How long will we be confined to our homes for? (Photo by: Jeff Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

The Prime Minister is still in intensive care, cabinet ministers and the heir to the throne have been infected and we just suffered the worst-ever daily death count from Covid-19. As we head into a torturously sunny Easter weekend, there seems to be no strategy for getting out of lockdown: immunity testing that once was promised ‘within days’ is going nowhere, a vaccine is still 18 months away, and all we expect to hear from the Government this afternoon is that restrictions will be extended to the end of the month. You could be forgiven for feeling like there is no end in sight.
Yet there’s another story going on at the same time.
Alongside these gloomy developments, there has been, this week, a significant shift in the political conversation that could trigger a domino effect towards a sooner — rather than later — exit from lockdown.
To those people who say ‘this isn’t about politics, it’s about saving lives,’ I’d say that you would struggle to find a better definition of a political question than how we run our society in the face of mortal threats, competing interests and imperfect information. It’s what politics is there to resolve.
So far, public opinion has been remarkably supportive of the stringent lockdown restrictions, with somewhere between 89% and 94% of people broadly in favour. These are big numbers, but they can move quickly — the percentage of people who think the threat is ‘not being taken seriously enough’ slumped from 87% to 52% over the past week.
Millions of people are already finding it very hard: 38% report sleeping badly, 35% are eating badly and alcohol sales have spiked. The fascinating YouGov national mood tracker — perhaps more revealing for not asking directly about the virus — shows that people are less happy than any time on record, slightly less scared than the previous week (down 2% to 34%) but dramatically more likely to feel bored (up to 34% from 19%).
Boredom isn’t something to be dismissed as a luxury problem — it is profound and works against the creativity of the human spirit. In combination with economic anxiety, it can turn nasty. The Government will be looking at similar numbers and will be aware that, as the economic disaster becomes clearer, the small percentage of active ‘coronasceptics’ who think too much fuss is being made (currently at around 14%) is only likely to go in one direction.
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