Over the past 10 months, however, there has been a notable exception to this rule: at anti-Israel protests, where masks are still not just the norm but often mandatory. Sometimes, a keffiyeh will be fashioned into a balaclava; more often, a surgical mask or N95 respirator will be worn. All three were on show outside of last week’s Democratic Convention.

Yet it was more than 1,000km away, in a populous suburban region adjacent to New York City, that the latest battle in America’s mask wars was unfolding. Earlier this month, legislators in New York’s Nassau County signed the country’s first mask ban into law, a strange inversion of the mandates that prevailed state-wide between 2020 and 2022. Although exceptions for health and religious grounds may make the law unenforceable in practice, it threatens recalcitrant public maskers with a stiff fine of $1,000 and up to a year in prison.

The legislation was introduced by local lawmaker Mazi Pilip, a former IDF paratrooper who gained a national profile when she ran unsuccessfully for the congressional seat vacated by the disgraced George Santos, and signed into law by county executive Bruce Blakeman. To justify the new law, Pilip raised the alarm about Gaza protesters “hiding behind the mask and terrorising the Jewish community”, while Blakeman argued that the anti-mask bill “protects the public”. Like the mandates it inverts, then, the ban has been presented as a means of keeping the citizenry safe from a real and immediate danger.

Pilip and Blakeman are Republicans, so to a certain extent the ban reinforces the Covid-era partisan split over masking. But it’s not as straightforward as that. Indeed, the first high-profile New York politician to endorse such a measure was Democratic governor Kathy Hochul. In June, after a viral video seemed to show pro-Palestinian demonstrators harassing Jewish passengers in a subway car, Hochul was reported to be considering a ban on face coverings on public transit, and several Democratic state legislators drafted a bill doing just that.

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Versions of the same idea had also been floated on both the Left and the Right in response to an upsurge in shoplifting and other crime in the wake of the pandemic. Widespread masking clearly played some role here by enabling thieves to conceal their identities from employees and surveillance cameras. Though he stopped short of calling for a citywide ban, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, another Democrat, suggested to small business owners last year they should ban customers who refused to uncover their faces.

A paradoxical secondary effect of the draconian rules imposed during the pandemic was to create conditions for a severe collapse of public order in urban areas. For one thing, the collective retreat of much of the population from public spaces in effect abandoned large areas of cities to homelessness and delinquency. Meanwhile, universal masking norms — combined with cutbacks in policing —helped create conditions for impunity for petty crime.

But there are deeper roots, too. The Left-wing embrace of masking on public health grounds also coincided with the prominent role of antifa during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, another source of major public disturbances that year. “Black-bloc” masking, long practised by antifa militants, gained greater respectability as face-covering became nearly universal in pandemic-era Left-wing protest.

By the time of the October 7 attacks, the continued progressive attachment to Covid precautions and the greater acceptance of black-bloc-style tactics ensured that anti-Israel protests were heavily masked affairs from the outset. The concentration of protest on elite college campuses evidently strengthened protesters’ resolve to conceal their identities, given most were students worried that the public exposure of their activism might derail their promising careers.

The Nassau law, then, is a response to several highly contingent developments of the past few years. But even so, the bans themselves and the issues they raise aren’t new in American or New York politics. Indeed, prior to 2020, a mask ban had been on the state books since 1845. Back then, a law was passed to squelch the “anti-renter” movement of tenant farmers who had revolted violently against the harsh terms dictated by their landlords, donning elaborate Indian costumes when attacking their nemeses. The landlord-allied state government responded by making it illegal for three or more people congregating in public to mask, with an exception made for “masquerade parties”.

Nor did the ban fade entirely into obscurity along with the anti-renter movement. Over the recent decades, New York police used the 1845 law to arrest anti-globalisation protesters, Occupy Wall Street militants, and Pussy Riot supporters, as well as to constrain the activities of the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, extensive litigation followed a 1999 Manhattan rally by the latter group, in which city officials prohibited them from covering their faces. Anti-masking laws in several other US states were devised specifically to rein in the Klan — a precedent sometimes cited by lawmakers advocating crackdowns on masked Gaza protesters, whom they claim are engaged in a campaign of racist intimidation.

These older mask ordinances have faced legal challenges, as the Nassau law likely will. So far, American jurisprudence has remained divided on their constitutionality, with some courts finding that masking is not a form of expression and thus enjoys no first-amendment protection, and others determining that the anonymisation enabled by face coverings offers a means of protecting the expression of unpopular views. Those arguing against the right of Klan members to mask have made a case critics of Gaza protests have repeated recently: that masks are a tool of intimidation. “[A] faceless figure strikes terror in the human heart,” as a 1990 Georgia Supreme Court decision put it.

Yet we are, of course, living in very different times. And what sets apart the new round of controversy isn’t just the conversion of the mask into a symbol of politicised public health, but the contradictory effects of the new electronic media landscape on how we conceive of our public identities. Perhaps most obviously, online existence has made younger generations of protesters take the constant availability of anonymous or pseudonymous modes of expression for granted. Today, every one of us, when we communicate by way of a digital profile, is at least partly “masked,” which makes our publicly exposed faces feel all the more naked. This is all the more true as facial-recognition technology becomes more ubiquitous and accurate.

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Thus a paradox emerges: at the same time as they furnish new means of anonymisation, digital technologies also elevate the risk of exposure. Political protesters in the late 20th century were unlikely to have their participation made public unless a news camera happened to capture them. Conversely, in today’s crowdsourced panopticon, any public activity is a viral video waiting to happen, which might well upend the life of anyone unlucky enough to become the main character of the day. Our technologies incite us to make our views public on a scale rarely possible for prior generations, and at the same time threaten us with dire consequences if the expression of those views provokes a backlash.

As long as these conditions hold, several things will be true. The availability of anonymous means of expression online, as well as the premium accorded by the attention economy to the extreme, will ensure that controversial and often hateful views enjoy a visibility they wouldn’t have otherwise. This, as well as the general decline of public order exacerbated by the collective retreat into digital life, will continue to provoke a general sense of unease and vulnerability, creating constituencies for various sorts of “safetyist” appeals — such as laws targeting disinformation, hate speech or masked protest.

And in the meantime, the conflict over mask bans will remain legally and politically unresolved because it pits two goods against each other: on one hand, freedom from intimidation carried out under the cover of anonymity; on the other, the protection of unpopular views from retaliation. As long as it can be plausibly claimed that both of these values are severely compromised, an end to this decade’s mask wars is unlikely to arrive soon.

As two of the key preliminary hearings in the UK Covid Inquiry take place this week — two years after Boris Johnson said “we owe it to the country to produce answers in a reasonable timescale” — bereaved families and policy sceptics could be forgiven for thinking the whole thing is an excuse to kick controversies and failings into the long grass. Will this inquiry follow the pattern of previous ones and avoid the difficult questions?

There are already concerns. With the World Health Organization refusing to provide a statement of evidence, not all the relevant stakeholders are engaging with the process, while bereaved families already feel marginalised. But the Inquiry’s broad Terms Of Reference (TOR) are encouraging: decision-making, the availability and use of data, “legislative and regulatory control and enforcement”, “the use of lockdowns and other ‘non-pharmaceutical’ interventions (NPIs)”, the impact on mental health of the whole population, the specific impacts on young people and education, and the safeguarding of public funds are all included. As are questions of the treatment of Covid-19 in hospitals, care homes, and “the development, delivery and impact of therapeutics and vaccines”, alongside the consequences of the pandemic on provision of non-Covid treatments.

But how will the Inquiry address these issues? Will it simply reinforce the mainstream public and Government messaging — or will it provide a meaningful examination of this peacetime catastrophe? Given the current narrative regarding the most controversial of pandemic measures, “the use of lockdowns and other [NPIs]”, one might perhaps be allowed a little scepticism. That the UK failed to lock down soon enough is pretty much orthodoxy in policy circles. This was the conclusion in October 2021 of the Health and Social Affairs Select Committee, soon repeated by luminaries such as Jeremy Hunt — and trumpeted by Keir Starmer as early as April 2020.

A serious inquiry shouldn’t simply repeat the mantra — it should consider the novelty of the lockdown model (the WHO’s November 2019 pandemic preparedness report into NPIs did not mention the word “lockdown” once), as well as its long-term effectiveness. The TOR encourage the “reasonable regard of relevant international comparisons”, and it’s to be hoped that this is taken seriously. Italy’s national lockdown was the first in world history —  and yet it has one of Western Europe’s highest Covid death rates. South Africa’s was the strictest lockdown in Africa, and yet it has far and away the highest Covid death rate on the continent. Peru had one of the world’s strictest lockdowns in 2020, and now has the world’s highest Covid fatality rate.

So this inquiry should seek to understand how and why the world’s political and scientific establishment cohered around a completely untried and untested model for dealing with the Covid outbreak. It should attempt to connect this to some of the other themes in the TOR, especially the question of political decision-making, such as how and why did the UK’s scientific establishment depart from the previous consensus that, as the Government’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said on March 13, 2020, “If you completely locked down absolutely everything, probably for a period of four months or more then you would suppress this virus… but when you do that and then you release it, it all comes back again.”

And it should seek to interrogate how and why the lockdown approach became unchallengeable, leading to a situation in which 40% of the deaths from Covid-19 in the Western world took place in the most vulnerable of all settings — care homes. Why did the Imperial College modellers’ predictions that the lockdown measures would see fewer than 6,000 people dying from Covid in the UK overestimate the effectiveness of these measures by something like 3,000%? And why was the UK’s pre-2020 pandemic planning — which emphasised balancing the costs and benefits of all interventions according to the principles of proportionality and flexibility, minimising the disruptions to everyday social and economic life, and protecting the vulnerable — thrown out of the window?

This core question should be connected to the broader impact on healthcare. Instead of protecting the NHS, did lockdowns produce the crisis we now see flooding the health service? Should more care have been focused on the vulnerable, while allowing the rest of society to continue as normal? Would this have then mitigated the damaging effects of lockdown on young people and societal mental health, as well as avoiding the immensely regressive consequences of school closures?

Although the effects of lockdown should lie at the heart of the Inquiry, there are other aspects of the pandemic which deserve scrutiny.

Why, for example, did the Government ignore the potential benefits of natural immunity, when evidence suggested early on that prior infection confers durable protective immunity in the case of SARS-CoV2, as confirmed by a study just published in The Lancet? The idea of letting the virus spread through those who were at low risk from it (the overwhelming majority of the population), allowing them to generate antibodies, while protecting high-risk groups, was a well-established epidemiological concept, and yet it was dismissed as outlandish, despite being initially advocated by Patrick Vallance.

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Why, too, was compulsory universal masking adopted, despite the fact that no existing data supported the use of face-masking in the general population as a protective measure against respiratory viruses? Even the WHO had originally stated that “the wide use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not supported by current evidence and carries uncertainties and critical risks” — including lulling elderly and at-risk people into a false sense of security by making them mistakenly believe they will be safe while wearing them. This has now been confirmed by meta-analysis published in January by Cochrane, widely considered the gold standard of healthcare data review. And what was the point in the use of mass testing for the general population, including in very low-risk children, at a massive cost, without evidence of individual or community-wide benefit from doing so?

