Will the “pingdemic” be the last straw for a jaded public?
Remember the early days of the first lockdown? That spring was full of high days, pale blue skies, clean air, tranquil parks and bright suns. State-backed quarantine felt like a novelty, so too the social contact that resumed as we re-opened during the summer months. In the harsh winter, we reassured ourselves that this summer would be much like the last, only a little sweeter – long-awaited weddings, much-missed family gatherings, the freedom to travel abroad would all resume.
That sense of shared optimism has given way to an altogether darker set of emotional states – the public mood is extremely frayed. In London, the anger and anxiety are palpable. The close, tropical weather is hardly helping. Last Friday, on a packed tube train, I witnessed a vicious argument unfold along my carriage. A masked man asked a woman standing by the next set of doors down: “Where’s your mask?” After she muttered something noncommittal, he responded: “Why haven’t you got something round your neck? If you don’t, I can’t tell if you are actually exempt.”
He then turned to another unmasked man across from him: “Where’s your mask?” “I’m double vaccinated, I’m tested every day at work, I’ve worked non-stop throughout the pandemic. I just don’t want to wear it this evening.” Everyone starts piping up: “You might not be infecting us with Covid, but you’re infecting us with your crap,” says one wag. Even Mr Plandemic logs on: “Covid isn’t even real.”
Eventually, the atmosphere grew less fraught and dullened as stops went by and the carriage emptied. I had the odd impression of being at the centre of a particularly vicious Twitter argument – all the qualities were there that dominate our feeds: the instinctive hardening of positions, sweeping snap judgements and frenetic push-and-pull. It also had the classic effect of a Twitter debate, making me feel far surer in my belief that no vaccine can deliver a “return to normality” on its own and that the priorities that shaped lockdown are moulding the shape of future restrictions.
In his diary for the New Statesman this week, Armando Iannucci wrote in fatalistic terms: “A pandemic is random, unremitting and beyond reason … It won’t back off when enough of us say, ‘We’ve had 18 months of masks, time to take them off and get on with our lives.’” Not only does this kind of reasoning elide the genuine conflict there is within the scientific community over various public health interventions. It also underplays the extent to which the shifting priorities of our ruling élite influence what it means to “get on with our lives” and the deep moral conflicts that are at play along every avenue of Covid policy.
Take the Euro championships – the state-sponsored, bread-and-circuses-style bonanza that played out over the last few weeks. While the rest of us bowed and scraped before the Covid gods – gathered in groups of six at most, wearing masks for hours in the heat in inside settings, made to “dip and sip” in theatres if we were silly enough to attempt to enjoy a drink during a performance – vast, vast crowds characterised by extreme hooliganism were met with the most minimal state censure and only the lightest touch policing.
Before the England versus Scotland match at Wembley, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon merely advised fans not to travel unless they had somewhere to stay. A light touch indeed for a politician who has previously pursued such a Stakhanovite approach to the Covid rules and guidance as to slip into occasional self-parody: last summer, after a mini-outbreak involving the Aberdeen football team and an ill-fated night “on the toon”, she said that she was “pretty furious” about the affair and implicitly threatened the Scottish league with swingeing cancellations in the future: “All bets are off,” she said.
Were the massed crowds and the celebrities and politicians given grace-and-favour access to sports events invited to curtail their activities because “there’s a pandemic on”?
The “pingdemic” is no different – the jaded public is expected to maintain inhuman standards of personal stringency and sacrifice (the government has even urged those “pinged” on the eve of their wedding to self-isolate and cancel), while for those at the top, there is always a pilot scheme, an exemption, an elegant excuse. This government is behaving like old Eastern bloc élites, whose members always had access to the best cars, relatively easy travel to the West and the best areas of cities, all justified because they did so much on behalf of “the people”.
This increasingly febrile summer will soon pass into bleak autumn. But in the face of rising cases and new variants colliding with waning immunity in the elderly, will the government stick or twist? It will find it harder to win legitimacy for new Covid rules if it continues to promote the impression that the “new normal” is pour les autres while it’s business as usual for the important ones. Expect plenty more bickering and recrimination on tube carriages in the next few months.