At the moment, they’re free, at least for users. The Government will provide them, in packs of seven, to anyone who asks. But is that going to stop? There was confusion over the weekend after one “senior Whitehall source” told the Sunday Times that it would — before the education minister, Nadhim Zahawi, informed Sky that there were no such plans.

Maybe it’ll happen soon, maybe it won’t. But we are moving towards a world in which we need to think differently about testing for Covid; the current scenario — free tests for anyone who wants them, followed by automatic isolation if you have a positive result — cannot continue forever.

The question now is: what should replace it? Will it soon be time to start using tests in new ways – to let people decide whether they ought to stay home, rather than ordering them to via restrictions? And will we start doing the same for diseases other than Covid?

First, let’s be clear about something: the cost of LFTs has been low. The figure usually quoted is £6 billion — which seems tiny when compared to the £315 billion spent on Covid measures (as of December 2021), not to mention the vast economic damage inflicted since March 2020. Economists often talk about “Treasury brain”, the desire to cut any and all spending without asking whether that spending is actually saving money elsewhere. I suspect the call to stop giving away LFTs is an extreme case of Treasury brain: lateral flows don’t have to stop all that many infections to pay for themselves many times over.

And they probably do stop a lot of infections. LFTs are less sensitive than the standard PCR tests, but they are much quicker — minutes rather than hours — and, unlike PCRs, will not detect dead virus in the system of someone who has been recovered for days or weeks. “I’ve always been a big advocate,” says Prof Alan McNally, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham. In particular, they are more likely to return a positive result when you have a high viral load and, therefore, are more likely to be infectious. He points to various studies, including this modelling paper in the Lancet Public Health journal, which seem to find that LFTs followed by self-isolation lead to significant drops in transmission.

That said, we should still be wary. LFTs definitely miss some non-trivial fraction of cases, including some which are infectious. Alexander Edwards, a professor of biomedical technology at the University of Reading, notes that one recent preprint followed 30 people who had tested positive for Covid on PCR while doing LFTs at the same time. It found, as expected, that PCRs tended to pick up the infection earlier and more reliably. But it also found, through contact tracing, that four people passed on the virus in between negative LFTs. It’s a tiny study, and we have no way of knowing how common events like that are. But they do happen: you can’t 100% rely on LFTs telling you whether you’re infectious or not.

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What Covid tests can we trust?

By Tom Chivers

But LFTs have always been in a bit of a strange situation. On the one hand, there is a tendency to assume that they are outranked by PCRs. I know at least one person who had a positive LFT followed by a negative PCR, and assumed that meant the LFT was wrong and they could go back to work. But that’s wrong. “I’m always astonished by this,” says McNally. “If you have symptoms, and you take an LFT and it’s positive, then you have Covid. The idea that PCRs trump LFTs is baffling.”

There have been calls recently to drop PCRs altogether — for Test & Trace to rely entirely on LFTs — and that makes sense to me: even if PCRs are somewhat more sensitive, they’re much more expensive and they take two days to give you a result. An imperfect result now is better than a somewhat more accurate one after you’ve been spreading the virus (or needlessly locked at home) for two days.

On the other hand, there’s a contradictory tendency: to think of LFTs as definitive. I notice this in myself: I’ll say things like “Ah, good thing I don’t have Covid!” when I test negative, rather than virtuously thinking “Well, this new evidence supports my hypothesis that I do not have Covid.” No medical tests are 100% accurate — some number of negatives (and positives, although that’s rarer with Covid) will be false. “I’ve always been nervous that people will think that if they have a negative PCR it’s fine to go and see their family,” says Edwards. “And that’s not true.” He worries that overenthusiastic supporters of LFTs “overemphasise how good they are”, and potentially undermine trust in them when false negatives happen.

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It's time to end mandatory isolation

By Tom Chivers

But we are moving into a new phase of the pandemic, and trying to return to as normal a life as possible. At the moment, Covid is a “notifiable disease”: that is, if you are diagnosed with it, the Government must be informed. But if we are to “live with the virus”, then at some point that will change; we don’t inform the government when we have a cold, or the flu. Likewise, we’ll need to stop informing the Government of every asymptomatic infection or mild case of Covid-caused sniffles.

It’s unclear when that will be, although my own feeling is that it should be relatively soon: a few months’ time, at most, assuming future variants aren’t much more dangerous. Certainly, we should be thinking about reducing the isolation period for positive tests, and letting people make their own judgments about isolating. (We implicitly do this already, since the whole thing runs on an honour system: if you want to fake a negative LFT test, it is trivially easy to do. We’re relying on people’s honesty as it stands.)