The question of treatment is often ignored in the heated exchanges around Covid, but it also deserves serious examination. Why was so little research conducted into early at-home treatments for Covid? Based on existing drugs, these had apparently early benefits in reducing hospitalisations and deaths — which were subsequently confirmed in peer-reviewed studies (see here and here) — as early as March 2020. They were ignored, though, even after the publication of a first early treatment protocol based on efficacy and safety in the prestigious American Journal of Medicine in July 2020.

The potential of a number of early treatments was relatively unexplored, even though they might have worked well to prevent infection and illness. Instead, how many people ended up in hospital because all they were told, at the onset of the first symptoms, was to stay at home, rest, and in the case of a high fever to take paracetamol? And then, once they were in hospital, how many of those who developed serious respiratory issues perished because they were placed on mechanical ventilators? During the first wave, this became the mainstay of treatment for severe and critical cases of Covid-19; however, it soon become clear that a shockingly high number of patients put on ventilators ended up dying. It would later emerge that the use of pressurised oxygen was literally destroying patients’ lung sacs that were inflamed and damaged by the virus, and therefore unable to withstand the high pressure of mechanical ventilators. Why was the ventilation protocol maintained for months despite such appalling results?

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Finally, why were fast-tracked, experimental, and, ultimately, little-known “next-generation” mRNA technology-based vaccines offered to everyone, including those at little risk from Covid, even though it was known that the vaccines didn’t prevent transmission, and were associated with serious side effects? Wouldn’t a focused, risk-based approach to vaccination have been more advisable?

There are serious questions to be asked about the management of this catastrophe. The scope of the inquiry is necessarily huge. But the politicisation of the debate around Covid is fraught. There are strong headwinds, built up during the initial years when the lockdown consensus was so powerful. But as the failings of the Covid policy response become ever clearer, let’s hope the the British public isn’t lumbered with yet another meaningless inquiry.

“ICU Doctor here: I skied 4 hrs in an N95 + a ski mask on top of it! Did not get hypoxic or hypercapnic!” an anaesthesiologist named Ilad Sharifpour tweeted last month. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) advises that “in general, people do not need to wear masks when outdoors”. But such is the enthusiasm for masking among some people, including medical professionals, that the doctor felt moved to boast about outdoing the CDC guideline while engaging in a solo sport that involves high-speed travel through wide-open spaces.

Last May, in a particularly striking example of the “permanent pandemic” mindset, two American doctors wrote an article arguing that masking should “remain with us, becoming part of our everyday lives even as the Covid-19 pandemic, science willing, subsides”. Yet that emotional attachment to masks is even more pronounced today, amid a backlash to the governors’ move and proposals to lift remaining mask requirements in public schools. The New York Times‘s Covid reporter David Leonhardt — a pro-vaccine, pro-masking moderate liberal — was denounced online by hundreds of people last week simply for pointing out that mask mandates involve tradeoffs.

It seems that for a certain group of pandemic diehards, the fact that the guidance on masking has been so overtly unreliable and politicised has actually made masks more, rather than less, potent as instruments of public policy. In less than two years, the CDC has changed its position on masks at least three times. The agency originally discouraged their use before endorsing it, before finally acknowledging the cloth masks used by most Americans cannot stop the fine aerosols that spread Covid — which is exactly what Dr. Anthony Fauci wrote in a private letter from February 2020.

Given that we now know that these public health decisions are not rooted in The Science, the crucial question remains: Why did tens of millions of people willingly give up their freedoms and embrace the ever-changing dictates of such transparently incompetent and undeserving authorities?

So far, two types of answers seem to hold the most explanatory power. The first focuses on the psychology behind the mass adoption of fear-based emergency measures. The second looks at material rather than psychological factors, using the formula favoured by Lenin: “Who, whom?” In other words, which groups have benefited from the Covid regime, and at whose cost?

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The most compelling account of the “permanent pandemic” mindset, it seems to me, is one that recognises the confluence of these two forces. The Covid regime provided a grand life-or-death psychological drama that enlarged the power of the government and its partners in the tech industry, while enabling the destruction and economic displacement of small businesses that make up the base of the Republican party. Some 20% of small businesses and roughly 41% of black-owned small businesses in the US have been forced to close since the start of the pandemic. In the first year of the pandemic alone, there were an extra 200,000 business closures above historical levels. Hardest-hit, according to the Wall Street Journal, were: “Barber shops, nail salons and other providers of personal services.”

One popular psychological theory of the pandemic is ‘mass formation psychosis’, also known as mass formation hypnosis or, simply, mass formation. Developed by Mattias Desmet, a psychology professor at Ghent University in Belgium, it posits that the response to Covid in countries with strict policies illustrates how people can be brought into a collective trance that makes them easy to manipulate and prone to acting in ways that are contrary to reason and evidence.

Such mass formation can only occur, according to Desmet, when four conditions are met: the society has to be atomised and lacking in social bonds; most people living in it must feel a pervasive sense of meaninglessness about their own lives; they must also feel a free-floating anxiety that is not attached to any particular cause; finally, there must also be high levels of free-floating frustration and aggression that, again, have no specific source.

It’s plausible that these conditions were met in the United States when the pandemic broke out. A survey of 10,000 adult American workers taken between July and August 2019 found that three out of five reported being lonely, a 13% increase from the previous year. The number was even higher for heavy social media users, 73% of whom reported feeling lonely. Then came the pandemic, one year into which Americans reported having fewer close friends. In circumstances like these, Desmet argues, mass media can inculcate a narrative that provides the public with a fixed object for its ambient anxiety, drawing otherwise isolated individuals into a common cause in confronting the supposed menace.

The theory, with its obvious evocations of 20th-century totalitarian movements, was popularised when it was brought up on Joe Rogan’s podcast by Robert Malone, a scientist known for his warnings about the risks of mRNA vaccines. That interview may have been the beginning of the end for Rogan. Something about the mass formation hypothesis clearly struck a nerve with state authorities and information commissars and it was almost immediately censored and scrubbed from Google results. Desmet neither denies the existence of Covid nor attacks vaccines. He merely argues that the response to the pandemic has entailed a series of unscientific overreactions that have whipped the public into a dangerously susceptible state.

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People disposed to strictly rational explanations of large-scale events will find Desmet’s mass psychology unconvincing, but much of what has happened over the past two years defies rational accounting. Why did certain drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin become stigmatised as politically untouchable and subject to gross distortions in the press, with CNN calling ivermectin, a Nobel prize-winning drug that had previously been used to treat over 100 million people across the world for ailments like River Blindness, a “horse dewormer?” These kinds of hyper-polarised rituals resemble past collective frenzies and moral panics.

Yet there are obvious limits to what psychology can account for in the past two years. There’s no psychological phenomenon sufficient to explain why the pandemic has been so beneficial to financial capital or led to the technology industry making a record-setting $1.4 trillion in 2021. As Marketwatch put it in a recent headline: “Big Tech’s pandemic year produces mind-boggling financial results”.

It’s not simply that the rich have gotten richer, though that’s certainly true as America’s billionaires added $2.1 trillion to their net worth during the pandemic. It’s Silicon Valley corporations with close ties to the Democratic party, like Google, that have benefited most.

While the tech companies have few actual employees compared to older productive industries, their largesse now directly subsidises whole sectors of the professional class economy, including journalism. Individual professionals may not have become richer during the pandemic but, unlike hundreds of thousands of American workers who lost their jobs — many of whom worked in the small businesses that were shuttered over the past two years — their employment was mostly secure.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that those professionals would instinctively internalise Covid policies that enriched their tech oligarch patrons as a personal victory and defence of their own status. Few would put it that way, of course. Instead, they accuse protesting truck drivers of being fascists and call for them to be arrested because they recognise that medical mandates provide a ruthlessly efficient — yet morally sanctioned — means for sorting the populations between rulers, who deserve to monopolise power, and subjects, who can follow the rules or be crushed. That seems to be the underlying logic animating Juliette Kayyem, a former homeland security official under Obama who spoke for many in her circles when she recommended the best way to deal with the protests: “Slash the tires, empty gas tanks, arrest the drivers, and move the trucks.”

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Recently Toby Green and Thomas Fazi, both self-described Leftists, posed a series of questions about the Left’s relationship to Covid policies that had been devastating to the working class and global south. “Why has the mainstream Left ended up supporting practically all Covid measures?” they asked on UnHerd. And how, they wondered. did the Left end up ridiculing the very notion that there might be motivations from the vaccine manufacturers other than “the public good” at play?

The answer, it seems, is fairly clear: the Left did this because the Public Good has become, along with The Science, largely a costume worn by the professional classes who, quite rightly, suspect that they have more in common with a Moderna executive than an anti-vaccine mandate truck driver.

This policy divergence created an opportunity to examine the impact of mask mandates. Those areas that rescinded their mandates could function as control groups for evaluating the effect of the policy on cases and mortality. But neither public health experts nor any of the major media outlets took up this opportunity. The reason, most of them would likely have said if pressed on the subject, was there was nothing to learn: “the science” was settled.

For their part, critics of masking and other Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) typically relied on principled assertions of freedom. This gave them little reason to examine the evidentiary basis of these policies, since they would have rejected them on moral grounds even if they worked. Only a few sceptical observers drilled into the data that could be found on sites such as the New York Times — even if the paper’s own reporters made little of it. The most prolific of these was Ian Miller, who over the past two years has published copious data-driven commentary on the track record of various Covid public health interventions.

Miller arrives time and again at the same conclusion: that the ad hoc pandemic mitigation policies rolled out since 2020 have systematically failed to achieve goals. Miller has now compiled one subset of his graphs and commentaries into a book titled Unmasked: The Global Failure of Covid Mask Mandates which focuses solely on the most ubiquitous pandemic containment strategy deployed by governments worldwide: masks.

The endorsement of masking by medical bodies and public health authorities worldwide, Miller shows, entailed the abandonment of a longstanding view that masks were a useless and even harmful intervention. Over the previous decades, numerous randomised controlled trials had assessed the efficacy of masks in controlling the spread of respiratory viruses like influenza, and pandemic simulations had evaluated their potential.

A document published by the World Health Organisation in 2019 framed the results of these studies in no uncertain terms: “there was no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza”. It’s unsurprising, then, that when the CDC briefed reporters on the pandemic in February of 2020, masking was not even mentioned among the NPIs that might be deployed. The UK government, too, stated early in 2020 that there was no evidence to support masking.

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After the CDC and other agencies revised their guidance in April 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, by then a staunch advocate of masks, claimed that he and other officials had discouraged the public from obtaining masks to ensure there were adequate supplies for health care workers. Ever since, promoters of masking have cited Fauci’s “noble lie” to account for the abrupt reversal of prior guidance. But as Miller notes, it was not just during the early months of the pandemic that officials said masks were ineffective. They had said so for years, and Fauci had advised against masks not just in public statements but in private emails in early 2020.

In light of the earlier consensus, Miller’s findings in Unmasked should not be surprising. As we might have predicted based on a plethora of trials and meta-analyses published prior to the pandemic, mask mandates have had little to no demonstrable impact on curbing the spread of the virus. Miller reaches this conclusion by comparing areas with mask mandates of longer and shorter duration with each other and with areas that never imposed mandates at all. The results, he shows, simply do not support the standard adage that “masks save lives”.

