). Many policymakers could sense from the very beginning, that too great a percentage of people were likely to refuse taking a vaccine that was approved and produced with so much haste. It’s long been understood that if the pandemic is to be overcome, the intransigence on the part of many towards vaccination had to be corrected, and so sorry things had to be enforced. The worn out adage of ‘desperate times, call for desperate measures’ is but all too apt in describing our current situation.
It may however be objected that such thinking amounts to nothing more than mere conjecture, and that the government’s decision to abruptly throw the majority of people into the strictest tiers is based solely on hard, data-driven science; taking only the limiting of the virus’ spread as an end. To this I would say, perhaps so, but to disallow for the possibility that heavier restrictions are also intended to soften public morale, and to make people more obliging towards the new vaccine(s), is to exhibit a truly extraordinary level of naïveté. In any case, whatever the full and actual motives behind recent developments are, they fortunately (or unfortunately) will soon cease to be opaque to public perception.
A brief closing segment on the sociological impact of lockdown is in order, especially as it concerns forcing individuals en masse into a state of long-term solitude and atomisation. I think with great difficulty would you today find a scientist of any standing, who would withhold assent from the proposition that human beings are fundamentally social creatures. It’s known as you might say a priori, and there are an exhaustless number of studies which say as much. In light of this, what then to make of continued lockdown policies, which seek to outsmart a killer virus that boasts a breath-taking 0.3% death rate (or if you like, 99.7% survival rate)? You really don’t need me to labour in detail the consequences… though, just for cursory purposes: — increased medication/alcohol dependencies, increased domestic abuse, increased existential confusion/anxiety, increased loneliness, increased self-harm, increased suicide rates, increased unemployment, increased university dropouts, increased consumer uncertainty, increased business bankruptcies, increased homelessness, and increased political disillusionment — but there there now, take heart, a few percent also knocked off the national transmission rate.
