A personal take on human contact and isolation, COVID and lockdowns.
In normal conditions, many of us have stood in the queues at shops and supermarkets and become irritated with the lengthy conversations which sometimes occur between the cashier and customer, raging at the several minutes of our life which will we will never get back- but I don’t, because one of the first proper jobs I did was working as a small branch keyholder in one of the small two-man branches which used to dot the high streets of the Britain- before they were all shut in belt-tightening, profit-maximising exercises and converted into bistros and boutique shops.
Many of the customers were elderly, interspersed with the occasional small business dropping off its daily or weekly takings. And for the former, a conservation with the person behind the till might be one of the few points of human contact in the course of their entire week- a highlight to be looked forward to for days, like peering out of the window eagerly awaiting the arrival of the postie, the paper or the milk, so you could have an impromptu conversation with someone you knew at least loosely.
And it’s not just the childless elderly who find themselves atomised and alone. In many formerly industrial towns across the UK, and in the North in particular, there is a deep sadness to people’s eyes. They grew up in a time where most people in a town worked for one of only a handful of employers, and their parents and grandparents were only a few doors down the street each way, ever ready to pop round for a cup of tea and a chat, readily available to babysit the kids if a night out down the local pub, social club or working men’s club was planned.
Now their own children have long since moved hundreds of miles away in pursuit of jobs, they live such hectic lives they can’t stop for more than a few minutes when phoned and visits from grandkids are limited and dutifully restricted to a few special occasions each year. Even before the pandemic, much of social fabric which previous generations had relied upon was unravelling before our eyes, the young perpetually anxiety-ridden and depressed- no doubt caused by trading the vicarious thrill of the like button on social media for the handful of true friends which are really more essential and necessary to maintaining sanity.
During lockdown, if one was fortunate to live in a small village or a street where there was least at some semblance of community spirit generated through the local pub and cornershop, you might have noticed the frequency of miserable older man in mourning over the temporary closure of their local watering holes- on your daily ration of exercise which the government allowed.
And that’s the point of all this- we didn’t ask whether the old or elderly wanted protection, we simply assumed the responsibility, through the dreadful mechanism of daily death figures. We didn’t ask them whether they wanted to eke out much of their slender few remaining years in isolated misery instead of taking the chance of going out with both a bang and a whimper. We didn’t have the appetite to reflect on the abject misery we were causing, acting instead to salve our own consciences through swift and decisive action.
The elderly and dementia-befuddled dying alone, hurt and confused by the absence of their cherished family in those last slowly dimming days and weeks. Their only comfort plastic-clad strangers and a muffled tear-filled phone call. Lonely funerals which suggest a plenitude of national miserliness, instead of the often joyfully reflective mourning of a community coming together to celebrate a life.
I was lucky. I saw the pandemic coming from miles away, before most were even aware of a problem through our public health officials. I was the beneficiary of digital knowledge tree which gave me access to in-person experts every bit as knowledgeable as government advisors. My family was fully saturated by Vitamin D long before more than a handful of cases were detected in the UK. My freezers and shelves were fully stocked in anticipation of the inevitable emptying of supermarket shelves. I had seen the local supermarket in the next village run out of bread, milk and eggs too many Christmases with a few centimetres of snow, to not know what was coming.
I was lucky. Within weeks of the first lockdown, my aunt was popping over on almost a daily basis, her dog in tow. We would drive down to the local boat dyke in separate cars with separate dogs for hour long circuits of idyllic footpaths and fields. She frequently borrowed masks from my pre-ordered stock. Like many smart cookies during those early days she had noticed that our community shop had the luxury of infrequent one-at-a-time customers, instead of the fear instilled by shopping with a mob of strangers who didn’t know that a mask wasn’t a substitute for social distancing.
