A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic - Laura Dodsworth (the first e reader .txt) 📗

disturbing impact of lockdown too early. A cynical interpretation would be that it was conducted early to placate people, before the impact on suicide could be known.

said

Easthope also told me that she worried that ‘we’ve done something incredibly traumatising to the families that is potentially bigger than the bereavement itself. In any disaster you should still allow people to see the dead. It is a gross inhumanity of bad planning that people couldn’t visit the sick, view the deceased’s bodies, or attend funerals. Had we had a more liberal PPE stockpile we could have done this. PPE is about accessing your loved ones and dead ones, it is not just about medical professionals.’ She said previous plans had flooded resources into death registration and management, not taken them away. It was recognised that overwhelm was an issue, but just removing the safeguards should not have been the answer. ‘This is the sort of thing that I had expected us to be doing in January and February,’ she said, ‘but a sort of paralysis set in.’

Good planning was cast aside. We were not equipped to process the Covid dead, and we’ll never be able to properly count them. In decades to come, when the inevitable reports and studies into the Covid dead are published, they will be littered with asterisks and freighted with footnotes. Or worse, taken dangerously at face value.

Beyond counting the dead, how do we count the cost to ourselves socially? Dying alone in a hospice, last rites delivered in full PPE, no family beside the bed. People unable to visit elderly relatives in care homes for months. Funerals limited to 10 people. The young calling suicide helplines, bewildered and traumatised. The uncertainty over cause of deaths, the lack of closure. How do you count the cost of dying alone at home, too scared to go to hospital, or without holding someone’s hand? For this, we need the ultimate inquest and then the birth of better ways to count the dead.

ROSIE, 13, BY HER MOTHER

We were really scared with all the images we’d seen in the media. We put ourselves in isolation a week before lockdown because the kids had coughs. When we officially went into lockdown on the 23 March we stuck to the rules. We stayed inside 100% for a good three months, except for a dog walk once a day.

We got to the stage where it was obvious my 13-year-old daughter, Rosie, was scared to go out. So at that stage, even though it wasn’t technically allowed, we thought we had to start encouraging her to go out with her friends.

When you are 13 the world should open up to you. It’s really sad to think of teenagers having so many restrictions placed on them. I worry it will stunt their emotional growth.

She has to use hand sanitiser before each lesson at school and her hands hurt. She has been sent out of class for coughing, but she coughed because of the sanitiser fumes in the air. They have a mask monitor who screams at them if they don’t have their masks on. Our daughter complains about the constant eyes on her and telling her what to do. It’s a tyranny over them.

My daughter started having panic attacks. They happen more often at school, and I think that’s because of the rules and restrictions. I have to pick her up from school if it happens. The first time, I genuinely thought something was seriously wrong with her. Her body went into overdrive.

She feels dizzy and weak when she has one. She feels like her neck can’t hold the weight of her head and has shooting pains in her head. After the huge rush of adrenalin she starts to shake. She couldn’t walk after the first one.

When she had the first one, apparently the teacher wouldn’t come near her. I couldn’t believe a teacher wouldn’t stop her falling, or help her, because she was so scared of touching another human.

Some of her friends are experiencing anxiety in their own ways too. It’s made me think about how young girls are going to cope. Hysteria and feelings do pass especially between young girls.

She is on a waiting list for a counsellor at the school who probably won’t be available till January. It feels like we don’t have anywhere to go. We feel cut off from the world. I feel angry. It’s where we are headed as a society that worries me.

We don’t make our daughter stick to the rules anymore, She has enough to deal with in school with these measures. She needs normality at the weekend, so we let her see friends and family. Grandparents hug her. We won’t have people tell us we can’t hug.

12. THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL

During the epidemic we were told repeatedly that mass gatherings and the loosening of lockdown screws would result in more Covid cases, more deaths, a surge, another wave, a tsunami, a worst-case scenario. Disaster was always around the corner, or in ‘two weeks’. By the time we were around the corner, or the fortnight had elapsed, we were onto the next crisis.

Here are nine times that the doom-mongering modellers and the pessimistic politicians and pundits told the people of the UK that they would cause disaster and death during 2020.

8 MAY – VE DAY

Despite being urged to stay at home, people held socially-distant street gatherings for VE Day, braving the UK media’s disapprobation. Villagers in Grappenhall were described as ‘breathtakingly stupid’ for performing a socially-distanced conga holding a rope marked at two-metre intervals. A local journalist commented that ‘the best thing the Grappenhall conga line could have done was to keep on dancing all the way down Knutsford Road to Warrington Hospital’. Yet they must have found their way home, as there were no Covid deaths in the local hospital over the next several weeks.

26 MAY – BANK HOLIDAY

Tourism bosses and local authorities, panicked by the beautiful weather forecasts, warned people to stay at