Lockdown commenced here on March 13th with the shutdown of schools. That was a Friday and by Sunday the unthinkable became lived reality, the pubs of Ireland where shutdown in advance of St Patrick’s Day. Yesterday I heard of a pub that had defiantly remained open for a few extra days. The Guards came a visiting and let the operator know that if he insisted on keeping his doors open license renewal would not be a smooth process.This is not a carrot and stick situation, it is liberal, Western governments obfuscating the draconian nature of the restrictions by making their implementation nominally voluntary, it is a light stick and heavy stick situation. This light stick of social control is backed up by an army of citizens, online and on the streets, who are quick to point fingers at anyone or any institution that contravenes the strictures of the new normal.
Of course, that is the case in all times. There are unseen but felt lines which demarcate socially acceptable bands of behaviour. Politics uses the concept of an Overton window to capture where on the line from right wing to left wing socially acceptable policies sit. In recent decades, the Overton window has moved rightwards, as government stewardship of the economy has faltered when compared with the dynamism of private companies particularly those in digital technology.
Social policies have moved in the opposite direction to economic ones, becoming more left-wing, as non-traditional beliefs such as gender equality and marriage equality have become orthodoxy in many countries. In the face of this pandemic, the magnetic poles have flipped and economics is swinging leftwards as governments are forced to offset the precipitous drop in economic activity with direct payments to companies and individuals. Can we expect social norms to move in a less progressive more restrictive direction as social interactions are frowned upon, mass entertainment is strictly prohibited, and rule following is fetishised. That’s a yes.
Where is all this going? Looking at worldometers.info/coronavirus/ on March 21st, the number of new daily cases in China is down to 41, with the vast majority related to people returning from overseas. Wuhan went into lockdown on January 23, just over 8 weeks ago, and according to a Nature magazine article the day of peak number of infections was two days later. Many restrictions remain in China, but people are going back to work. That is in many ways the best case scenario. A short sharp shutdown and then a gradual return to what we used to call normality. In a more likely scenario, the virus will return again and again, as it is out in the wild, roaming across the globe, highly infectious and highly robust. From what I’ve read it can survive for up to 3 hours in aerosols and up to 3 days on surfaces. It survives in large aerosols, the kind which can be flung 2 metres by spluttering from infected individuals. Social distancing, hand washing and surface cleaning are the methods so simple that they seem an ironic takedown of our complex, hyper-connected way of life. What is common, and therefore statistically easy to comprehend, is that we are all human, and our humanity is what makes us susceptible. Talk about an Achilles heel