CounterPunch.org COVID-19 Learns From Experience, Unlike Boris Johnson and His Crew

Photograph Source: UK Prime Minister – OGL 3

Fear is at a high point in Britain at the moment and with very good reason. There is much to be frightened of as it turns out that Covid-19 has been quicker to learn from experience than bumbling Boris Johnson and his third-eleven team during a calamitous year in which they have zig-zagged between panic and complacency.

A process of mutation akin to natural selection of the fittest has produced a more virulent variant of the virus better able to invade its human hosts. This swift improvement in its ability to be spread contrasts with the repeated stumbles of the Johnson government since it first underestimated the epidemic in February and March.

This ensured an economically devastating 11-week lockdown, which might have been partially excused by the unprecedented nature of the crisis, if the government had not made exactly the same mistake in September and October, with equally disastrous results. The only common features in its approach over the year were amateurism and inconsistency.

Fear is an inescapable part of any life-threatening epidemic. This has always been true of the great outbreaks of disease in the past from bubonic plague to cholera and polio. The danger of death and injury during an epidemic is more pervasive than in wartime.

The consequent sense of fear gets bad press for being only a step away from cowardice, but it is essential as the only way to mobilise whole populations for common action and to persuade individuals to make sacrifices for the general good.

Much of the sorry saga of the British government’s shambolic response to the pandemic is about its inept and counter-productive manipulation of public fears. At the start of the year, it tried to downplay them because it underestimated the threat and half-opted – it is a government that does everything by halves – for “herd immunity”. Johnson attended the England v Wales rugby match on 7 March and allowed the Cheltenham Festival attended by 250,000 people go ahead three days later.

Selling herd immunity requires downplaying public fears about the gravity of the illness. The message being sent by those mass gatherings in March was that there was nothing much to worry about. Fortunately, people did not believe it, as they watched governments locking down all over Europe. By the time the British government, panicked by forecasts of hundreds of thousands of deaths, did impose a lockdown on 23 March, people were generally before them in wanting to close down the country.