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

home for the bank holiday. Merseyside employed a charming ‘Wish You Weren’t Here!’ campaign. Perhaps the high temperatures and fresh air weren’t conducive to disease transmission; no spike in deaths followed.

16 MAY ONWARDS – ANTI-LOCKDOWN PROTESTS

Anti-lockdown protests inspired outrage. People who attended were labelled ‘idiots’ and ‘selfish anti-lockdown morons’ who would ‘put everyone at risk’. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, branded anti-lockdown protests ‘unacceptable’. There was no discernible impact on deaths.

31 MAY ONWARDS – ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’ PROTESTS

Many thousands took to the streets in a series of protests over the death of George Floyd and in support of Black Lives Matter. This time, politicians, the police and media were fairly quiet about the risk of spreading Covid. Sadiq Khan said, ‘To the thousands of Londoners who protested peacefully today: I stand with you.’ An article in The Guardian claimed that the mobility of crowds and mask-wearing reduced risk. One study, reported in The Independent, went further and said the protests helped increase social distancing behaviours. However, the science must have changed, as Priti Patel, Home Secretary, said in November that she would like to ban protests of more than two people.

25 JUNE – BOURNEMOUTH BEACH

A ‘major incident’ was declared at Bournemouth beach on 25 June. There were half a million visitors in Dorset, roads were gridlocked and the beaches were full. Local MP Tobias Ellwood said that people were ‘being selfish and also acting dangerously’. Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty responded to the beach scenes by saying that Covid cases would ‘rise again’. They didn’t. Eventually, by mid-February 2021, Mark Woolhouse, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, told the Science and Technology Committee in the House of Commons1 that no outbreaks of Covid had been linked to a beach so far.

4 JULY – ‘SUPER SATURDAY’

Dubbed ‘UK’s Independence Day’ or ‘Super Saturday’, 4 July was the day that pubs reopened in Britain. Places of worship opened too, but people seemed more cross about the pubs. Predictably, news stories on 5 July contained photographs of crowded streets of ‘drunken idiots’. While most of Britain probably celebrated sensibly, one police officer claimed to have dealt with ‘naked men, happy drunks, angry drunks, fights and more drunks’. Saturday night then. ‘Welcome to the second wave’ one furious commentator said. There was no impact on cases or deaths associated with ‘Super Saturday’.

SEPTEMBER – BACK TO SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY

Academics and unions warned that students preparing to return to university were risking a ‘public health crisis’ and that we were ‘weeks away’ from ‘sleepwalking into a disaster’. They also grumbled that plans to make schools ‘Covid secure’ were ‘unviable’. In line with fresher’s flu and back to school sniffles, cases of Covid undeniably rose in September although deaths remained low.

CHRISTMAS

Neil Ferguson of Imperial College warned that households mixing ‘risks some transmission and there will be consequences of that. Some people will die because of getting infected on that day.’ Happy Christmas to you too, Neil. Susan Michie said, ‘If we really want to keep our loved ones safe, the best thing is not to see them.’ And Anouchka Grose wrote in The Guardian that, ‘Anybody with any kind of conscience is beating their brain, calculating all eventualities that may result from showing up for lunch in a week’s time – one of which involves inadvertently killing your aged parents.’

UK deaths within 28 days of positive test by date of death2

Just a couple of weeks after Ferguson’s predictions, the UK government changed its plans to relax social restrictions for Christmas due to a new infectious and rapid-spreading strain which was ‘was out of control’.3

According to the Office for National Statistics,4 around half of the people who were allowed to meet for Christmas did so. There was a spike in infections at Christmas, but unrelated to Christmas itself. Paul Hunter, a professor at the University of East Anglia’s medical school, said, ‘I actually can’t see any convincing evidence that Christmas actually did anything to make things worse at all,’ in an analysis for the BBC.5

BACK TO SCHOOL AGAIN

By now you know the script. Some experts were worried that when pupils returned to school, Covid cases would go up. It was almost as though all their previous predictions had been true rather than false, such was the confidence. Also, it was as though the UK had not rolled out a successful vaccination programme, and that spring was in the air. Professor John Edmunds of SAGE warned that ‘it looks as if it would be touch and go’ and that ‘if we opened secondary schools and primary schools both at the same time, I suspect we would be lucky to keep the reproduction number below one’.6 There was a slowdown in the fall in cases attributed to the return to school, although this was thought to be due to the increased mass LFT testing in schools. Once again, there was no catastrophic effect on cases, deaths or R.

In a twist on the game ‘pin the tail on the donkey’, see if you can locate the super-spreader events on the graph of Covid deaths and discern any impact. Then see if you can pinpoint the following interventions: lockdown 1.0, masks on transport, masks in shops, rule of 6, lockdown 2.0, tier restrictions or lockdown 3.0.

Has the illusion of control exaggerated our belief that we can control the course of a virus?

The attitudes towards people who would gather and mingle are definitely not illusory. Journalists, politicians and the public condemned and sneered at ordinary people they described as ‘Covidiots’ and ‘selfish’. This created social division, shame, anger and more fear. People are more likely to assume responsibility when things go right, and less responsibility when things go wrong, so perhaps they simply need scapegoats lined up for the crisis around the corner.

MARK, 44

I did feel a sigh of relief when the second lockdown was announced. We’ve been having a trial thing of going back to the office one week out of every three. I