For example, Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the US, imposed one of the earliest mask mandates in the United States, just after the CDC released its new guidance in early April 2020. By May, the county was requiring masks outdoors as well as indoors and enjoying 96-97% compliance. (It also imposed an array of other strict mitigation measures.) But it had case and mortality rates well above the national average throughout 2020 and 2021. LA currently ranks 3rd among California counties in its Covid death rate, faring worse than numerous counties with mask mandates of shorter duration and lower levels of compliance.

It’s possible to quibble with Miller’s methodology. As he readily acknowledges, we don’t know precisely how LA and other heavily masked areas would have fared against Covid in the absence of mandates, and the fact that mask mandates have tended to be deployed alongside social distancing and other NPIs muddies the water. Miller’s comparisons of LA’s outcomes with those of neighbouring Orange County, which has had no mask mandate since last year but has had lower case and death rates, seem rather conclusive, but a sceptic might note confounding variables such as demographic differences, population density, and so on.

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Such criticisms would be more damaging to Miller’s case if the officials and experts who have embraced mask mandates were more modest in their own assertions. Not only did they jettison years of prior research pointing to the minimal efficacy of masking, they also made empirically indefensible claims that masks alone could end the pandemic.

For instance, Miller compiles the astonishing claims made by Dr. Robert Redfield, who directed the CDC until just a year ago. In September 2020, Redfield described masks as “the most powerful public health tool we have”, claimed they offered “more Covid protection than vaccines would”, and stated: “If we [wore masks] for 6, 8, 10, 12 weeks, we’d bring this pandemic under control.” While they may not rule out some small effects of masking, Miller’s charts expose claims such as Redfield’s as delusional propaganda.

Likewise, those sceptical of what Miller’s comparative graphs can teach us should be even more suspicious of the shoddy studies published by the CDC over the past two years. For example, one study claimed to show a decline in Covid cases in certain Arizona counties as a result of mask mandates. But it failed to note that cases declined at a similar rate over the same period in Arizona counties without a mandate. In the months following the completion of the study, moreover, cases rose well above prior levels in counties with mandates still in place. Such studies produced a mirage of success by limiting the period of study, conflating correlation and causation, and avoiding comparisons with non-mandate counties.

The most disastrous failing of the experts has been their lack of curiosity about the actual results of the policies they have staked their reputations on. Mask mandates have been, in Miller’s phrase, “a population-wide experiment”, but few within the US scientific and medical establishment have seemed interested in parsing the resulting data, leaving that task to outsiders like Miller. Astonishingly, there have been just two randomised controlled trials on masking published since the pandemic began. One found no significant effect at all, while the other found a small effect of 11% for surgical masks and no significant effect for cloth ones. The first was largely ignored or dismissed, while the second was optimistically glossed as proving that masks work.

Moreover, even the most bullish case for the technical efficacy of at least some higher-quality masks does not constitute a case for mask mandates, a distinction that most commentary elides. The only way to measure the efficacy of mandates is to look at their actual track record. This is what Miller has done, and the result, he argues, is clear: “mask mandates have demonstrated very little impact, if any, on case curves throughout the United States and in many other international locations.”

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Miller is justifiably derisive about the experts who have oversold dubious policies at every turn, but the ironic implication of his book is that much of the expert guidance from prior to 2020 has been vindicated. Before Covid appeared, scientists and officials advised time and again that masks would be ineffective at containing a pandemic respiratory virus, and the evidence Miller has compiled suggests they were correct.

Two years into the pandemic, the experts are now the last to acknowledge the accuracy of their earlier predictions. This raises the question of why they changed course and sacrificed their own credibility in the process. Miller confines himself to the data, and if there’s a limitation to his book, it’s that he does not offer any compelling explanation of why the expert class threw itself a policy it once regarded as worse than useless.

It is not difficult to see why mask mandates proved irresistible to politicians. Masks are the perfect form of hygiene theatre, conveying an intuitive sense of safety regardless of demonstrable efficacy at scale. They also offload responsibility for controlling the pandemic to ordinary people. The overcrowding of ICUs can be blamed on the bad behavior of “anti-maskers”, rather than on the allocation of resources by governments and hospital CEOs. When cases and deaths spike, it is the fault of the citizenry, not the leadership.

The scientific and medical establishment’s uncritical support of masks and other dubious policies is just the latest manifestation of its lack of independence from political imperatives. After several years of finding themselves at the receiving end of rhetorical assaults from rising Right-wing populists, the experts seized on the pandemic as an opportunity to reassert their own status and authority — and that of the liberal-technocratic politicians with whom they are largely aligned.

In the long run, however, the temporary political advantages they gained from this will be outweighed by the discrediting effect of their embrace of censorship, propaganda, and rule by decree. Making us all put masks on was the expert class’s mask-off moment — and what we can see now isn’t pretty.

But in many of America’s deep-blue cities and suburbs, stringent Covid measures are still the norm, especially for schoolchildren. In New York City public schools, for instance, all students must wear masks at all times, including outdoors, except while eating or during designated “mask breaks”. Palo Alto, the hometown of Stanford University, makes kids wear mask outdoors at recess. And LA public schools, responding to new evidence about the uselessness of cloth masks, recently required children to wear surgical masks or N95/KN95s.

These measures are premised on the idea that America’s children must be shielded from exposure to Covid-19. What kids really need, however, is a return to normal. And when it comes to infectious disease, normality means a world where they are routinely exposed to, and overcome, viral illness. For children, getting sick and recovering is part of a natural and healthy life.

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It has become common to criticise restrictions for children on the grounds that they harm mental health and social development. These concerns are valid, but it is important to emphasise that a more laissez-faire approach to kids and Covid makes public health sense, too. Dropping masks, quarantines, distancing, and all other mitigations will allow children to develop the kind of broad immunity gained by living a normal life.

Shielding kids from exposure only increases their future risk. This is partly why the UK does not vaccinate against chickenpox. Serious complications from the disease are rare among children, and the circulating virus allows adults to be naturally boosted against reactivation-driven shingles. By rebuilding population immunity among the least at-risk, moreover, we help buffer risk for those most vulnerable.

With Covid, the nadir of risk is between 5–11 years old — an age where children develop more robust and durable immunity from infection than adults, even with asymptomatic silent infections.

Some parents may think this sounds like a call to put their children at risk of serious illness or death. But it is important to remember that exposure to Covid-19 is inevitable. Vaccines protect against severe disease and side-effects such as MIS-C, but they cannot stop breakthrough infections, and the rapidity of Omicron’s spread suggests that no matter what we do, we cannot avoid the virus. In January, Anthony Fauci admitted as much, saying that Omicron will eventually “find just about everybody”.

The epidemiologist and researcher Francois Balloux puts it this way:

https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1486449517503389707?s=20

This idea is not as frightening as it may sound. We know that even unvaccinated children generally do well after Covid-19 infection. A study from Germany found that among healthy, unvaccinated children aged 5–11 who became infected with the disease, just 2 in 100,000 ended up in the ICU and none died (16 in 100,000 received ICU care later for MISC-C). Even children for whom vaccination is not yet an option are at lower risk now than they were last summer: the Omicron variant resulted in 66% fewer hospitalisations than Delta in a study of children younger than 5 years.

In some countries, this data informs policy. In Norway, for instance, parents of 5–11 year-olds can get vaccines for their children if they want them, but vaccines are only recommended for children with serious underlying conditions. This is not because vaccines are ineffective but because, according to the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, “the risk of a severe disease course at this age is small, and the need for vaccines for children and adolescents is limited”.

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For children who are vaccinated, however, exposure at the lowest-risk age — roughly between kindergarten and middle school — could also be the safest way for young people to develop superior “hybrid” immunity. Last week, the CDC released a large study demonstrating that natural immunity is superior to vaccinated immunity and that hybrid immunity is superior to both. Vaccination provided a 19.8-times reduction in hospitalisation risk, but prior infection provided a 55.3-times reduction and a combination of the two conferred a 57.5-times reduction. Other studies suggest that hybrid immunity confers better cross-variant protection than vaccines alone.

And so schoolchildren, already at the lowest possible risk for severe Covid-19, have now exited what should be their last winter of restrictions. Many have already recovered from infection or been vaccinated, meaning that their risk has dropped from low to miniscule.

“Normal” has been an option for adults — it’s time to allow children to resume normal life, not simply because their exclusion is unfair or hurts them socially and psychologically, but because it is immunologically in their best interest. Parents must consider that exposures are how we best protect our children against the variants of the future. In fact, it is reckless to let children age into a more serious encounter with a disease best dealt with while younger.

This view is shared by the authors of a May 2021 paper in The British Journal of Medicine, who wrote: “Once most adults are vaccinated, circulation of SARS-CoV-2 may in fact be desirable, as it is likely to lead to primary infection early in life when disease is mild, followed by booster re-exposures throughout adulthood… This would keep reinfections mild and immunity up to date.” In fact, Norwegian authorities believe that natural infection will better protect children than vaccines that rely on out-of-date variants of the virus.

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For parents worried that dropping restrictions will put their children at risk, the way forward is to realise that many of the protective measures we’ve been relying on, including masks — and especially the cloth masks that many American schoolchildren have been wearing for over a year — were never as protective as we’d thought, and are no match for omicron.

Some parents understandably fear the consequences of long Covid in kids, but the largest study to date is profoundly reassuring. Children who tested positive for Covid-19 were only 0.8% more likely to report long Covid symptoms, such as fatigue and muscle weakness, than those who had never tested positive. As the authors of the study concluded: “Long Covid in children is rare and mainly of short duration”.

Anxious parents should also put the risks in perspective. Children in many parts of Europe have been subject to less draconian restrictions than their US counterparts — without disastrous results. And while the death of any child is a tragedy, Covid-19 is less deadly to children than many other risks we accept as a matter of course, including drowning, vehicle accidents, and even cardiovascular disease.

Yes, diseases will continue to circulate, as they always have done. Schools are not sterile, nor should they be. Immunity is built through illness. If we can’t return our children to normalcy now, knowing what we know about the small risks facing children and the serious harms inflicted on them by pandemic-era restrictions, there is a real risk, at least in the more progressive parts of America, that the current arrangement will become the new normal. And that is a risk none of us should be willing to take.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this article misstated the findings of a study from Germany on hospitalisation risk among unvaccinated children age 5-11. The correct figure for ICU admissions is 2 in 100,000, not 8 in 100,000. We have also added the figure for MISC-C risk and linked to the paper, which can be found here. We apologise for the error.

Omicron has been detected — and may have first arisen — in Gauteng province, South Africa. There have only been a few hundred cases detected, so it’s hard to say much about it with any real certainty. But it appears to be more transmissible and there are concerns that immunity, whether from vaccination or prior infection, will be less effective against it. There have been, as I write, three cases detected in the UK, and there are real (and justified) fears that we are heading once again into a lockdown Christmas. 

But nonetheless, we have been very lucky.

We mustn’t forget that the virus is constantly mutating. Every time it copies itself, there is a chance that it will make some minor error. Most of those mutations either have no effect or make it less effective at spreading. But every so often one will improve it: perhaps make it harder for the immune system to see, or make the virus quicker at copying itself.

The other new variants, notably Alpha and Delta, had several mutations, but Omicron has dozens: around 50. And 10 of them are on the bits of the “spike” protein on the virus’s surface which bind with our cells — the “receptor binding domains”. Sir Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust and former member of SAGE, tells me that these are exactly the kind of mutations which virologists have been expecting and dreading: “It’s biologically plausible that they will drive higher transmission. They’ve been identified before as ones we should be really careful about.”