I was lucky- even though I agonised. My mother was not only in the most vulnerable group, but she also has a weekly methotrexate injection for her arthritis. That makes her immunocompromised. Realising the danger, the local doctor’s surgery sent out a plastic clad nurse every week by car to mitigate her chronic risk. The nurse sternly told my mum that she wasn’t to have any in-person contact, outside of our small bubble, whatsoever. I didn’t have the heart to stop her going down to the shop once a day. The risks were minimal, after all, and it was convenient having weekly updates from the nurse, as to the real story of what was happening with COVID at the local hospital. We got priority access to the by-then in-short-supply and rationed weekly online deliveries through our local supermarket.
But many during COVID weren’t so lucky. Mother’s with their children, technically homeless, but housed in emergency one-room accommodation were told to stay put. People in cities, kept enclosed in claustrophobic conditions, whilst the one thing which would have been a real difference- the shutting down of the primary vector for the disease in those early months, public transport, was never even considered. When the only healthy young people dying in droves, other than hospital nurses, are physically fit bus drivers with no comorbidities in their thirties, then that should have told the powers that be, exactly how the virus was finding new sources of food.
A few brave souls in the scientific and medical communities did publish a declaration of a saner means of navigating the pandemic which was far more reflective of views within the scientific community in general, sticking their head above the parapet to risk the censure of the self-same caution zealots who were by now advising governments across the West. It’s a brave group of souls willing to publish the more general view, and risk the ad hominem damage to reputation sure to follow from standing up to the Dictatorship of the Small Minority. They called it the Great Barrington Declaration. It was largely ignored by the media, but here it is for the record: Great Barrington Declaration
One of the most disappointing things about the whole episode is that, in many ways, here in the UK, is it’s been a repeat of Brexit. I don’t understand the certitude of so many in the public arena, or generally- even close friends and family members have come down with a particular disease of bias related to COVID, or at least the lockdowns. People fell into one of two categories- either the wilfully dubious and rebellious towards even the most common sense and basic restrictions, or an absolute and certain conviction in the dire warnings of the totally unrepresentative experts hand-picked by a media hoping to boost their ratings and confirm their own biases. I could quote Bertrand Russell “One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”
Perhaps having read him, makes one forewarned and forearmed. I went from being far more concerned than most, to guarded caution, to frustration with a media narrative which was trying to scare people into submission. Most of all, I didn’t go out of my way to find evidence which supported my position, quite the opposite. One can be quite assured that one is on the road to truth when one becomes less certain of one’s convictions with each passing step. The thrill of finding a piece of evidence which directly refutes your presuppositions is in many ways more satisfying than that which supports it.
One of the easiest way to spot those who are heavily under the influence of anchor biases is by watching to see whether their gospel is daily new cases and R numbers alone. One of the first things any fool learns when examining data professionally is that you need a consistent source of data collection over time. That means that your sampling method needs to be the same throughout. With the number of new daily cases detected each day massively inflated over time by improved testing capacity and better access to tests for those who are more asymptomatic, daily new cases was and is perhaps the worst single source of data to rely upon, although it should not be ignored completely.
Far better look to total hospitalisations and deaths, as well as excess mortality figures. Even the hospitalisation numbers have to be taken with a degree of caution, because, as more critical and serious cases free up capacity and hospitalisation becomes less a matter of life and death triage, there is a danger that this newly freed up resources will be allocated to people who only need short-term access to a breathing mask. Opinion polls show strong support for a temporary lengthening of remaining restrictions to ensure permanent reopening, but how many people labour under the misconception that our current straights are quite serious? By new daily cases, one might assume that the situation is about half as serious as in January, but in January hospitalisations peaked at 39,000, whereas only last week they stood at 1,400.
But perhaps, the most disappointing aspect of COVID, is that the country seems to be making the same mistakes it made about Brexit. Cosmopolitan liberals still believe that they lost the vote because people who voted for Leave didn’t get the economic argument- or even worse that it was all motivated by some deeply held animus towards foreigners. They were wrong about both counts.