But once we do move away from notifying the Government about Covid cases, LFTs are still going to be a vital part of the world. We will need to think of them neither as PCRs’ inadequate cousins nor as golden tickets allowing us to enter our elderly relatives’ nursing homes free of danger, but as useful tools in our risk assessment.

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Is the pandemic over?

By Tom Chivers

If you’re going to visit your elderly parents, and you’re all triple-vaccinated, and you have no reason to think you have Covid, then you might feel pretty safe already and use an LFT to add an extra layer of reassurance. Likewise, shops, pubs and theatres might also want to call for customers to show a negative LFT result in order to reduce the number of Covid infections among their patrons and staff — it won’t remove every one, but it will reduce the risk.

What’s going to be really interesting, though, is how Covid changes our attitudes to diagnostic testing in general. “It has democratised it,” says McNally. Before now, infectious-disease testing was something done in labs, by doctors and scientists. But now we’re all extremely capable of sticking a simple cotton swab up our nose and using that to test for Covid, at home.

But we don’t have to do that just for Covid. I recently spoke to Pantelis Georgiou, a professor of electrical engineering at Imperial College London. He’s developing what seems to be the natural successor to LFTs: “lab on a chip” technology that can test for a variety of pathogens, whether viral, bacterial or other, as quickly as LFTs. It has been used to detect malaria in Ghana, and, he told me, has been shown to work for TB, aspergillus and dengue, among other other things.

The most interesting thing to me, though, is that it doesn’t need to be specific to a single disease. “We are working to roll out a version that looks for the top five respiratory or fever-causing pathogens,” he told me. So you could do a simple swab test, and it will tell you in minutes whether the cold symptoms you have are Covid, or the flu, or a rhinovirus.

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The good news about the Omicron variant

By Tom Chivers

“I think it could really change how people regard having symptoms,” says McNally. For instance, imagine you often get snotty, and you’re not sure whether it’s just allergies or a virus. In future, you might be able to test, and use the result of that test to help you decide what to do — you might feel comfortable going into the office with a confirmed cold or a negative result, but not with an influenza virus or Covid, for instance.

That’s for the future. For now, LFTs do a good job, as long as we see them as risk-reduction tools rather than infallible oracles. “The actual cost of producing one is pennies,” says McNally — most of the £5-or-so price tag at the moment represents the cost of building factories, and logistical issues like boxing and transport, costs which will fall. “You could see a situation where you can buy a pack of seven for £10, and that would really change things.” In future, maybe they’ll be like paracetamol, just something that everyone has in their cupboards.

For now, I suspect that keeping them free is the best option, contrary to the Treasury-brain instinct — although perhaps some nominal cost would stop people stockpiling them when demand is high. Rather, the next change should not be to how we provide them — it should be to how we react to them. And that is to rely on the results, rather than double-checking them with PCR. Meanwhile, with a 90% vaccinated population, we can surely put an end mandatory isolation, and start trusting people to make their own decisions about risk.

One would think a worldwide lockdown — which has cancelled all our plans for the foreseeable future — would be exactly what these young people longed for. But when the concept was first introduced, I was a bit amused by the panic it was met with. Why were millennials posting about the trauma of cancelled 30th birthday parties they didn’t want to go to anyway? Why weren’t Zoomers delighted at the opportunity to retreat further into the digital world of Houseparty hangouts, Zoom parties and FaceTime dates?

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Soon we’ll all be cancelled

By Meghan Murphy

It was strange, pre-lockdown, to observe the young being so very un-vibrant. Fine, be a tired mum. Go to bed at 8pm when you’re 80. A farmer would understandably be exhausted at the end of the day. But a single 30-year-old with a desk job, one would presume, might still have a little zest for life — a desire for adventure, or, at the very least, experience.

I saw it in my friends as well — not Zoomers, but near or post 40. Asking about New Year’s Eve plans was met with a sour “nothing” or “watching a movie”; even an attempt to make drinks plans for a Friday night was like pulling teeth. A 2018 think piece in Vogue  discussed the “staying at home movement” as “the ultimate indulgence”. A 2017 article in The Cut acknowledged that the familiar game of “cancel-reschedule ping-pong” usually ends in abandoning attempts to meet up entirely, but concluded: “doesn’t it also feel at least a little good to bail?”

I couldn’t relate. Cancelling plans constantly is rude and that “ping pong” game usually ends in someone giving up on more than just plans — no one likes to chase others around, so the end result is that we just forget those relationships entirely. This has always depressed me: I value friends and socialising. I like to meet up, in real life, with those I care for. Why would I want to waste my time lying around on the couch feeling sorry for myself?