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So far, it doesn’t sound very lucky. But in one mutation, Omicron has been kind to us. Like Alpha before it, it has a particular mutation, 69-70del, two missing RNA letters in its genome — part of the “S gene” which codes for the spike protein. By happy chance, those missing letters are at one of three places that many PCR tests look at.

What it means is that if a PCR test comes back positive on two out of its three areas — if it has an “S-gene dropout” — then you can be pretty sure you’ve got one of the variants. It means that Alpha last year and now Omicron can be tracked pretty effectively, just with PCR testing: even without sequencing the genomes, you can see where these S-gene dropout results are happening and it’ll give you a good idea of how the variant is spreading.

“It’s a complete gift that the S-gene dropout hits this variant,” says Ewan Birney, the deputy director-general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. If it didn’t, we would have much less of an idea where Omicron is. (We’ve actually been lucky twice. If Delta hadn’t replaced Alpha, then the S-gene dropout wouldn’t have told us anything, because both the circulating variants would have had it.)

So far, so good. But is the new variant more transmissible and/or more able to bypass our immunity, whether from vaccines or infection? And is it more or less dangerous to people who catch it?

These are hard questions to answer, because at the moment, we only have data from South Africa, and South Africa’s population is tricky to compare with ours. It’s younger, for a start — the median South African is 26-years old, while the median Brit is 40. It’s also much less vaccinated: somewhere around 75% of Britons have been double-jabbed, while barely a quarter have in South Africa (which is, to my surprise, more to do with uptake than supply). It has also had far fewer confirmed cases per capita.

That said, we can make some guesses. When a new variant emerges, it’s difficult to tell whether it has spread because it is better at spreading, or because it happens to have arisen in a convenient place. Imagine a virus which happened to mutate into a new variant in someone who was about to go to a major conference. It might infect hundreds of people and show up all over the country, but it wouldn’t be because it was any more transmissible — it was just that it got lucky.

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With Omicron, this seems unlikely to be the case. Thanks to the S-gene dropout, we can see that it’s spreading faster than you’d expect. Farrar says that “there has been a clear upswing of transmission in Gauteng, which seems to be driven by the variant”. “It probably can outcompete Delta,” says Babak Javid, an immunology lab director at the University of California San Francisco, “although by how much is still up in the air.” 

Is that because it’s better at spreading in general, or because it can evade immunity? So far, we don’t have the data to say for sure. Soon, we’ll start to get results from laboratory studies, and later from epidemiological observations, but Rupert Beale, leader of the Cell Biology of Infection lab at the Crick Institute, thinks it’s “a few weeks before we get useful information, and the other side of Christmas before we know anything definitive”.

But on the plus side, antibodies aren’t the only part of our immune system. We also have T-cells, which are less easily fooled by mutations. To oversimplify, antibodies stop you getting infected in the first place, but T-cells stop you from getting very ill. So Javid and Birney think it is plausible that Omicron will spread quite easily among vaccinated and/or previously infected people, but will be less likely to kill them or make them severely ill.

There has also been speculation that Omicron is inherently less deadly to people with no pre-existing immunity. That’s not impossible, but everyone I spoke to said that any definitive conclusions are premature. “The speculation is extremely uninformed,” says Beale. “We just don’t know until it gets into a more vulnerable population, which sadly it seems it’s likely to. We can hope it’s less pathogenic, but it’s foolish to make that assumption.”

So it might be better at spreading, and able to escape our immunity to at least some degree; and while it’s theoretically possible it might be less deadly, that’s certainly not a proposition we want to put any weight on. The question is: what should we do, and are we facing a second bleak Covid winter?

The pandemic should have taught us that acting early is usually better than acting late, and that preparing for worst-case scenarios is important. It’s like chess, says Beale: “You play your moves in the most flexible order.” If we assume it’ll all be OK, we might be right, but if we’re wrong, we’ll end up with Omicron spreading all over the place. Whereas if we assume it’ll be pretty bad, we can always open up again later on.

I’ve seen a lot of people, some of them very sensible, suggesting that there’s no point closing borders to South Africa because variants will get through anyway, and that it’s just punishing countries for doing good surveillance. But I think they are wrong. 

Yes, the variant will get through, if it hasn’t already. Farrar points out that it was first identified on 11 November, and its sequence suggests that it had already been circulating for some time before then. “I think it may already be on every continent,” he says. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no point in trying to reduce its spread. “Border closures might buy you a little time.” Birney agrees: “Shutting the borders until we understand it, minimising the seeding events, is a good rational move.”

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It’s true that there’s a risk of punishing countries for responsible surveillance, but I don’t see what the alternative is — pretending that they don’t have lots of Omicron circulating? Perhaps the thing to do is also put restrictions on countries with poor surveillance.

Because “buying a little time” might be important. If nothing else, it gives us time to understand it: if Omicron is highly virulent and vaccine-resistant, then our best response will be rather different to what it would be if it isn’t. It also gives us a chance to get more boosters in arms and to stockpile antiviral drugs. 

All the same arguments apply to other non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as introducing vaccine passports or asking people to work from home if possible. But there are other things Britain can do, too. 

One thing is to hugely increase our vaccine manufacturing capacity — something which would be good for us and for the world. Rolling out children’s vaccines and booster jabs faster wouldn’t hurt. One scientist I spoke to suggested making antiviral meds available by post when people get a positive result: “They need to be given quickly to have a good effect, so you can’t rely on GP appointments. You need to link them to Track & Trace”. Cheaper, quicker PCR testing at airports would help.”

But while those measures are important, they’re not addressing the root of the issue. For Farrar, the emergence of Omicron is just another reminder that we need to vaccinate the world, not just the rich world. “There’s been political drift for months now, in terms of access to vaccines,” he said. “The rich world thought it was over, so they’ve been kicking it into the long grass.” Variants like Omicron will continue to arise until the world has a decent level of immunity.

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We’ve been lucky, with Omicron. But it may well still end up becoming the dominant strain, just as Delta did before it. If it doesn’t, then another one will come along. And it will be “incredibly disruptive”, says Farrar: “Everyone’s putting restrictions in.” Certainly, to avoid another lockdown Christmas, we need to act now.

But if we want to be sure we don’t have another one next year, we need to get this pandemic behind us — and that means billions more doses of vaccine, distributed around the world. We won’t always be so lucky.

That was the premise of EM Forster’s science fiction novella The Machine Stops. Like all good sci-fi, the story can be read in multiple ways. But for me the key thing is what happens when the machine begins, slowly but ineluctably, to break down. Trivially to begin with — strange noises, the wrong music, smelly bath water — but then things begin to get more serious when the food starts to go off, and eventually the machine collapses and everyone is killed.

Yet until it’s too late, these flaws do not make people challenge the machine or wonder whether they might in fact be better off living on the surface of the earth. Although each flaw is resented at first, people just get used to them and begin to think them normal. “Time passed,” Forster wrote, “and they resented the defects no longer. The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that latter day had become so subservient, that they readily adapted themselves to every caprice of the Machine”.

I confess to not having given the story much thought since I studied it back in school, decades ago. But it has clearly been lurking somewhere deep in my memory — because all it took for it to leap out from the subconscious was the right cue.

It turned out that the right cue was Professor Sophia Chan Siu-chee. Professor Chan is Hong Kong’s Secretary for Food and Health, with responsibility for many of its Covid restrictions, and so for those of us living here she is a figure of some import. She is firmly of the Safety First, Can’t Be Too Careful school of thought, to the point where she makes Chris Whitty look like an especially rabid anti-vaxxer.

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This approach served Hong Kong well in the early days of the pandemic. Moving swiftly, and encouraged by most of the population who often urged the Government to take more drastic action, Hong Kong has managed to avoid both mass outbreaks and any large-scale full lockdowns of the sort seen in the UK. The Covid death toll here stands at just 213 — fewer than died from SARS — and there now hasn’t been a locally transmitted case for over a month.

Faced with the choice between remaining Asia’s World City or prioritising Our Friends in the North, it has now chosen the latter, aiming for a zero Covid policy and hoping that the border with the mainland will open again soon. This has resulted in some of the tightest travel restrictions in the world – 21 days in a quarantine hotel for someone from the UK, for example, even if fully vaccinated. In turn, this has had a disastrous impact on the vaccination programme. Vaccines are freely and easily available, but uptake has been slow, with the most vulnerable being the least likely to have been jabbed. The figure for the over-80s vaccinated is still below 20%: when you’ve got zero Covid, and if you don’t want to travel anywhere, why bother?

Yet however frustrating some of this might be — and however much we might wonder if this is sustainable — these are all legitimate policy choices. Given the mainland’s own zero Covid policy, and the importance of cross-border traffic, it’s difficult to see what Hong Kong could really do. Plus, however much pain this causes many foreigners and others with relatives overseas, there’s little doubt that it is popular within the wider population.

All this I can cope with, just about. But last month, Professor Chan claimed that in Hong Kong there is now “local normalcy” — and it was this that provoked my Forster flashback.

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She was trying to argue that however grim the quarantine rules might be, life once here is fine and dandy. This might strike you as a bit “apart from that Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”, but you can at least see her point: if they allow normal life to continue, maybe it’s possible to justify very strict travel restrictions.

Yet life is clearly not normal in Hong Kong, even if we just confine ourselves to the restrictions brought about by Covid. Rather, Chan’s claim is one of the best examples of the ratchet effect in public policy I’ve seen for ages.

Let’s just take just the things that affect me on an almost daily basis. Mask wearing is compulsory in public, for everyone, even when outdoors. There are limits on group gatherings, with still no more than four people allowed to gather outdoors (although unlike in the UK, say, there has never been any limits on private gatherings). Table sittings in restaurants are also restricted, usually to four, although some places are allowed to go really wild up to six, depending on the extent of staff vaccinations. Tracking entry and exit via an app into any public building or restaurant is compulsory.

Most schools are still not back to full-day provision, even though pupils are now in their sixth term of disrupted schooling, and even when at school there are innumerable restrictions on what they can do. Meanwhile, at home, there is routine compulsory testing of areas or groups. These can involve locking down whole blocks with no warning — so-called “ambushes” — even with the possibility of breaking into your home if you don’t answer the door.

And hovering above it all is the ever-present threat of being carted off to a government quarantine centre. Should one of your close contacts tests positive, there’s none of the would-you-mind-awfully-staying-at-home-please attitude here. Instead, you get picked up, with almost no notice, and chucked in a room in a quarantine centre for up to three weeks, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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If you actually have Covid, you are taken into hospital. There is little care for family separation, as with the children taken away from their parents — or the breastfeeding mother separated from her four month old baby, despite the child being unable to take formula milk. (That one was solved only because women donated spare pumped breast milk).

It is common to see praise in the West for how countries like Hong Kong have managed track, trace, and isolate programmes, without being aware of what the reality of the isolate bit often means. We have a bag ready, by the front door, packed with emergency provisions, just in case the guys and gals in Hazmat suits come knocking.

These examples are illustrative, not exhaustive. Everyone in Hong Kong could list others. And remember: these are the restrictions currently in place with the Covid stats down to zero.