They did get the economic argument, but simply weren’t beneficiaries of trade with Europe in any tangible real ways. Most accepted that there would be some disruption to trade and even permanent loss, but suspected that the doom and gloom forecasts were overblown, as has subsequently been borne out. And they weren’t really against foreigners in any hateful or individually antagonistic way- it was simply that they didn’t want to see their culture and communities displaced any further by incoming mass migration. You see people weren’t asking them what they cared about, what mattered to them. To my shame, as a then Remainer, it was something I only began to examine after the Referendum loss. Unlikely many, I wanted to know exactly how I had gotten things so completely wrong.
And it’s the same now. Because most people want to protect the vulnerable, it’s the reason behind the still continuing support for some restrictions, as well as protecting the NHS and the overweening caution of a few under thirties who have not yet had access to the vaccines. But nobody has bothered to ask our older and senior citizens what they actually want.
You can tell from the pubs. There are clear divisions by class and by age. Generally, most of the young to be found, are there because it’s their job- they are working there. Most of the drinking customers are at least in their forties, with many a grey hair to be spotted. Generally, if the upper middle classes are there at all, it is for a sit-down meal, rather than for purely social drinking purposes. They have active home lives, ample ability to entertain in safety with their spacious accommodations and gardens, and can maintain social contact through rich and rewarding professional lives. Many are not so fortunate.
Most don’t realise the fatalistic approach adopted by many older people with more tenuous points of social contact, because they just haven’t asked. For many, the risk of death is preferable to the shutting down of all human social interaction. Years ago, after my dad’s second bout of cancer in which a thyroid removal left him somewhat more vulnerable to health risks, his doctor told my mum that he was often reluctant to tell older patients that they should stop drinking, smoking or eating unhealthily. To his mind, there was something obscene about telling people living under the shadow of mortality to strip out much of the remaining simple pleasure in life.
Everybody is operating under the assumption that we have been acting in the interests of not killing gran. Nobody has stopped to ask her whether she really wants to avoid seeing her grandchildren, or live alone in isolation. At the same time, there is a growing sentiment that just because some people are unwilling to get the vaccine, the rest of us shouldn’t be held hostage, or subject to never-ending restrictions.
Many accept that taking the vaccine is a matter of personal choice, but as it becomes more apparent that COVID deaths from the Delta variant are almost exclusively restricted older people who have refused the vaccine, there is a growing swell of resentment building that the rest of us are being held hostage to a recalcitrant few. At the moment the temperature is barely simmering, like a saucepan far from reaching the boil. But if the powers-that-be aren’t careful, then lockdown protestors might become a far more common and numerous sight. People have put their lives on hold for long enough and patience is wearing thin.
One of the reasons for the seemingly lackadaisical chaos of early COVID planning and response which occurred in many countries in the West was for one simple reason. Lockdowns were never a part of any pandemic planning for the simple reason that almost all the experts agreed that it simply wasn’t possible to keep people cooped up for any real length of time. The plan in most scenarios involved triaging the situation until natural herd immunity was reached. Depending upon your point of view the fact that they were able to frighten and guilt people into compliance should be a source of fear, anxiety and pride. Pride because most people were willing to voluntarily self-restrict. Fear and anxiety because of just how easily we were cowed.
One of the most poignant moments for me was the sight of a very elderly couple sat closely together near the back of a bus. The moment was short and my eyes never left them until the bus passed by and the image has returned many times since.
Your account is a keen observation that mirrors much of my own observance. I've felt somewhat like a voyeur in a living dream and within that dream one can discern the largest implication of reaction as one of a form of panicked shell-shocked reaction. That this war on the invisible enemy, that somehow is as much a war on our inability to make rational and collective decisions for a fear of misdiagnosing how to behave. As we evaluate the script being described we must individually reach conclusions and a direction; but the narrative is broken, scattershot, hypercritical and hyperinflates panic and fear over any real objectivity. So we react as stunned. Like shell shocked individuals unable to reach a point of clear thought. Zombified.
Our leaders have a plan and they'll update us by the science. Yes they'll terrify the life out of us and make themselves by their design, the only saviours that will bring salvation to the very psychological trauma they've successfully sold en-masse.