I know the excuses people employ: I have social anxiety, I’m exhausted, I’m stressed, I’m broke, I’m an introvert, I’m an Aquarius, what is there even to do? But I don’t accept them. People have been broke, tired, stressed or shy for all of history, yet we remain social creatures. Why the desperation to avoid human connection?

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There is no mental illness epidemic

By Polly Mackenzie

One of the problems is social media. In the internet age, people believe that technology not only can, but should, replace face-to-face, shoulder-to-shoulder interactions. We attempt to do everything online — politics, dating, debating, socialising, learning, loving. The younger generations have never known anything else. Millennials and generation Z are more heavily reliant on smartphones and social media than older generations — so much so that their use is often reasonably viewed as an “addiction.”  And they have been conditioned to conflate online interactions with actual communication, and to equate social media connections with real-life ones. In some ways, their lives have been made more convenient; in other ways, young people have suffered.

Take Tinder, for instance. This dating app, while claiming to connect people, actually does the opposite. Nancy Jo Sales, who wrote the infamous (if you ask dating app fanatics) article “Tinder and the Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse”,  for Vanity Fair told me:

“I don’t actually think the point of dating apps is to connect us with anything but the app. The whole point of it is to get you to keep using it.”

Indeed, dating apps have been designed like slot machines — they aim to get the player addicted, to keep swiping — offering the same dopamine hit you get when you hit the jackpot. Yet, ask a single person, and they will probably repeat the narrative offered by dating app companies: this is the best way to meet as many people as possible — why not expand your horizons? In fact, finding love is even less likely within the context of being offered seemingly endless choices, and we are less likely to commit. Overuse of social media or dating apps — the new normal in terms of meeting sexual partners — are shown to increase anxiety and depression, as well as to decrease self-esteem. Similarly, social media — which sells us the idea that we are connecting with thousands of people around the world, makes us feel lonelier and more disconnected.

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Get off social media and help!

By Mary Harrington

Don’t get me wrong, I am no Luddite. The internet is an incredible resource, and I am grateful that I can do many aspects of my job comfortably, from my sofa. But I know I need more than that. I know my health and wellbeing depend on my connections to others — as does my work.

But the cancel-everything-to-wallow-at-home-in-the-dark movement is often framed as “self-care”. In truth, it is the opposite. “Self-care” — ensuring that we are mentally and physically healthy — requires personal relationships and physical contact with others. Both millennials and zoomers revel in anti-social behaviour compared to older generations. For millennials, even the thought of interacting with others can be repulsive. A 2018 survey of 1,200 UK employees found that they “look to avoid human interaction” in the workplace.

Rather than recognising the value of human connection, the younger generations have isolated themselves — and then justified this behaviour online by insisting it is a version of ‘self-care’. Research shows they are deluded: the happiest people are the ones who are sociable — or force themselves to be, even if they don’t feel like it. Laurie Santos, Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology at Yale University and host of the podcast, The Happiness Lab, found that “happy people prioritise social relationships”. Referencing a paper by Marin Seligman and Ed Diener, Santos said:

“Strong social relationships are necessary for happiness — they’re not sufficient for happiness, but you can’t find happy people that don’t have them… And that means taking a hard look at your priorities to figure out if those social relationships are falling by the wayside.”

Not only that, but the dreaded “interactions with strangers” has been shown to improve our wellbeing, which means that talking to a barista or your Uber driver “can really bump up your mood”. It is not only a great way to build compassion for others and learn about those who share the world with you, but it makes you feel good.

Millennials and their Zoomer successors, for all their talk of self-care, are lonelier and more anxious than other age groups — and face rising rates of depression diagnoses. It’s the worst of both worlds: they neither make time to reflect by themselves — as this “alone time” is actually spent on phones or computers — nor are they out in the world, interacting with others and building intimacy. They become simultaneously incapable of being alone, yet refuse to connect with others in healthy and beneficial ways. And so they are lonelier than ever.

In other words, these anti-social generations are doing it exactly wrong.

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Drinking in the madness of social media

By Gareth Roberts

Those who used to whine about having to leave the house — and post memes about how great it is to go to bed at 9pm alone — have got what they wished for: legally enforced isolation. There is no option even to make plans! The pressure is lifted — we are free to be alone, at home, all the time. And yet, only a few days into the lockdowns, social media was full of desperate posts, complaining of mental health crises. The stay-at-homers have been spooked.