Just as when Forster’s machine starts to break down, some of this might be considered fairly trivial, but some of it is not. Some of it may even be justified in the short or medium term. But none of it is normal, and we should not let politicians — in Hong Kong or elsewhere — ever tell us otherwise.

This has largely been borne out across the world. For better or worse, countries such as Britain and France have been relatively united around their political leaders. Any perceived failures have largely been forgiven thanks to the sense that they were doing their best under difficult circumstances. There were even strange moments of forced unity: in the case of the UK, there was weekly applause for the NHS.

The only country in which this was not the case was the United States. From the start of the virus, the pandemic became as highly politicised as everything else. Aware that a roaring economy was one of the central pillars of his return to office, President Trump was unwilling from the start to respond drastically. He was, perhaps, the world’s most reluctant leader to concede to lockdowns or mask-wearing — and, as a consequence, both of these issues fell, like everything else, along entirely partisan lines.

Many who hated Trump became dedicated to mask-wearing precisely because the President was not. Single, double, or triple mask-wearing — even when engaged in an activity like jogging — suddenly became an even better way of displaying your political sympathies than wearing a “Biden-Harris” t-shirt.

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Likewise, the rejection of mask-wearing and an opposition to lockdowns became the mark of a Republican with a strong Trumpist sensibility. During a visit to the States ahead of the election I was struck by how New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and other Democrat cities were filled with mask-wearing lockdown enthusiasts. Towns in Florida, by contrast, resembled party destinations in an especially frenetic holiday-season.

There was a feeling throughout all this that the cause resided in the White House. Once Trump was gone, so the argument went, so the obscene divisiveness of American politics would recede and there might at least be some unified narrative on Covid and the national response to it.

Unsurprisingly, this did not happen. Trump may be long gone, but the polarisation of America’s pandemic politics remains. Vaccine hesitancy, in particular, has become an issue that divides the Left and Right. For example, one poll carried out last month found that while 86% of Democrats had received at least one Covid jab, while only 45% of Republicans had — and while a mere 6% of Democrats said that they would most likely avoid being vaccinated an extraordinary 47% of Republicans said the same.

It isn’t quite analogous to compare this situation with Labour and Conservative voters in the UK; this is clearly more than a political dispute. But even if you transpose the Democrat-Republican vaccine divide on to the most divisive British counterpart argument of recent years —Brexit — the divide is less pronounced. A poll carried out by YouGov in April found that vaccine hesitancy in the UK saw only a five-point difference between people who had voted Remain and those who had voted Leave.

There are a range of possible explanations for this. The first is that the UK’s Brexit divisions have begun to heal, if not completely. People who voted Remain have, by and large, accepted the new reality and do not in large numbers believe that they can continue to overturn the 2016 vote.

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In America, by contrast, more than half of Republican voters still believe that Trump won the last Presidential election and that the Democrats stole the vote. Around three in ten Republican voters believe that Trump will be reinstated as President this year. In other words, they believe the election was stolen, but that the facts are going to come out, forcing Biden to step aside.

And yet it is not only about politics. From the start of the pandemic, it was striking that reactions to the pandemic in America fell across a quasi-philosophical line. Most Americans have lived all their lives better acquainted with the concept of risk than their British and European counterparts. In part this is because of the absence of the European-style model of the welfare state. In Europe, life’s game of snakes and ladders exists in a much more sanitised form. But in the US, the reality is far more extreme.

The American Right’s suspicion of the state and state agencies remains more pronounced than it is on the European right. Ever since the British and European Right made their peace with the welfare state, there have been those who have wished to reduce the size of it, but no significant figure who has wished to abolish it. The same cannot be said for the US.

Ultimately, political polarisation has become a way of life, one that is more than capable of surviving the rotation of Presidents. Indeed, as a phenomenon I suspect it will only become more pronounced. At the end of last month, the CDC advised all Americans, including people who are fully vaccinated, to once again wear masks in a number of scenarios. And this week, more than a dozen large US corporations, including Walmart, Google and United Airlines, announced that their workers would be expected to demonstrate that they have had the vaccine in order to work for them.

So off the American cultural divide goes again. America may have survived the worst of the pandemic — but the deep divisions which it has highlighted look increasingly irreparable.

Husband and wife Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley did most of the research for Until Proven Safe before the Covid-19 pandemic struck. Perhaps they felt strangely lucky, then, as the world descended into the current age of lockdowns and self-isolation, their study of “the history and future of quarantine” taking on a sharp new relevance.

Reading the book, there’s a case to be made that the just-to-be-sure quarantining began in fourteenth-century Dubrovnik, where travellers from areas known to be infested with the Black Death weren’t allowed to enter the walled city until they’d spent a month on a nearby small island. Similar schemes were adopted for maritime visitors to Venice, where you can still visit the lazarettos — quarantine hospitals — that were built especially for this purpose. Even lacking the germ theory of disease, the powers-that-be in these ancient cities intuited that separating was a way of protecting.

In the modern era, with a much better understanding of germs, we sometimes quarantine humans when we don’t really believe it’s necessary: recall the famous photo of the Apollo 11 astronauts, having just returned from their successful moon landing, meeting Richard Nixon from behind a window in a sealed metal box. They were quarantined for three weeks just in case they’d brought back some unknown alien pathogen from the moon — even though it was strongly suspected that (as we now know) the surface of the moon was sterile, and no such pathogens existed.

We’ve been less strict when it comes to the animal kingdom, where we can see some of the most drastic consequences of not quarantining playing out. Think of the episode of The Simpsons where Bart sneaks his pet bullfrog into Australia, whereupon it promptly escapes, reproduces, and devastates all the crops in the country. Manaugh and Twilley remind the reader of the UK’s terrible foot-and-mouth disease crisis in 2001, which originated in pigs who had been fed illegally imported pork from Asia. They also describe how Florida’s citrus industry has been in decline for years due in large part to the insect pest known as the psyllid. Only extremely strict quarantine of incoming plants by the state of California has stopped something similar happening to its famous oranges.

And remember the “friendship tree” that Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron planted on the White House lawn in 2018? Being from France, its roots were specially wrapped in plastic so as not to spread anything nasty to the US — and it was immediately dug up and sent for a two-year quarantine as soon as the cameras were switched off. (In a definitely-not-metaphorical development, it died before it was returned).

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It might seem to be stretching the term, but we quarantine some non-living objects, too: containers of radioactive waste are “quarantined” deep underground until they’re no longer dangerous. That, as Manaugh and Twilley explain, might be a very long time — long enough that scientists have tried to develop universal signs and symbols to communicate with civilisations thousands of years in the future who might have languages very different from our own: “there is bad stuff here – it is dangerous”.

So, animal, vegetable, and mineral: we routinely quarantine them all. Until Proven Safe argues that quarantine is a fundamental part of how societies deal with uncertainty. The lazaretto, the quarantine greenhouse and the concreted-over mine facility full of radioactive waste are, as the authors put it, “what results when abstract arguments over risk are given architectural form” — our best attempts at seeking the certainty we so badly need in the face of terrifying, and sometimes existential, dangers.

But the book left me with one massive unanswered question. If quarantine is such a well-understood process, with such a long history, how come we fumbled it so badly during Covid-19?

The will-they-won’t-they history of the UK Government’s decisions about border quarantine is recounted in a long document by the Home Affairs Select Committee from August 2020. As the disease began to spread outside of China in February last year, our government put in place some relatively light measures: those who had been in Wuhan, Iran or some parts of South Korea were asked nicely to stay at home after arrival at a UK airport, even if asymptomatic; those who had been in Northern Italy or a few other locations where cases had been found did “not need to undertake any special measures” unless they had symptoms. Even though there was to be no UK lazaretto, at least there was a gesture towards keeping incoming high-risk guests apart from the population at large.

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Then, on 13 March, this advice was completely dropped. As the outbreak began to spread into Europe, our government decided to remove some of its advice for border quarantines. As a Select Committee report five months later put it: “The decision to lift all Covid-19-related guidance for international arrivals on 13 March, just as other countries were expanding their border measures, is inexplicable.”

It would be 10 days until the first lockdown began in the UK — ten days in which thousands of people with Covid-19 entered the country and wouldn’t have had to isolate at home (as everyone would, when lockdown later came in), and certainly wouldn’t have to be tested as they arrived at the border. Even after lockdown began, there wasn’t the slightest question of us instituting a mandatory quarantine, despite other countries at the same time requiring incoming travellers, few though there were by this time, to stay locked in a hotel or other special facility for periods of as many as 21 days (that being, at one point, the length of the mandatory quarantine in Hong Kong). Incredibly, the UK only began a mandatory hotel-based quarantine on 15 February 2021 — and only for some countries — more than a full year since the first Covid case arrived on our shores.

Calling the decision inexplicable is understandable. But let’s try to explain it. Perhaps some thought that, since border measures like quarantine wouldn’t stop all cases, they weren’t worth instituting. This all-or-nothing argument has certainly been made in other contexts — for masks or even vaccines — and it betrays a magic-bullet mentality: defeating a contagious disease takes a lot of different measures, none of which will ever be 100% effective. Manaugh and Twilley note the irony that if a quarantine works — if it stops disease transmission — then it will in retrospect be seen as an overreaction.

Was quarantine thought to be a bit too disruptive, a bit too difficult, to institute? Perhaps, though of course we did eventually end up instituting it, and if the story of vaccines has shown us anything, it’s that we can move mountains to get something done if we feel we really have to.

Were some scientific advisers, and perhaps politicians, unable to decouple the idea of border quarantine (or indeed travel bans) from politically-unpalatable views in their minds? The authors of Until Proven Safe do note the political angle: treating foreigners, immigrants, or refugees as if they were carriers of disease (or were a disease themselves) has been the preserve of authoritarian, racist, populist leaders. Could an innate aversion to being like those bad people have skewed the experts’ judgement?

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There is some evidence for this, with Sage fretting early in the pandemic that border measures would need to be “draconian” to hold back the spread — a choice of words that clearly indicated disapproval. In fact, those measures may have been the proverbial stitch in time that would’ve saved, well, a lot of lives — and to draw comparison between actions taken during a pandemic emergency and those in “normal” times is irrational in any case.

Or maybe there’s an even more disturbing explanation: that quarantines weren’t instituted because, at the start of the crisis, the UK’s scientific advisers thought it would be a good thing if as many people as possible caught the disease. The idea that a strong quarantine system could render the “herd immunity” plan unnecessary doesn’t seem to have occurred, even though it did to policymakers in Hong Kong, New Zealand and elsewhere.

In any case, few of the lessons from history described in Until Proven Safe were applied during the history we’ve just lived through. The simple idea that “keeping people in quarantine, even if you’re not sure they’re infected, helps to hold back a contagious disease” seems to have been lost in the morass of counter-intuitive thinking that swirled around the start of the pandemic.

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Maybe we can learn the lessons for next time: what of the future of quarantine? Manaugh and Twilley say that it might not look like quarantine at all. They discuss DARPA’s Prometheus project, where the idea is to develop a way of predicting whether someone, once infected with a disease, will be contagious. One of the nastiest things about Covid is, of course, that people can still spread the disease before seeing any symptoms — if they get symptoms at all. Such a system could help us pinpoint the people who need to be isolated — and would, to return to the theme, help reduce a big source of uncertainty.

