UK lockdown 3.0: the mutant virus edition

Hello again guys. Many of you have read in the news what is happening here in London. So on Saturday afternoon on the 19th December, whilst everyone was out preparing for Christmas by getting their Christmas shopping, the government announced that a large part of England including the entire London region would be moved into tier 4 (we had previously only had a 3-tier system) and effectively, we had a lockdown announced with about eight hours' notice. This plunged the capital into chaos of course, because just a few days earlier in the week, Boris Johnson went on record saying that he wanted to avoid a third lockdown if possible but this is a massive U-turn by the government. This took many businesses by shock because they expected to do a lot of trade in the period between now and Christmas with people doing their Christmas shopping but now, in tier 4, all non-essential shops and services are forced to shut with so little notice, they will undoubtedly face financial ruin - imagine if you're a shop selling Christmas decorations! Many people in the region are left frustrated by this news of course, we have been through two lockdowns already this year but in both cases, we had a bit of warning so we could get things in order prior to the lockdown. But in this case, we were given 8 hours' notice - that's all. We then started receiving emails and text messages from various services that we had booked in the following days, apologizing that due to the lockdown these services would be canceled until further notice. 

If this makes our British government sound totally incompetent and inept, then yes allow me to tell you please that I think that Boris Johnson is a fucking moron who is woefully out of his depth. He is as bad as Trump. He wanted to be prime minister so bad that he lied to the British public about Brexit, ran on a campaign about getting Brexit done and now we're about to crash out of the EU without a deal as our hospitals are overwhelmed - given that we're still having about 500 to 600 Covid-19 deaths a day, the morgues are literally overflowing with corpses. I suppose there's an element of schadenfreude on my part given the twisted mind I have: a lot of poor people voted for Boris Johnson's brand of toxic politics because they really wanted Brexit to happen - this was the once in a lifetime opportunity to make a protest about how the rich elites in London get richer whilst the poor in the rest of the country are forgotten and neglected. Boris Johnson calculated correctly that this country is so unequal that if knew which side of the battle to pick, he is now the king of this castle but what a frightful state this castle is currently in, mostly due to his incompetence. Let's put this is in perspective: if a bomb went off in a busy central London location killing over 500 people, there would be such outrage, a day of mourning, candlelight vigils held in every town across the country for such a tragic lost of life. In 2017, a terrorist suicide bomber in Manchester killed 22 people but that figure is tiny compared to the number of Covid-related deaths everyday for much of this year. As a country, we have become totally immune to the horror of deaths - people are just brushing this off as a statistic, a number rather than thinking about what led to so many dead bodies piling up everyday and how we desperately need to hold this incompetent government to account for their shambolic mishandling this crisis.

Of course, the recent US elections has given me hope but I have to qualify that - Biden did win but one would have assumed that after the last four years of Trump, there was no way he would even have a fighting chance but he just keeps coming back. So at this point, it is no longer about Biden or Trump, but about the voters who vote for Trump and why they would gladly vote for a political party that is going to make them worse off. It would be simplistic to reduce it to these voters being dumb enough to believe whatever they are told - so Trump tells these people that Mexicans are a threat and they should vote for him because he will build a wall, none of that happened of course. Four years later there is still no wall but these people keep voting for Trump anyway? How is that even rational anymore? Oh we're definitely getting to the stage where we just want to see Boris Johnson fail time and time again just so we can have a new government when it is time for the next election here in 2024 - I know that seems an awfully long way in the future but it is in fact 3.5 years. Heck, if we have had a general election within the next few months, Boris Johnson could suffer a defeat the same way Trump did but one just wonders with Boris Johnson finding a new way to fuck up royally every few weeks, just what state would he leave the country in by the time we get to 2024? This reminds me of a guy called Greg at a party I attended when I was at university - he drank so much at the party, got so drunk, threw up one the carpet (have you ever tried to get vomit out of a carpet?) then decided to go home after that rather than try to help clean up the mess he created. At that point we were just glad Greg finally left - so he wouldn't throw up again somewhere else in the house!