And good thing too. Perhaps, when we come out of this, they’ll stop taking the world for granted. They’ll remember that it’s important to hug our friends, to reach out, to get up off the sofa, to talk to the person sitting next to you at the bar. They’ll realise that holing up at home — typing away angrily at whomever our latest target is; swiping through faces, hoping for a momentary jackpot; or posting selfie number 24 of 30, filtered just so, captioned to sell our audience on a life, mood, and nose we don’t have — doesn’t make you happy.

When they’re able to make plans, perhaps they won’t cancel. Maybe they’ll just turn up.

To some extent, anyway: history provides numerous examples of people living in isolation. From lighthouse keepers maintaining a watchful eye over stormy seas to anchorites in the desert, not only did these people cope, but many saw the experience as contributing to their spiritual betterment.

Meanwhile there has been a utopian strain in the writing about the Covid-19 crisis, with some commentators expressing the hope that we shall emerge on the other side transformed, convinced of the value of communitarianism/socialism/universal basic income/insert pet solution to world’s ills here. Could this period of lockdown lead us to the promised land? Or will we all just end up hating each other?

Here in the United States, the vast landscape practically invites you to disappear, self-isolate and start afresh — and many have done just that. Famously, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden is an account of the two years and two months the author spent living in a hut in the woods, getting back to nature, seeking self-betterment, etc. He got a book out of it that high school kids are still made to read today — a pretty good result, all in all.

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Nineties Russia prepared me for coronageddon

By Daniel Kalder

Well, perhaps not. Thoreau isn’t actually a good example of life under lockdown. He complained of having more visitors than when he lived in town; the record was “twenty–five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof.” In Covid-19 conditions, he’d be a super spreader. A more recent American hermit, Ted Kaczynski, was more committed to avoiding people, and also got a book out of it. But he did wind up sending letter bombs to scientists and was sent to prison for a very long time for murder. So maybe not a good example, then.

No man is an island, as they say. Perhaps isolation brings better results if you do it with a select group of like-minded people? Certainly, many have tried to find perfection this way, forming self-contained communities dedicated to this or that vision of utopia throughout the nation’s history.

Take, for instance, the Rajneeshpuram community in Wasco County, Oregon, subject of Netflix’s fascinating documentary Wild, Wild Country. Rajneeshpuram was founded in 1981 by an Indian guru who went by the name of Rajneesh, after his foundation got into a spot of bother with the Indian authorities over millions of dollars in unpaid tax. Moving to the US, he hoped to be able to lead his followers to enlightenment unhampered by such petty, worldly concerns.

Alas, it didn’t turn out so well. One minute it was all peace vibes, maroon clothing and hippies rutting in public “like baboons”; the next it was all stockpiling guns, poisoning 751 people in the neighboring town, attempting to murder a US Attorney, prison sentences and deportation for the guru.

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OK, so maybe that’s also not a good example. The good news is, there are lots of other American utopian communities to learn from. In fact, more than 100 were established in the century prior to the Civil War alone. Surely one or two of them worked out, right?

Well, some certainly managed to exist for a while. One group was founded in the early nineteenth century by a certain George Rapp, who was convinced that the return of Christ was imminent and that it was necessary to prepare for the moment. To that end, he established three communities: Harmony, Pennsylvania in 1804; followed by Harmony, Indiana in 1815; and then Economy, Pennsylvania in 1824.

Celibacy was part of the deal, until a cove styling himself as the “Count de Leon” arrived from Germany in 1831 and persuaded about 200 people to seek the pleasures of the flesh and demand their share of the community’s funds. Rapp wound up embroiled in lawsuits but lived on until 1847; the remaining celibate Rappites dwindled during the second half of the century, before finally disbanding in 1906.

The Shakers were another famous utopian community, founded by Ann Lee, the illiterate daughter of a Manchester blacksmith who had emigrated to the American colonies in 1774. “Mother” Ann declared that she was the ‘divine female principle’ completing Christ’s male principle, ushering in the millennium. Like Rapp, she imposed celibacy on her followers. In the 18 Shaker villages that popped up, the sexes were housed in separate barracks; it was forbidden to touch at communal dances; and men and women were seated at separate tables during meals. To compensate, they leaped up and down and writhed in ecstasy during services.

The Shakers, nonetheless, made a good run of it for a community forbidden to procreate; the community existed for almost 200 years before dying out, and along the way opposed slavery and pioneered equality for women. To compensate, they performed ecstatic dances during their services, and the collective trembling which ensued led to their name. The Shakers made a good run of it for a community forbidden to procreate; the community existed for almost 200 years before dying out, and along the way opposed slavery and pioneered equality for women. Today their lemon pie lives on at Martha Stewart.com.