But anyone who’s had a visit to the pub cancelled because of the UK’s “pingdemic” should know that technological solutions are wont to go awry; we can predict endless angry debate over the rate of false-positives and false-negatives from a Prometheus-like system should it ever come to be used. Far from putting all our eggs in technology’s basket, we should be open to the central point of Until Proven Safe: although the low-tech idea of setting possibly-contagious people apart could be made more effective, more equitable, and more humane — we wouldn’t have a history so full of quarantine if it didn’t really work.

And yet, according to Twitter, this was anything but good news.

“Sooo…how does one tell the difference between a fully vaccinated person and a not vaccinated person?” asked one viral tweet, while elsewhere, a chorus of “Too soon!” went up. Some people bemoaned that the guidance seemed not to consider the plight of parents with unvaccinated children, including NBC’s Kasie Hunt, who wrote, “[What] do I do with my child who’s too little for a mask now that these rules have changed and I have no idea if the people in, say, the grocery store are telling the truth about their vaccination status?”

Still another made an ominous, baffling prediction: “We will know who the real vaccinated people are – they will be wearing their masks. The unmasked will be the unvaccinated.”

Around the world, masks have taken on a symbolic meaning distinct from their function as a means of preventing the spread of disease — and also, crucially, a political one. But nowhere has the issue become more detached from reality, more partisan, than in America, where public health advice that should be celebrated — as a sign that the virus is finally on the way out — has been met with outrage.

Americans’ complicated relationship with masks dates to the beginning of the pandemic, when we were scolded that masks didn’t work and we shouldn’t buy them. Then came a twist: they did work, and we should! Then, it wasn’t just should, but must: mandates requiring the use of masks began to pop up across the States.

My own state, Connecticut, imposed one of the strictest of these: not only were masks required at all times, including outdoors, but residents would be fined if caught violating the order. (Failing to mask would cost you $100, while more serious offences, like attending or organising a gathering in excess of 25 people, could run as much as $500.)

Masks, we were told, were about protecting others from getting sick; if you wore one, you were engaged not only in good medical hygiene, but in a brand of performative compassion that has long been associated with the American political Left, and particularly with the anti-Trump resistance. Depending on where you live in the the States, walking down the street without a mask could earn you angry glares, even verbal scoldings; joggers in cities like New York and Washington D.C. may be accused of literally killing people if they don’t mask up.

Diligence seems to vary across regional, and also class, lines; virtually nobody in my own modest neighborhood wears a mask outdoors, but in swankier parts of town, virtually nobody goes out without one. (When I went hiking in a park adjacent to one of the wealthiest enclaves in Connecticut, a trio of well-dressed women carrying telescoping hiking poles made an elaborate show of yanking up their masks and tsk-tsking when I passed at a distance on an adjacent trail.) Meanwhile, friends who had moved to Florida texted the rest of us up North with bewilderment: by comparison, people in more relaxed (and redder) states were going about their business as though they’d forgotten the virus even existed.

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This ramped-up relationship between compassion and progressivism can be traced to 2017, when debates were raging over Trump’s desire to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Caring about other people — while the orange narcissist in the Oval Office cared only for himself — became a crucial element of the way the progressive Left saw itself. There’s a reason why compassion played such a crucial role in Joe Biden’s presidential campaign: it validated the idea of him as the Anti-Trump. As Barack Obama said in a speech supporting his former VP: “Trump cares about feeding his ego. Joe cares about keeping you and your family safe.”

When the pandemic hit, it was this sentiment that fuelled the widely agreed-upon notion that whatever Donald Trump wanted to do, the right, morally correct, caring thing was to do the opposite. If Trump wanted to close the borders to travellers from China, we wanted to keep them open (and suggest that closing them was racist.) If Trump wanted to reopen schools, we wanted to keep them closed (and, yes, suggest that reopening them was racist.) A with-us-or-against-us mentality emerged, making dissent dangerous; as one parent confided to a reporter, “If we say anything about wanting our kids to return to school, we’re painted as Trumpers.”

And if Trump disliked pandemic safety measures like lockdowns, distancing, and, most especially, masks? Then we were all for these things. The more Trump or his supporters railed against them, the more we dug in. Masks were good. Masks were great. And most importantly, masks were political: a symbol of tribal affiliation that was literally all over your face. (Or, if you were on the other side, removed from it conspicuously and dramatically at the earliest possible moment.)

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In a country where many people define themselves first and foremost according to political identity, putting “THIS HOUSE BELIEVES” signs in their yards or a decal of Donald Trump’s head in their window, living in perpetual terror of their children marrying someone from the other team, what happened next was probably inevitable. Even as the U.S. began to roll out its vaccination program, and millions of Americans lined up to get their shots, those who had adopted the mask as a symbol of political and moral purity began expressing their intention to keep wearing them even after being vaccinated.

Even if the virus was no longer a threat, the argument went, the mask served other, equally important functions — and people began finding reasons to celebrate them. Wearing a mask even after you’d been vaccinated meant you were compassionate (“Other people don’t know that I’m vaccinated, and I care more about their emotional comfort than about having my face free!”), and health-conscious (“Masks prevent colds and flu, too!”) and even a good feminist (“Masking relieves me of the burden of the male gaze!”) And of course, it also meant you weren’t one of those people. The anti-maskers. The Trump voters. The bad ones, who believe bad things; the ones whose fault it was that we were even in this mess in the first place.

New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo pointed out the conundrum: “What if you are a good lib and don’t wear a mask outside because the media says it’s ok now because science,” he wrote, “but other libs despite science still associate masklessness with Trumpy defiance, is there a button you can wear, maybe a blue check or something, to show you’re good?”

When a writer at the libertarian magazine Reason expressed that continuing to mask outdoors even post-vaccination was nothing but theatre, author Mark Harris snapped, “If more people had engaged in performative acts of safety and fewer in performative acts of ‘freedom,’ maybe we wouldn’t be discussing exactly how the FOURTH WAVE is going.” And when Emily Oster, a Brown University economist who dispenses popular science-based advice on adjusting to pandemic life, suggested that the CDC adjust its messaging to emphasise that vaccination was our path back to normalcy, she was swiftly and immediately dogpiled: “‘Return to normal’ is a world that is still incredibly unsafe for so many people,” one outraged commenter wrote. “Why don’t you care about them? What would it take for you to find value in their lives?”

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But it’s not just that many liberals are still wearing masks, even outdoors, purely to signal to random passersby that they aren’t Republicans. At the same time, to admit out loud that you don’t enjoy masking — or even that you look forward to removing your mask after you’ve been vaccinated — has become a bizarre third rail: how can you even talk about what’s comfortable when 500,000 people are dead?!

In some ways, the political posturing surrounding masks is reminiscent of the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, when questioning the necessity of, say, removing one’s shoes at the airport was seen as something akin to treason. The fact that a person was vastly more likely to die in a car crash on the way to the airport than in a terrorist in-flight shoe bombing was compelling to no one; the fear of another attack (or in the case of Covid-19, another infectious wave) had dialled our risk tolerance down so close to zero that no precaution, no matter how disruptive to our daily lives, could be considered too much to ask. After all, what’s a little inconvenience in the name of fighting terrorism? Is your comfort more important than human lives?! Why do you hate America?

All of this might be dismissed as nothing more than the latest, dumbest skirmish in the culture wars, except that this one, unfortunately, is having wider repercussions on the landscape of public health. At this point, America’s best hope of returning to living, working, and socialising as we did before is to vaccinate as many people as possible — and to persuade hesitant parties that it’s in their best interest to get jabbed, because once they do, they can get back to normal.

But when vaccinated people won’t remove their masks, they send the opposite message: that getting the vaccine changes nothing. Combined with visuals like this one — in which Kamala Harris wears a mask on a Zoom call, in a socially-distanced room where everyone present has been vaccinated — the impression being created by our political leadership and our media influencers is that the vaccines don’t work.

For a coalition that prides itself on caring about other people, the Left-wing pro-mask-even-after-vaccination folks are remarkably unconcerned that they might be discouraging their fellow Americans from participating in our most important life-saving public health measure. Instead, public responses to the vaccine-hesitant (including a video public service announcement that aired on the Jimmy Kimmel show) have been mainly centred on mocking them, an approach that does plenty to stoke existing tensions but very little to move us toward herd immunity.

Meanwhile, public health officials have struggled to explain to reluctant people why they ought to get jabbed, when doing so wouldn’t make any discernible improvement in their lives, and the vaccination rate in the States has been slowing lately, as supply begins to outstrip demand. The new CDC guidance may change this, assuming that America’s governors respond by lifting the mask mandates — but the update is already being met with hesitancy in places where many people have made overcautiousness into not just a virtue, but a lifestyle. Indeed, it is possible to envision a future in which normality is lost to us forever because the people who care were more invested in performing compassion for an audience of their tribesmen than practicing the real thing.

The real thing, though, is our only way forward.

Newsom has been uniting opinion in California ever since he took over as Governor last year — against him. He had previously been Mayor of San Francisco and during his tenure there had helped to turn one of the world’s most beautifully-positioned cities into one of the first world’s most shameful slums. Since his election success last year, he appears to have tried to establish whether he could replicate this success on a state-wide level.

During his time as Governor, as during his tenure as Mayor, homelessness has skyrocketed. This isn’t accidental; it has been encouraged. The state’s subsidies mean that it has become a magnet for homeless people, so that in California, as in San Francisco, people can essentially live wherever they wish to pitch their tent or shopping cart. There are now over 150,000 people living homeless in the state, the highest such proportion anywhere in the US. This is now one of the major reasons why so many Californians are leaving and heading elsewhere.

But in recent days, Newsom has been making wider headlines because he has transgressed one of the cardinal rules of politics, specifically “Do as I say not as I do”. For many months, California’s Covid restrictions have been among the most stringent anywhere in the United States, and at present if you travel around the formerly great state you can see the results of the policies that Newsom and his colleagues have instituted.

Among the most visible trends is with the state’s restaurants, which can remain open only so long as they transfer to a sort-of open-air, vaguely tent-like structures in parking lots and other spaces adjacent to the state’s restaurants. The whole thing has the air of a permanent state-wide celebration of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. The diners of California now pay top whack to have the pleasure of eating out in a parking lot.

But Newsom has not been content with simply instituting that piece of communal inconvenience. Until the start of October, the state forced you to wear a face mask on entering a restaurant and heading to or from your table. But you were allowed to take your face-mask off (as on aeroplanes) when you were actually eating. Then, at the start of October, Newsom’s office issued updated guidance, so that diners in California would henceforth be required to keep their mask on at all times other than when they were actually taking bites. The governor’s office advised: “Don’t forget to keep your mask on in between bites”. So during a meal you would have your mask on throughout, whip it off to allow yourself a forkful of food, and then as soon as the food was in your mouth you would have to put the mask back on.

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It was my experience, being in California during the days after this edict was issued, that people in the state did not follow this particular madness. Many treated themselves to chewing in an overheated parking lot without covering their faces, and so far as I could see neither restaurant staff nor the local police did anything to enforce that particular measure. But it was indicative of the overzealous insistences that were coming out of the Governor’s office.

Newsom had previously liked a tweet from Cory Booker which declared that “Wearing a mask is not a surrender of liberty. It is an affirmation of love.” His Twitter profile shows him wearing a mask and his pinned tweet declares: “CA, you are now REQUIRED to wear a mask in public spaces.”