This current lockdown is up for review on the 30th December, but so many factors will determine what will happen between now and then. The key reason why the third wave hit so hard was because of a very stupid decision by the government to keep the schools open during the second lockdown - so whilst we couldn't go to a restaurant, bar, gym or shopping mall, the children were still going to school. Allow me to analyze the rationale behind this: there is never one single reason why a complex decision like that is taken but a whole host of factors are considered before ultimately pushing the decision maker one way or another. One major argument was that parents would struggle to get back to work if their kids were off school, so making sure schools were opened was an essential step to kick start the economy (that had struggled since the virus hit us so hard). Secondly, another argument was that not all children can learn from home - many poor children live in crowded conditions where they cannot get hold of laptops, tablets or smart phones to join an online lesson. Richer parents can spend a lot of money to ensure that their children keep on learning from home whilst the children from poorer families simply get left out and lose out. So closing the schools will only make this inequality in our society a lot worse if the poorest kids are deprived of the chance to learn at school. The third argument for keeping schools open is that children don't fall seriously ill when they get infected by Covid-19, so the only people in the school who are vulnerable are the older teachers - particularly if they are obese or have underlying health conditions. 

I do have a counterargument for all three of these arguments: firstly, schools can stay open parents who are essential workers and that's what we had during the first lockdown; but since so many parents are unable to work during a lockdown situation, we have the uncanny situation where the parents don't have to get up in the morning and it is only the children who are waking up early, having breakfast, getting dressed to go to school whilst the parents are going to be spending their day at home watching TV since they can't work. If that's the case, then you may as well make the kids stay at home too. Secondly, let's acknowledge that most of what the kids learn in school is totally useless bullshit anyway - I have a respectable job in banking today but how much of the crap I learnt in secondary school is actually useful to me today? Only a tiny percentage, I would say that over 99% of what I have learnt is totally irrelevant quite because it has nothing to do with my current career - am I fucked because my syllabus didn't cover anything to do with corporate finance? Hell no, school isn't about memorizing tonnes of facts and figures, don't be silly, that's what Wikipedia is for. It is about learning how to learn, so you do a subject like economics at school, promptly forget 99% of everything you've learnt within months of having taken your last exam but the next time you're given a challenge to learn something new, you know exactly how to tackle that challenge. I have learnt how to teach myself everything I need to know to do my job properly. So I shrug my shoulders and say, "99% of the syllabus they missed is totally useless and irrelevant bullshit anyway so they can then spend that free time learning how to learn by pursuing interests that they are passionate about."

Even if the students don't get sick when they get infected with Covid-19, they are still spreading the disease and when these students go home, they infect their other family members with Covid-19. Rich families are less affected for two reasons: rich people tend to have a lot more living space in their homes, so parents can effectively socially distance from their children a lot more easily than poor people, who often lived in crowded conditions. Secondly, the "three generations in one house" situation is far more common with poor people for a simple reason: the adult children get married but can't afford to move out, so they end up living at home with their parents even when they go on to have their own children. The result of this is that these children from poor families get infected with the virus at school, they then go home and infect their vulnerable grandparents, then grandparents end up seriously ill and dying of Covid-19. The cynic in me thinks that the government wants poor, older people in the UK to die in their thousands because such people are a massive strain on the country: they are economically inactive and do not contribute to the economy, they are entitled to everything from the state pension to free healthcare to free/subsidized travel on public transport - yet given how poor these poor, older folks are, they probably didn't pay that much in taxes over their entire working lives. So such people pay very little into the system but benefit the most from it, if only there was a disease or virus that would target these poorer, working class older folks with surgical precision whilst not affecting the richer people. Oh wait, that is just what Covid-19 is doing. 

So as more poor people get sick and die of Covid-19, the economy gets healthier with each subsequent death and that's why I am cynical: this is an outcome that favours a right-wing Conservative government, so that's why they kept the schools open and for quite a few weeks now, they wanted these poor people to meet up for Christmas, spread Covid-19 to all their elderly relatives so we can kill off all these poor, older folks in one fell swoop, leaving the younger, economically active tax-paying adults around to help restart the economy. It is a cull that targets the poor with surgical precision. So the cynic in me thinks that is exactly what Boris Johnson is doing - it is a cull of the poor. Most formal education is a complete waste of time, these poorer kids have the rest of their lives to teach themselves whatever they need to make a living in the future but sending them to school at this moment means giving their grandparents a death sentence. Is the Conservative Party deliberately trying to kill off millions of poor people? Not deliberately, instead they are motivated by short-term goals to boost their popularity rather than make difficult decisions for the good of the people. Ironically, that's why China managed to get the Covid-19 situation under control better than most countries because they have no elections, the Chinese communist government doesn't have to worry about pissing off the voters when they order strict lockdowns - contrast that to the situation in the UK, where the government is far more interested in playing party politics than acting in the interest of public health. Countries like China are in a much better position to respond to a pandemic than the UK and so that is why people in Beijing can celebrate Christmas this year, whilst we can't in London. 