One thing I feel that is being brought to the fore and through the individual instinct of self-preservation, is an atomisation; a singularity, but with a caveat and that is although a person would naturally revert to self-preservation that here he is somehow doing everything more for the good of others. A great old thing too, if that's what happens. But sneeze in your mask and watch people flee or watch the curtains twitch across the road when someone appears at your door; as if their entry into your dwelling spells instant doom to any witness of such. Of course these same neighbours are out applauding themselves as much as any health-care worker at 7pm and surreptitiously their eyes scan for those not obeying the politically in vogue doctrine that virtue is guaranteed only to those showing it.
I was most awakened to the Covid spectacle via some personal pattern recognitions that never seemed to add up for this crisis. Initially there was far too little international effort in containment, that seemed an apparent yet crucially important mistake. You would just stop the planes. Then I thought of India where I'd spent years of travel. A country one could never really lock down. That this virus was airborne and once uncontainable there seemed an impossibility in eradicating it; like suddenly deciding that we'd get rid of the common cold or influenza viruses.
Then Sweden and even the British initial herd immunity strategy. Adding it all together and many more things on this endless list of irregularities one could only see glaring holes.
So back to those two old people on that bus. They were undoubtedly scared, but they weren't so scared to give up their independence. Oh to have lived so long and know that you aren't far away from meeting your maker. To see your skin wither and now walk slowly. To have survived all other illness, tragedy, but to have felt both youth and old age. To understand the human condition and its selfishness, but all its great offerings. To recall a past when everything was the same in condition but complicated by modernity. To comprehend the cycle of change that only a long life can appreciate. So who are you to choose for me what I want in my final hours? Who are you to take away my final decisions and proclaim such on my behalf? For if there is anything precious in life it is family. If there is anything more precious than this it is the holders of long lives who have the wisdom of its appreciation. They alone can choose their own risk, they understand mortality better than any.
I imagine them stepping off that bus and feeling between them that spirit of strength and determination, that no matter what is put in front of them, just like all that has come before, that they will fight it on their own terms.
I often read your posts on Quillette with interest. This is my first visit to this site. Thanks for your candor regarding your journey on the Brexit issue. I feel like one of the worst aspects of that debate ("cruel" would not be too strong) is now surfacing in this one and about to be promoted further. That is the practice of painting the opposition as incompetent or downright evil. Is the label of "racist" in the Brexit debate that much different than "wilfully dubious and rebellious towards even the most common sense and basic restrictions" and "recalcitrant few"? I am one of the recalcitrant few you speak of. I am in my 70's and willfully (childishly? incompetently?) resist submitting my body to a largely untested new technology and the mass psychosis behind it. You are not being held hostage by me, or "to" me as you put it. This is a red herring offered to you by Big COVID, the corporations, government officials and technocrats who benefit from it. I fear a future in which my choice not to be a guinea pig puts me in an underclass that is reviled, isolated, and who knows what else.
Yeah. Is it good news or bad news that there's enough cohesion that most everybody meekly did what they were told? Depends who's doing the telling doesn't it?
Hi Geary, I have always been happy to see your comments on articles in Quilette, and more often than not, will find you're actually more enlightening than the author. So I'm glad to see you have your own platform and will be sure to keep visiting.
One question I have on this article, is that whilst you make a good case for not following the "experts", without thinking of what people actually want, I wondered what your thoughts are on:
a) Long Covid? And whether there is a risk that if not understood it could be a problem in itself?
b) The risk that the longer the virus is among us, the greater the chance of a variant that our vaccines do not deal with?
One of the most poignant moments for me was the sight of a very elderly couple sat closely together near the back of a bus. The moment was short and my eyes never left them until the bus passed by and the image has returned many times since.
Your account is a keen observation that mirrors much of my own observance. I've felt somewhat like a voyeur in a living dream and within that dream one can discern the largest implication of reaction as one of a form of panicked shell-shocked reaction. That this war on the invisible enemy, that somehow is as much a war on our inability to make rational and collective decisions for a fear of misdiagnosing how to behave. As we evaluate the script being described we must individually reach conclusions and a direction; but the narrative is broken, scattershot, hypercritical and hyperinflates panic and fear over any real objectivity. So we react as stunned. Like shell shocked individuals unable to reach a point of clear thought. Zombified.