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Coronavirus will change nothing

By Ben Gummer

Bad news for unbelievers staring down lockdown: secular utopian communities were markedly less successful.

I dimly recall learning, back in my Scottish schooldays, about the model village of New Lanark, where the Welsh manufacturer and reformer Robert Owen conducted experiments in education, communal living and the amelioration of poverty. What my teachers didn’t tell me was that Owen then travelled to the US where he went full utopian socialist.

To get a head start, he purchased the already extant utopia of Harmony, Pennsylvania from the Rappites in 1825, renamed it “New Harmony”, and then burned80% of his fortune over the next two years as disagreements erupted over details as small as the correct form of government and the role of religion (Owen didn’t have any). A flurry of Owenite communities — 12 in all — suffered a series of similarly rapid rises and falls, starting with great hope before voting to abolish themselves.

A swift demise awaited many other utopias, whether they were established on the principle of free love (like the hopefully named community of Free Lovers at Davis House, Ohio, 1854-1858), vegetarianism (like Octagon City, Kansas, 1854-1858) Fourierism (like Brook Farm in Massachusetts, 1841-1847) or anarchy (like Fruit Hills, Ohio, 1845 – 1852).

The Icarians were more successful, perhaps because their founder — Etienne Cabet, a friend of Robert Owen — had written a novel, Voyage en Icarie, which at least illustrated what his followers should aim for (a primitive economy without private property or selfishness). The Icarians got off to a shaky start in Texas in 1848 but eventually its members founded settlements in Illinois, Iowa, Missouri and California where they enjoyed four decades’ worth of splits, schisms and factionalism before eventually admitting defeat in 1898.

Perhaps the most ambitious utopians, however, lived at the Oneida Community, established by John Humphrey Noyes in New York state in 1848. Noyes, a relative of the US president Rutherford Hayes, extolled the virtues of “complex marriage”, by which he meant that everybody in the community was married to everybody else. This led to a complicated system of regulated polyamory.

The Oneida Community also dabbled in eugenics and held vigorous mutual self-criticism sessions. In 1879, however, Noyes fled to Canada to escape charges of statutory rape; there God blessed him with the revelation that conventional marriage was complex enough. The community disbanded the following year, only to promptly reinvent itself as a silverware manufacturer. By the 1980s Oneida, Ltd. made half the cutlery in the United States.

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Will the pandemic kill off libertarianism?

By James Kirkup

So, will we all emerge from this period of confinement — be it with our loved ones or locked in the airless virtual communities of the like-minded on social media — improved and enlightened? Almost certainly not: there is a reason why monks take a vow of silence, and why prisoners don’t hang out in the yard all day. Even so, the American utopian experience contains a couple of lessons that might help you deal with this lockdown, should it drag on.

Firstly, you stand a better chance of overcoming squabbles, factionalism and dissent — and generally holding out for a long time — if you hold Millenarian beliefs. The Shaker’s Mother Ann, for instance, persuaded her followers that she was the feminine incarnation of the Godhead, in regular communication with the angels and all that. So if you can channel a little of that sweet End Times action and convince yourself that the Coronavirus is actually a prelude to Christ’s imminent return and that now is the time to prepare — have at it. You might even find the whole lockdown experience strangely fulfilling.

On the other hand, the whole Millenarian thing can go down the pan very quickly if the wrong type of charismatic leader turns up. Take Rajneesh, for instance. So if anyone in your house (or on your Twitter feed / a Facebook group chat) is talking excitedly about the new world that will emerge post-Covid while growing a very long beard — watch out.

Finally, utopia does not await us on the other end of this, but you might still come up with some good ideas or develop some helpful new skills. The Owenites, for instance, opened a free library in New Harmony; the Shakers invented the clothespin. You can still buy Oneida cutlery; I use it to eat every day.

Maybe, that’s the solution. Forget utopia — if you want to get something valuable out of this lockdown experience, do something good for others or learn a craft. In particular, knowing how to make things with your hands might come in handy in the, er, “changed economic conditions” that await us once this is over.

I assert this confidently because my training ground for today’s Covid-19 isolation was a single cell in HMP Belmarsh, 21 years ago.  Those conditions were tougher than they are now.

As I was confined in a far smaller space for 18 hours a day (23 hours a day at weekends) with no modern distractions — no mobile phone, no internet or TV — I had to be resourceful.  Nevertheless, the basic ground rules for surviving isolation are surprisingly similar then as now.