So what a beautiful thing it is to now see that Newsom himself follows none of this advice. This week, footage emerged of him breaking every single piece of Covid regulation that he has attempted to foist upon the unhappy people over whom he rules. Earlier this month he had attended a dinner at an expensive French restaurant called French Laundry in Napa, the unmissable occasion being the birthday dinner of a lobbyist called Jason Kinney.

And during the course of the evening he followed absolutely none of the advice he himself had spent months doling out.

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First off, the dinner appears to have been indoors. Second, everybody at the table was closely packed together, in a gathering of more than a dozen people — AND absolutely none of the them were wearing masks. In other words, it was the sort of dinner that was perfectly normal until 2020, but which people like Governor Newsom have insisted are a total health hazard this year.

As photos of the gathering emerged, it has further transpired that the Governor was joined by two high-level members of the California Medical Association. The $400 per person menu included a starter of “Oysters and Pearls” followed by “Sole aux Crevettes” and Braised Veal. All of which must have left a delightful taste in the mouth of the Californian leader, various medical authorities and assorted lobbyists, but leaves a rather less pleasant aftertaste with pretty much every other resident of California.

Since being outed for his hypocrisy Newsom has made a public apology of the predictable kind. He seems to be hoping that people will forgive his actions because of a miscalculation by him about the precise size of the gathering. He claimed that when sitting down at the table he realised that “it was a little larger group than I had anticipated. And I made a bad mistake. Instead of sitting down I should have stood up”. He acknowledged that the “spirit” of what he was telling everyone else to do had been broken.

And he also acknowledged that what he was “preaching” all the time had been contradicted “because I need to preach as well as practise”. It is questionable whether a politician should be into any sort of “preaching” at all, let alone preaching an ideal they then self-confessedly cannot live up to. But more than any other Covid scandal so far, Newsom’s lobbyist supper is deeply telling about a divide which is emerging between rulers and ruled.

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By Freddie Sayers

In Britain, the biggest Covid-breaking scandal was that surrounding the Prime Minister’s then chief advisor, Dominic Cummings. When Cummings was criticised and made to explain his behaviour, the UK was in a state of feverish anger about a potential breaking of the rules. But through all of that there was no question of Cummings having done something frivolously. He stood accused of having perhaps ill-advisedly attempted to make alternative childcare arrangements to look after his young child while he and his wife were falling sick with Covid. People may have disagreed with his decision, or not, but he was acting in the best interests of his son.

Newsom by contrast broke the far more stringent rules of California, which he himself was extolling for the pleasure of having an exquisite dinner with a bunch of political lobbyists and healthcare professionals. Everything that is wrong with the American political class might be summed up in that fact — that of all the things one might have broken the Covid rules for (visiting a sick or dying relative, attending the funeral of a loved-one), the Governor of California did it to have a $400-per-head indoor dinner with lobbyists.

After all these months, does he now think that his strategy is a failure or a success? A bit of both, he says quickly, but emphasises more of the latter:

“I think to a great extent it’s been a success. We are now seeing rapidly falling cases, we have continuously had healthcare that has been working, there have been free beds at any given time, never any crowding in the hospitals, we have been able to keep schools open which we think is extremely important, and society fairly open — while still having social distancing in place in a way that means that the spread of the disease has been limited.

The failure has of course been the death toll … that has been very much related to the long-term care facilities in Sweden. Now that has improved, we see a lot less cases in those facilities.”

Mortality is hardly an afterthought — so why is Sweden’s mortality rate so high? At around 550 per million of population, it sits just under the UK and Italy but far above neighbouring Norway and Denmark. Dr Tegnell offers a collection of reasons: with its larger migrant populations and dense urban areas, Sweden is actually more similar to the Netherlands and the UK than it is to other Scandinavian countries; he believes the Swedish counting system for deaths has been more stringent than elsewhere; also, countries are at different points in the epidemic cycle so it is too early to compare totals.

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The one thing he doesn’t mention in this list is that Sweden, uniquely in Europe, did not impose a mandatory lockdown at any point. Is he really claiming that this is not even a factor?

“I am not sure that it is easy to say that lockdown would make the difference … in many ways we have had a very stringent lockdown in Sweden. We have cut down on movement in society quite a lot: we have compared how much we travel in Scandinavian countries, and the decrease in travel is the same in Sweden as in neighbouring countries … In many ways the voluntary measures we put in place in Sweden have been just as effective as complete lockdowns in other countries. So I don’t think complete lockdown is the way to go for all countries … the rapidly declining cases we see in Sweden right now is another indication that you can get the number of cases down quite a lot in a country without having a complete lockdown.”

I ask again: is he claiming that lockdowns make no difference?

“We don’t know. It would have made maybe some difference, we don’t know. But on the other hand we know that lockdowns also have big other effects on public health. We know that closing schools has a great effect on children’s health in the short and the long term. We know that people being out of work also produces a lot of problems in the public health area. So we also have to look at what are the negative effect of lockdowns, and that has not been done very much so far.”

Tegnell points out the huge differences between different areas in Sweden — parts of the South that have had much lower Covid-19 than Copenhagen just over the water while Stockholm has had it much worse, despite the same lockdown policy nationwide. This he puts down to the volume of original introduction of the disease due to international travel:

“There seems to be a close connection to how many people introduced the disease at the same time… The spring holidays in Sweden are spread over four different weeks depending on different geographical regions. Unfortunately Stockholm happened to have its spring holiday just when there was an enormous spread of Covid-19 in Europe … so a lot of Swedes living in the Stockholm area came back with the disease. And that started an epidemic on a level that was much higher than the start of the epidemic in the South of Sweden, or in Finland or in Norway. Currently that’s to me the most likely theory – that if you have a massive introduction, it’s going to be a disease that is very, very hard to control.” Stockholm, in other words, was more like London or New York than Oslo or Helsinki in terms of introduction of the virus.

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He believes strongly that eradication — the zero-tolerance approach that is increasingly winning the day in the UK and US — is not a viable option.

“I don’t think that this is a disease that we can eradicate – not with the methods that we have right now. It might be a disease that in the long term we can eradicate with a vaccine, but I’m not even sure about that. If you look at comparable diseases like the flu and other respiratory viruses we are not even close to eradicating them despite the fact that we have a vaccine. I personally believe that this is a disease we are going to have to learn to live with.”

Many people feel that Anders Tegnell’s approach has been overly laissez-faire and that even now, he should be introducing more draconian measures. A model this week from his Health Agency suggested as many as 3000 additional deaths may be seen in Sweden in the next year — shouldn’t he do more to stop that happening?

He insists that those projections are only models, and that he hopes and expects to achieve a much better result. But he is also mindful of whether these draconian measures may do more harm than good:

“Of course we are trying to keep the mortality rates as low as possible, but at the same time we have to look at the draconian measures you are talking about. Are they going to produce even more deaths by other means than the disease itself? Somehow we need to have the discussion of what we are actually trying to achieve. Is it better for public health as a whole? Or is it trying to suppress Covid-19 as much as possible? Because getting rid of it I don’t think is going to happen: it happened for a short time in New Zealand and maybe Iceland and those kind of countries might be able to keep it away, but with the global world we have today, keeping a disease like this away has never been possible in the past and it would be even more surprising if it were possible in the future.”

One type of intervention that does not appear to have adverse effects is encouraging, or mandating, the use of masks. This has become an intensely political issue in the US and more recently in the UK. In Sweden mask use is minimal in almost all settings. Why is he not even recommending use of masks?

“One reason is that the evidence base for using masks in society is still very weak. Even if more and more countries are now enforcing them in different ways … we haven’t seen any new evidence coming up, which is a little bit surprising. The other reason is that everything tells us that keeping social distance is a much better way of controlling this disease than putting masks on people. We are worried (and we get at least tales from other countries) that people put on masks and then they believe they can go around in society being close to each other, even going around in society being sick. And that, in our view, would definitely produce higher spread than we have right now.”

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The emphasis on spread of the virus to the exclusion of everything else Dr Tegnell believes is misguided, as the number of cases is less and less correlated to the number of deaths.

“Deaths are not so closely connected to the amount of cases you have in a country. There are so many other things that influence the amount of deaths you have. What part of the population gets hit? Is it the elderly people? How well can you protect people in your long-term facilities? How well does your healthcare system continue to function? How can we improve the treatment in ICUs? All of these things have been changing a lot in the past few months… Those things will influence mortality a lot more, I think, than the actual spread of the disease.”

His belief is that, in the final account, the Infection Fatality Rate will be similar to the flu: “somewhere between 0.1% and 0.5% of people getting infected, maybe … And that is not radically different to what we see with the yearly flu.”

On the controversial question of immunity, he suggests that a larger percentage of the population in Sweden is already immune than antibody studies suggest.

“There are a number of small studies already that show that of people who had been diagnosed with Covid-19 with PCR, not all of them develop antibodies. On the other hand we have quite a lot of evidence that falling ill with Covid-19 twice seems to be extremely rare… Obviously there is also quite a big part of the population that has other kinds of immunity and T Cell immunity is the one that is most likely.

“What we see right now is a rapid fall in the number of cases, and of course some kind of immunity has to be involved in that as nothing else has changed. That means that immunity affects the R value quite a lot in Sweden today.”

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Does that mean that Sweden will be better placed to limit second waves and future flare ups than countries that have had minimal infection levels so far?

“I think it’s likely that those kinds of outbreaks will be easier to limit in Sweden because there is immunity in the population. All our experience with measles and other diseases shows that … we know that with large immunity in the population it is much easier to control the outbreaks than if you don’t have immunity in the population.

“There is now a number of countries in Europe that have a fairly low level of spread for a very long time, which is very unusual with a disease that seems to be so contagious, and where there is so little immunity in the population. If that is really a sustainable way for the disease to exist we will wait and see — I think the fall will show if it is possible or not.”

The eyes of the world have been on him for the past few months. How would he like to be judged, and when?

“It is better to have a more complete discussion around this in say 12 months, after next summer, then I think we can more fairly judge what has been good in some countries and bad in other countries.”

He has promised to talk to us again at that time. 23^rd July 2021 – it’s in the diary.

It’s a reasonable question, on the face of it. Why should anyone listen more carefully or be better-disposed to me because I took a couple of minutes out of my morning to fasten the top button of my shirt and secure a length of cotton or silk round my neck? Why don’t we just relax and show up in T-shirts and flip-flops? After all, the argument goes, we’re all just shaved monkeys underneath, and it’s the ideas in our heads and the goodness in our hearts that matter.

I’m not sure this quite settles the matter. As I said to my son, albeit not quite in these words, taking time to make yourself smart is a signal that you are going to take someone seriously. It’s a gesture of respect, an indication that you are treating this encounter with the weight it deserves.

I’d make a similar defence of manners. Michael Gove ruffled a few feathers last week when he stated that, given the coronavirus situation, wearing a face mask while shopping was “basic good manners”. It struck me that it’s quite unusual to hear senior politicians talking sincerely about the importance of manners and politeness.

Like formal dress, manners — understood in the broad sense, as shared codes for personal conduct, common expectations of how one should react and behave in particular situations — are often derided by a certain kind of pseudo-sophisticated person. Why bother with the artifice? Aren’t manners simply hypocrisy, encouraging us to conceal our real feelings and thus stifling our authentic selves? Wouldn’t it be healthier if we said what we thought, so everyone knew where they stood?