Our leaders have a plan and they'll update us by the science. Yes they'll terrify the life out of us and make themselves by their design, the only saviours that will bring salvation to the very psychological trauma they've successfully sold en-masse.
One thing I feel that is being brought to the fore and through the individual instinct of self-preservation, is an atomisation; a singularity, but with a caveat and that is although a person would naturally revert to self-preservation that here he is somehow doing everything more for the good of others. A great old thing too, if that's what happens. But sneeze in your mask and watch people flee or watch the curtains twitch across the road when someone appears at your door; as if their entry into your dwelling spells instant doom to any witness of such. Of course these same neighbours are out applauding themselves as much as any health-care worker at 7pm and surreptitiously their eyes scan for those not obeying the politically in vogue doctrine that virtue is guaranteed only to those showing it.
I was most awakened to the Covid spectacle via some personal pattern recognitions that never seemed to add up for this crisis. Initially there was far too little international effort in containment, that seemed an apparent yet crucially important mistake. You would just stop the planes. Then I thought of India where I'd spent years of travel. A country one could never really lock down. That this virus was airborne and once uncontainable there seemed an impossibility in eradicating it; like suddenly deciding that we'd get rid of the common cold or influenza viruses.
Then Sweden and even the British initial herd immunity strategy. Adding it all together and many more things on this endless list of irregularities one could only see glaring holes.
So back to those two old people on that bus. They were undoubtedly scared, but they weren't so scared to give up their independence. Oh to have lived so long and know that you aren't far away from meeting your maker. To see your skin wither and now walk slowly. To have survived all other illness, tragedy, but to have felt both youth and old age. To understand the human condition and its selfishness, but all its great offerings. To recall a past when everything was the same in condition but complicated by modernity. To comprehend the cycle of change that only a long life can appreciate. So who are you to choose for me what I want in my final hours? Who are you to take away my final decisions and proclaim such on my behalf? For if there is anything precious in life it is family. If there is anything more precious than this it is the holders of long lives who have the wisdom of its appreciation. They alone can choose their own risk, they understand mortality better than any.
I imagine them stepping off that bus and feeling between them that spirit of strength and determination, that no matter what is put in front of them, just like all that has come before, that they will fight it on their own terms.
I often read your posts on Quillette with interest. This is my first visit to this site. Thanks for your candor regarding your journey on the Brexit issue. I feel like one of the worst aspects of that debate ("cruel" would not be too strong) is now surfacing in this one and about to be promoted further. That is the practice of painting the opposition as incompetent or downright evil. Is the label of "racist" in the Brexit debate that much different than "wilfully dubious and rebellious towards even the most common sense and basic restrictions" and "recalcitrant few"? I am one of the recalcitrant few you speak of. I am in my 70's and willfully (childishly? incompetently?) resist submitting my body to a largely untested new technology and the mass psychosis behind it. You are not being held hostage by me, or "to" me as you put it. This is a red herring offered to you by Big COVID, the corporations, government officials and technocrats who benefit from it. I fear a future in which my choice not to be a guinea pig puts me in an underclass that is reviled, isolated, and who knows what else.
Yeah. Is it good news or bad news that there's enough cohesion that most everybody meekly did what they were told? Depends who's doing the telling doesn't it?
You deserve a larger audience. Brilliant as always, you see things so clearly. Thank you for this piece.
Hi Geary, I have always been happy to see your comments on articles in Quilette, and more often than not, will find you're actually more enlightening than the author. So I'm glad to see you have your own platform and will be sure to keep visiting.
One question I have on this article, is that whilst you make a good case for not following the "experts", without thinking of what people actually want, I wondered what your thoughts are on:
a) Long Covid? And whether there is a risk that if not understood it could be a problem in itself?
b) The risk that the longer the virus is among us, the greater the chance of a variant that our vaccines do not deal with?
Thanks, Mike