The preparations are all in the mind. Your world has been compulsorily changed. If you resent or rail against the restrictions, your mental health will suffer. The trick is to attempt, no matter how hard it seems, to train your mind to accept confinement calmly, to ask the question: “How can I make the best of it?”

Penal, as opposed to medical isolation, had its own challenges: guilt, the cacophony of prison noise and spartan conditions. Staying emotionally and mentally stable was the name of the game. Yet the Belmarsh pressures did concentrate my mind wonderfully in some challenging directions.

The first priority is to create a schedule and find the self-discipline to stick to it. In prison, I pinned my hour-by-hour timetable on the bars of my cell and rarely deviated. It was no draconian schoolmaster’s regime. My schedule now, as then, was a patchwork quilt of colourful commitments and curiosities.

I was, for example, receiving around 50 letters a day from well-wishers. Remembering that Lord Curzon, while Viceroy of India had dispatched over a hundred letters a day written in his own hand, I somehow tackled my correspondence with punctual diligence and no laptop.

I would also spend two or three hours every day learning Greek. Oxford had offered me a post-prison place to read a degree in Theology. But to pass my prelims, I had to take a paper in Greek, the subject I had lazily skipped at school. I knuckled down to learning it with a single text book, Wenham’s New Testament Greek. To master the 900 word vocab, I would take out little postcards with me on the wing whenever we were allowed out of our cells for meals. My fellow cons used to tease me saying: “C’mon Jono we knows those squiggles on Greek are ‘em codes for your secret Swiss bank accounts!”

I revived a discipline I had learned in school, the ‘Saying Lesson’. This had required every boy to learn by heart and to recite aloud some 20 lines of poetry. Forty years out of the classroom, I discovered that my powers to recall sonnets, soliloquys and limericks were not too rusty. I polished them up and increased my repertoire declaiming the words through the bars of my cell into the sky.

In the loneliness of the night and early morning hours I also stumbled along some rather primitive pathways of prayer. They were perhaps too simplistic and self-centred, yet they nevertheless laid some foundations of spiritual discipline which have continued to this day.

With a little innovation, the motivations of self-improvement and spiritual-exploration kept me going.

It’s the same now. As in Belmarsh, I designate an hour for poetry, usually reading aloud to my wife Elizabeth (her favourites are Wordsworth and Maya Angelou) or occasionally learning verses by heart to improve my fading septuagenarian memory.

And I relish, as I did then, uninterrupted reading. I have embarked on the third and final part of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, the 870 page volume The Mirror & the Light. Sixteenth century Tudor plottings are particularly fascinating for an ex-politician who has seen half a century’s worth of contemporary betrayals, stabbings and executions (admittedly without the gore!) in and around Westminster.

But it’s not all betrayal and execution. When I have finished my hours with Hilary Mantel I slot in similar encounters with P.G Wodehouse or Nancy Mitford – because they bestow the gift of laughter on their readers.

One major difference between Covid isolation and Belmarsh isolation is that I now have easy access to modern technology. Also I have the companionship of my beloved wife. So loneliness is not the problem it was then.

I also follow Dr Samuel Johnson’s advice: “Sir, a man should keep his friendships in good repair”. And have been touched by the warmth of communications that lockdown has nurtured. I am able, with the help of Zoom and a telephone, to calm fears among my parishioners and laugh at the jokes of my children and godchildren. In isolation, sometimes we find a new closeness.

And I have built, too, on those spiritual foundations laid back in Belmarsh. I conduct the Daily Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer from Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer. The attendance consists of my wife (the congregation); my wife’s carer Jessie Chawda (a Jesuit trained Church Server) and myself (the Priest). On Sundays we celebrate full Liturgical Eucharist with bell, book, candle and robes. Some of the passersby who look into our ground floor flat seem to think the lunatics have taken over the asylum!

The last of my six verbs “surrender” is the strongest of practical and spiritual lifelines. My Belmarsh training taught me that it is as stupid as it is pointless to get angry or argumentative about the circumstances that cause the isolation. Surrendering to them with ingenuity and innovation opens new horizons.

The ultimate surrender in the present pandemic may mean facing up to the last enemy — death. This has long been an almost unmentionable subject in our secular society but not any longer.

A few days ago, with high fever, breathing difficulties and dreamy excursions in and out of consciousness, I wondered whether, as a 77 year-old asthmatic and ex-TB patient, if T.S Eliot’s “eternal Footman” might be holding my coat.

So I prayed — but in a new way. Instead of the predictably self-centred, “O Lord please save my life!” requests, I offered instead prayers of gratitude for a wonderful rollercoaster ride. And then I offered prayers of surrender: “Lord it is you who decide the hour of our death. I gladly and totally surrender my life to your will.”

