Lockdown fanatics scare me far more than Covid-19 | Spiked - Brendan O'Neill:
May 8, 2020 - "I know I’m meant to be scared of Covid-19. But I’m far more fearful of the lockdown fanatics. These people who are so blase about the halting of economic life, and who bristle at any suggestion that the lockdown should be eased, pose a graver threat to the future of the UK than coronavirus does. They are a menace to liberty, reason and people’s livelihoods. Our society is taking steps to tackle Covid – now we need a huge collective effort to face down lockdown fanaticism....
"Here’s why lockdown fanaticism unnerves me more than Covid-19. The coronavirus pandemic is clearly a very serious health challenge. It is right that we take it seriously and that we devote as many of society’s resources as possible to ensuring that it doesn’t impact on the populace too harshly. It is right to propose social-distancing measures, which is what we had before the lockdown was imposed. But where Covid is proving to be less lethal than we first feared, lockdown fanaticism is proving to be more lethal.
"The Covid threat is not the apocalypse we were warned about. Its death rate is low. Its impact on younger people is negligible. Just 0.75 per cent of deaths in the UK have been among under-40s, and the majority of those were people with underlying health conditions.... The horror stories that were spread about Covid-19 by government officials and media fearmongers have been exposed as inaccurate, and in some cases hysterical. As the government adviser Professor Robert Dingwall says, the government has ‘effectively terrorised’ us into ‘believing that this is a disease that is going to kill you’. When in the vast majority of cases that simply isn’t true....
"So, coronavirus is proving manageable. It has not overwhelmed our health systems. It is not the plague. It is mild or even asymptomatic in most people. Society can handle it. What society can’t handle much more of, though, is lockdown fanaticism. This is a more destructive force than Covid-19.
"Covid is just a virus. It doesn’t know what it is doing. It spreads to survive. But the lockdown fanatics are conscious human beings. They know – or ought to – the destructiveness of the path they are carving out for Britain and other nations. They know the economic calamity and anti-social culture of fear they are foisting upon society, with all the mass unemployment, denigration of public services, and even death that this will cause. And yet they carry on.
"Britain is on the brink of the worst recession since the Great Frost of 1709, according to the Bank of England. Others are predicting an utterly unprecedented 13 per cent contraction in national output. Millions will lose their jobs. And that’s just the UK. More than 100 million Indians have lost their jobs as a result of the global contagion of lockdown. Many will be plunged into hunger, and worse. The International Labor Organization says 1.5 billion people around the world are at risk of losing their livelihoods. The halting of economic life and production and transportation could lead to a global ‘hunger catastrophe’, says the UN. I hope the lockdown fanatics think about that next time they post a pic of their latest loaf of sourdough.
"But they don’t think about it. Not seriously. They treat it as incidental.... Or, worse, they engage in a political sleight of hand. They say job losses, rising mental-health problems, lack of money and a global downturn that will hit the poor severely are also down to Covid. ‘Covid-19 is giving rise to economic problems, too’, they occasionally say. No. We cannot allow this. It is not Covid that is destroying livelihoods and liberties – it is our societies’ historically unprecedented, ill-thought-through, contagion-like authoritarian response to Covid; it is lockdown fanaticism.
"They need to take some responsibility. Covid can be excused; it’s a virus. The lockdown fanatics cannot be excused. Their extremism is hampering sensible government action, stymieing open public debate, and nurturing economic catastrophe. They must be held to account. More than that, they must be opposed. We need a return to reason, freedom and productivity."
Read more: https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/08/lockdown-fanatics-scare-me-far-more-than-covid-19/
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