This latter question arises from what the writer-doctor Theodore Dalrymple calls “the hydraulic theory of human behaviour”, where repression, so-called, is seen as very dangerous because it will eventually result in a great uncontrolled outburst of pent-up emotion, and prevents us from showing our true self, that is to say our most strongly-felt impulses. Much healthier, in this view, to let it at all hang out and not take the risk of leaving a thought or feeling unexpressed.

But this comes at the matter from the wrong direction. The sceptical position on manners suggests that we shouldn’t care about mere forms of speech, as what matters is substance. On the contrary, being careful to put others at ease, to show them that you consider them an equal, and that you value their time, is deeply substantial.

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To say “please” and “thank you” to someone, to listen carefully to them, to not impose on them your noise or the odour of your food or the obscenity on your T-shirt, is not mere prissiness. It is an act of humility and kindness. It is a way of making clear that you prioritise their comfort over your own convenience or your own self-expression.

Taking your litter home, being quiet on public transport, and friendly and considerate to people who serve you in shops, are never going to be lauded in the history books, but they do contribute massively to the public good. They help people relax and find contentment and peace. They help others feel at home in the world. They treat the world as if it is genuinely a shared place, where we must take into account the needs of others, rather than one  dominated by the loudest and strongest and least considerate.

Manners can have another role. They are part of how we distinguish between the different roles which we play in public life, and between our public roles and our private lives.

A good example of this can be found in the final episode of the television show Band of Brothers. Quite by chance, the main character Dick Winters encounters his old adversary Captain Sobel. As a major, Winters now outranks Sobel, but when he was a lowly second lieutenant in basic training Sobel, his commanding officer, was extremely unpleasant to him; a strong antagonism exists between them, not helped by the fact that by this point Winters has proved himself a brave, effective and popular leader of men and Sobel has been prevented from going into combat. As they pass, Sobel does not salute Winters, as he ought to do, and Winters rebukes him: “We salute the rank, not the man”.

The point here is that sophisticated human societies and organisations, such as armies, cannot function without the willingness to separate the private individual from his or her public role, and without a clear conception that there are certain behaviours, attitudes and demeanours befitting a public role regardless of what the individual in that role might believe or prefer.

When I call a judge “Your Honour” or an MP refers to an opponent as the Right Honourable Member, this is not a judgment about the personal virtues of the person addressed — it is a sign of respect for the role itself. A judge is the representative of the Crown and of the law. A Member of Parliament fills an ancient role in the British constitution. A policeman or a doctor or a teacher are entitled to our deference to their professional expertise not because all police officers or doctors or teachers are especially admirable people in private life but because that particular profession is a creditable vocation, and because that role in society must be treated with respect.

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The formal dress and unusual patterns of speech associated with particular positions help to reinforce this distinction, and the broader point that the office is larger and more significant than any particular person who holds it. Some people chafe against this — differing attitudes to the interplay between individuals’ private and public roles are both cause and effect of political difference.

One thinks of John Bercow, former Speaker of the House of Commons. During his decade in the role he shed almost all the last vestiges of traditional dress, while simultaneously (and not coincidentally) thrusting himself and his own views into the forefront of political debate in a way that rode roughshod over the numerous conventions and traditions governing the neutrality of the Speaker.

We might equally consider the case of the UK Supreme Court, whose judges do not wear formal court dress. When the UKSC handed down its enormously controversial judgment on last September’s prorogation, the President Lady Hale was wearing a large spider-shaped brooch, which subsequently became a symbol of opposition to the Tory government. It cannot be healthy for a free law-governed society if figures such as judges, whose job is to interpret the law without fear or favour, become rallying points for one side of a partisan divide, and such an outcome could easily have been avoided by having the members of our highest court wear sombre formal clothes without individual accoutrements.

If proper dress is worn, the individual becomes more clearly subsumed in the role. The same is true with regard to the forms of words used in civic and religious ceremonies; they constantly remind us the focus of what is going on is not the individuals currently present, but something greater, more enduring and more important.

I wonder whether some of the modern antipathy to cultivating good manners is that they are generally a quiet and unshowy form of virtue. It’s difficult to post on social media about how impressive your manners are, because they so often consist of what you don’t say, what you don’t do, and of small gestures and minor sacrifices known only to yourself. Observing socially beneficial taboos can feel like ploughing a lonely furrow, but it is worth it.

For one thing, an enormous amount of great art has been generated by the need to approach certain matters obliquely or euphemistically. Much classic love poetry is of this kind; or consider the books of Jane Austen, where so much of the drama and humour arises from the gap — inevitable in a world of numerous taboos — between what is said and what is meant, between the things that characters want to do and the things that they must do. Consider even film noir, where stars like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall electrified the screen with sexual tension. Filmmakers were so limited in what they could show that they had to find all sorts of clever ways to portray attraction and generate chemistry between their leads.

I don’t doubt that there are downsides for societies that become excessively or obsessively focused on correct form and external proprieties. But it is worth noting that even apparently restrictive codes of behaviour can have unexpected benefits. Take, for instance, a workplace that insists on smart business clothing every day. On a superficial level, this is exclusionary. What about people who don’t want to dress that way for whatever reason?

Equally, however, it is a fair, explicit and visible statement by an organisation of what constitutes appropriate and professional behaviour. It is arguably much more egalitarian than the realistic alternative, where all sorts of dress are allowed and so assessments of professionalism are based instead on individuals’ knowledge of implicit and invisible norms and codes of behaviour and language, knowledge that may only be available to people from certain backgrounds. It’s better to have strict but clear open rules than strict and opaque secret rules.

Suggested reading

Would you rather be someone else?

By Dan Hitchens

It’s also worth thinking about the ways in which social taboos, even when resented, can benefit individuals. In the film Brief Encounter, for instance, the keenly-felt and strongly-enforced expectation of decent behaviour helps to stop the lead characters from making the terrible mistake of running away together, and the lesser but still potentially serious one of consummating their relationship.

Obviously Brief Encounter is fiction, but it is a very good illustration of how social pressure to conform to certain behavioural patterns can help to save you from yourself — and save other people from the consequences of selfish or reckless behaviour. Indeed, one general problem for defenders of social conservatism is that so many of the benefits of our worldview are effectively invisible, because they are things that don’t happen.

A significant political objection arises here, one which motivates many critics of manners. To follow social norms is to accept, at least to some extent, the authority of society over the individual. Implicit in the very concept of manners is the admission that how you present yourself to the world matters, that you cannot simply write off other people’s impressions of your behaviour and of the way you present yourself in the world. It is easy to see how this might be unpalatable for a generation of individualists, who view freedom as synonymous with self-actualisation and to whom no unchosen obligation can possibly be truly binding.

Nevertheless, the discipline of manners is worth the effort. It is good to develop the habit of not treating your moods, preferences and impulses as cosmic imperatives which cannot be challenged or gainsaid. For me to keep my feelings to myself is a decision not to treat the world merely as a stage for my own personal drama. It is a blow against the mentality where everyone else is a supporting character in the Story Of Me. And in the age of social media, that doesn’t sound so bad.

But I am far from convinced that the law requiring shoppers in England to mask up, which comes into effect next week, is rational or justified.

There is no scientific consensus on the efficacy of masks in the battle to suppress Covid-19. Some experts believe they do more harm than good. Until very recently, the Government’s own medical advisers were telling us that masks were of little use.

The timing is questionable, too. Why impose such a law now when the curve has flattened? Why not earlier when the virus was peaking (and, so far as I recall, supermarkets and other essential stores that remained open were bustling)?

I know some will argue that the Government is trying to encourage people to hit the shops harder in an attempt to rejuvenate the economy, and the order to don masks is seen as a way of assuaging the health fears of prospective shoppers. But I suspect that the order may in many cases have the opposite effect. There will almost certainly be a sizeable number who, puzzled and irritated by the measure, will simply choose to stay at home.

Suggested reading

Why heroes should wear masks

By Peter Franklin

Defenders of the Government’s decision have drawn parallels with the requirement to wear seat belts in motor vehicles. But the comparison is weak. There is compelling evidence to demonstrate the effectiveness of seat belts in saving lives. By contrast, the jury remains out on face masks. Moreover, the wearing of seat belts does not fundamentally alter the nature of our society or our relations with each other as human beings. I have seen, where I live, the effects of masks — on buses, on the street and in shops. They, for want of a better term, sterilise the atmosphere. The friendly smiles, the subtle expressions, the small-talk, the banter: all suppressed behind a strip of cloth.

Does the Government have an exit strategy on masks? With a vaccine potentially a long way off, will we be expected to cover up indefinitely? Is that an outcome that a majority of citizens are willing to countenance? Can we believe ministers when they say the law won’t be extended to include other locations, such as workplaces?

And what happens when the next flu epidemic strikes? How could the Government credibly refuse to impose an identical order to cover up? Again, is that something we will readily accept? Furthermore, should consistency not demand that we don masks every winter in future to help prevent some of the average 17,000 flu deaths that occur annually in England (in spite of there being a vaccine)? If not, why not? It is true that flu and Covid-19 are different viruses, but both are contagious respiratory illnesses which are transmitted in similar ways, so any marked discrepancy in the method of response would surely be illogical, would it not? Or is it perhaps just a numbers game? In which case, what is the threshold for imposing compulsory masks? Twenty thousand deaths? Thirty thousand? Forty?

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Test article

By Tom Chivers

Sadly, though perhaps unsurprisingly, to even raise these questions is to elicit a furious response from a section of society – particularly the Twittersphere – that appears slavishly compliant in its support for the Government’s position. Even those who challenge the wisdom and competence of Boris Johnson and his cabinet on virtually every other policy decision have suddenly become the embodiment of submissiveness over this new law.

Dare to challenge it, and you will find yourself accused of harbouring some wicked desire to see vulnerable people killed or ‘ignoring the science’ or being some kind of extreme libertarian. Rarely will your opponents put forward a considered and cogent response to your objections. Instead, they will use it as an opportunity to signal their own virtue. They support the compulsory wearing of masks, so they are by definition inherently better human beings. Hard evidence and facts can go whistle.

Every death from Covid-19 is a tragedy, but many seem to have lost sight of the fact that the vast majority who contract the virus will suffer either mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. Only in a minority are symptoms more serious, and in an even smaller minority fatal. Of course we must protect the genuinely vulnerable, an area where the Government has unquestionably fallen short. But the mentality that appears to have been adopted by some — that the virus presents a serious threat to the whole of humanity — is not serving us well. It is making us risk averse, generating needless panic and slowly recasting our social relations with each other. Perhaps permanently.

Suggested reading

Test article

By Freddie Sayers

The law on masks is but the latest example of the mission creep that has marked the Government’s whole approach to the pandemic. The original justification for the lockdown — that it was necessary to prevent the NHS being overwhelmed — appears to have been lost in the mists of time. Those of us who warned from the beginning that the curtailment of our civil liberties might not end up being the temporary measure it was intended to be, and that we ought to be on our guard against ever-tightening restrictions, have, it seems, been vindicated.

Some would prefer there to be no debate at all — let alone any dissent —on all of these questions. In fact, the debate is only just beginning.