In a moment of peace I dreamt I heard a voice saying with a celestial chuckle: “At last – you’ve got the point!”

Soon afterwards I began to recover and have returned to my isolationist timetable with even greater joy. As my favourite Old Testament prophet Isaiah has written:

“I will give you the treasures of darkness
Riches hidden in secret places”.

Discovering the riches and treasures of darkness can be the greatest blessings of self-isolation.

Those travelling into the area from more densely populated cities do carry a greater risk of bringing the coronavirus with them. But I suspect there is a degree of parochialism and xenophobia to placards like this, as demonstrated by the worrying number of people carrying on as normal: the virus is something they get “down there in London”, as I was told of various phenomena as a child. To paraphrase George Orwell, the pandemic still feels far away, a smudge of misery hidden by the curve of the earth’s surface.

There are of course some who are out and about for the daily supermarket run. Others are no doubt ‘key workers’; while some perform their one piece of exercise a day. It scarcely matters. What matters is that we don’t gather to socialise in public places. Yet through my dusty window I can still see a continual trickle of people — overwhelmingly older people — who appear reluctant to take even basic precautions in the face of this threat.

These are extraordinary times and writing this I feel like a member of the Stasi. According to Anna Funder’s excellent book Stasiland, there was one Stasi officer or informant for every 63 people in the former German Democratic Republic. Including part-time informers, that ratio was high as one informer for every 6.5 East German citizens. I view everyone walking past the window of my study with suspicion. Yet I was rather more disconcerted by the glee with which some police forces appeared to be enforcing the lockdown.

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The dark side of rural England

By James Bloodworth

Despite the protestations of professional contrarians and rent-a-gobs — the types who must continually batter themselves against the mainstream in order to define themselves — we are not yet East Germany. Indeed, this is not really a ‘lockdown’ as such: we are still permitted to leave the house and, unlike in much of mainland Europe, we do not have to show papers to anyone in order to do so.

The real test will be in the coming weeks as the death toll rises more rapidly. Just before the lockdown was announced the pubs in the small Somerset town where I’m staying were bristling with life. Drinkers fanned out onto the pavements like a swarm of ants, despite the macabre scenes broadcast from Italy and elsewhere. It wasn’t much-maligned millennials whom I saw expressing such frivolous abandon, but rather many who would be characterised as the so-called ‘war generation’.

I don’t know if this is a conscious expression of selfishness so much as an absorption of the idea that nothing ever changes. Through our obsessive nostalgia for the ‘Blitz spirit’ and its accompanying sentimentality, we forget that the generations born during and shortly after the war have experienced an unparalleled degree of peace and prosperity. There has been very little in the past 75 years that the provincial middle class have not been able to safely ignore behind net curtains and an irrepressible asset bubble.

For its part, the Government has understandably been reluctant to introduce the sorts of draconian measures that have been enacted in mainland Europe. This has been widely lamented yet it is a sound instinct. The Labour Party has been strangely silent, though we can assume its ruling clique of boutique Stalinists are lamenting the fact that it is not they who have finally been able to put the entire population under house arrest.

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How coronavirus exposes our fragility

By James Kirkup

More importantly, one wonders what kind of society we will have when we emerge from this crisis. It is striking how quickly even conservatives have grasped the ineffectiveness of the laissez-faire economic system now that the situation has required people to think about things beyond their own wallet. Human beings are largely emotional creatures who respond to seismic events in an emotionally charged way. The cool rationalism espoused by various economic theorists went out the window as soon as people started to stuff their bathroom cabinets with toilet rolls.

It isn’t only ordinary people who are carrying on as if nothing has changed. Even now, 10 days after Johnson announced the official lockdown and weeks after the crisis started, we are still hearing stories of employers forcing staff to turn up to work, and low-paid workers cram into Tube carriages — hotbeds of viral transmission — because the Government has been slow to close down all non-essential workplaces. Boris Johnson and co are not evil or intent on sacrificing millions of the elderly in the name of ‘herd immunity’, as some of the more deranged fringes of the Left are suggesting. However they are temperamentally incapable of grasping the realities of living the sort of existence where one is willing to risk fatal illness in order to earn a wage.