Furthermore, there is another dimension to this third wave - once again, it is the poorest people amongst us who are hit the hardest. The entire South East of England has been placed under lockdown but if you were to look at the local statistics, you will see a stark difference: in Camden where I live, we have an average of 353 new cases per 100,000 and just to the south of me, a short bike ride away in Westminster covering central London, that number is lower at 316. Mind you, even back in November, those figures were closer to 70. However, if you were to look at the poorer regions in East London and the Thames Estuary region, the figure in Thurrock is 1179, in Medway it is 1037 and in Epping Forest it is 1078 - the contrast is pretty stark! There are two reasons for this: the first is the one I have discussed already, poor people live in much more cramped, crowded conditions. The second one is that poorer people are less educated and are far less compliant when it comes to complying with rules like mask-wearing and social distancing. Most people would claim, "Alex you're just being snobbish and discriminating against poor people." But let's look at something like smoking which is clearly bad for health: there is a clear link between the level of education and smoking - the less educated you are, the far more likely you are to smoke. This is not just a simple matter of more highly educated people understanding the health risks of smoking, but there are other factors such as peer pressure as well as richer people having the money to seek other forms of pleasure to substitute the smoking habit. In the UK, it is quite easy to spot the working class from the way they dress and talk and whilst this is just anecdotal evidence from my observations, more often than not, it is the poorer, working class folks who put themselves most at risk by refusing to comply with rules regarding face masks and social distancing so is it any wonder why the rates of infections are over 3 times higher in these poorer areas of London? 

Let's now talk about this new mutation in the virus that has been making headline news: the viral load is higher so it is a lot more infectious. This mutation has been blamed for the spike in cases in recent weeks in the UK, but this new strain of the virus has been around since September. Over 40 countries like Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Germany, Canada, Turkey, Italy, France and many others (the list is growing fast - now including Singapore) have now banned flights from the UK because they are so afraid of this new strain of the virus - there is further worry about the disruption this can cause to our food supply as France has closed the border to vehicle traffic from the UK, threatening the entire supply chain. This is worrying as mutations are common with most viruses but now people around the world have clearly labeled this the London mutant and as a Londoner who loves to travel, this is terrible news. Things normally do shut down over the Christmas period anyway in the UK and so this has started early for us this year, but one does wonder to what degree normal life will return in January or would this lockdown be extended way into the new year? It is this uncertainty that is frustrating the hell out of everyone. I think we all got our hopes up prematurely twice this year - the first was during the summer when life returned to normal for a few months, we were able to go on foreign holidays, we could see our friends and do so many things we used to took for granted. Then we had the second lockdown and we thought, okay we have paid the price but now things can get back to normal because we finally have a vaccine that works. But now, the phrase 没完没了 ("seemingly endless") comes to mind - it feels like the light at the end of the tunnel is now simply the headlights of the oncoming train from the other direction and like so many people in the UK, I am utterly fed up with it all. 

I'd like to end with something I observed last night: on my way home from the supermarket, I noticed a Christmas tree outside my local pub with a note attached that said "free to a good home". Of course, so many non-essential shops and businesses have been forced to close on the evening of the 19th December and there have been many stories of restaurants, pubs and cafes facing financial ruin - yet even at such desperate times, many are donating everything from food to Christmas trees to those in our communities who are really struggling to make ends meet. I am trying to focus on the good news amidst all the doom and gloom. I did pause for a moment and contemplated taking the Christmas tree but I thought, no - let's leave it for a family with children who can't afford a tree, the children will appreciate this a lot more than me. Sure enough, when I passed the pub a few hours later, it was gone and I hope it is now making a local family's Christmas just a little bit better. I think we should be allowed to have the emotional wobble when dealing with bad news, let out our emotions rather than bottle them up, then we simply put on a brave face and try to make the best of a bad situation; what is the alternative, really? Getting angry doesn't solve anything especially in this current situation. Of course I have these angry thoughts, I allow myself a moment to be angry, I take a few deep breaths to try to clear my head then I would simply get on with the work I have to do. Please leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.