As the crisis has progressed, it has become clear that there are far too many opportunities for disreputable organisations and individuals to take advantage of the situation. This in turn is undermining the collective effort to protect the old and the vulnerable. There may be little we can do beyond better public information to keep the compulsive socialisers indoors, but we can reprimand the landlords ripping off their tenants and the bosses forcing immigrant workers — desperate to put food on the table — to pile into petri-dish Tube carriages

The Government had the power to pay self-employed workers to stay at home and it has finally done so. It also has the power to close things such as building sites, which remain open. In the words of a local friend who manages a couple of sites, they are “not the most hygienic of places and most people there aren’t too concerned by it all”. He will close this week regardless of government advice.

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All eyes on the Swedish coronavirus experiment

By Freddie Sayers

On a personal note, last week I informed my landlord in London that I would have to end the tenancy early because I had to self-isolate with my 90-year-old grandmother. It was something of an emergency. The response was immediate: I had to cough up the outstanding rent covering the six-week notice period or she would trouser my deposit. When I mentioned the three-month mortgage holiday my landlord would soon enjoy I received no response let alone any offer of compromise. I’ve heard nothing at all since. The landlord in question owns at least eight properties, each with at least three occupants paying £800 a month or more in rent.

I suspect there have been many similar occurrences of landlords taking advantage of the situation and employers flouting the spirit of the emergency measures. While the majority of people in Britain have made huge sacrifices over recent weeks, they’ve seen some of the country’s biggest companies — Virgin, Wetherspoons, Sports Direct — behave with only profit in mind. This may yet be a lasting lesson for those who have been brought up on the notion of benevolent capitalism, just as the relative success of collectivism during the Second World War shifted public opinion to the Left for a generation following the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Capitalism will endure because the alternative remains too temperamentally wedded to the failed doctrines of the past but the state has taken on a more significant role in the economy during the crisis than people will have imagined when they voted Conservative at the December General Election. Yet nationalisation for the sake of nationalisation leaves most people manifestly cold. I suspect the consensus view resembles the well-known quote from John Kenneth Galbraith: “I’m deeply suspicious of somebody who says, ‘I’m in favour of privatisation’, or, ‘I’m deeply in favour of public ownership.’ I’m in favour of whatever works in the particular case.”

What’s more, the outpouring of misplaced online sentimentality for Cuba’s international medical brigades is further evidence that the Left is too busy cosplaying the Cold War to formulate a serious alternative to the status quo. Whether the liberal model we have grown used to endures beyond the current pandemic may be another question altogether, as James Kirkup has touched on elsewhere for UnHerd. But Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party have all but disappeared from the national conversation since the crisis began.

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Will the pandemic kill off libertarianism?

By James Kirkup

Invariably one expects support to rally behind the Government during a time of crisis. Something similar has occurred in the United States under Donald Trump, despite his clumsy (to put it mildly) handling of the pandemic. Yet Corbyn’s decision to stay in office and preside over a lengthy leadership contest has lent the Labour Party an air of irrelevance during a period when the public needs an opposition that is volubly challenging the government on every decision it is taking. Corbyn’s decision to continue working from Parliament despite police advice to work from home is indicative of the man’s titanic ego — an ego he has always cloaked in a affected air of modesty and asceticism.

We are waiting then, all of us. For the pandemic to end — or at least to subside — but also to see what sort of society emerges by the end of it. It has not yet hit us in Somerset with the force it has in Europe or, indeed, in London, but every thinking person knows it is coming.

The mood among those who have shown indifference up to now will change as the local obituary pages expand and the numbers struck down crowd out the usual fare of petty crime and squabbles over planning permission. Theirs is the deep, deep sleep of England — and they are about to be jolted rudely awake.

Then it will be more waiting, mainly to see whether the resulting acidity and resentment is directed at the Government, or toward those fellow citizens who up to now have so egregiously flouted the emergency measures.

Why do 999 calls shoot up at Christmas and in the summer holidays? Because abusive partners find themselves at home with their families for a few days. Imagine, then, what’s going to happen when these angry, frustrated and violent men are shut up inside for weeks on end because of the coronavirus. The nation’s pubs are closed and there isn’t even any live sport to distract them.

According to the ONS, an estimated 1.6 million women suffer domestic abuse in England and Wales in a normal year. (Men are at risk, too, but the statistics show that women suffer more repeat incidents and more severe injuries.) With the lockdown, all those women will have even fewer opportunities to ring for help or go online for advice. In some places, they can’t even escape to the park to make a discreet phone call for help or support, because they have been shut. Thanks Hammersmith and Fulham. But this council isn’t alone in its short-sightedness. Very little has been done to address the problem. In fact, it has barely even been acknowledged by Government.

It’s as though our ministers live in a rose-tinted world where home is the safest place to be, oblivious to the mass of statistics that tell a different story. We know that domestic abuse — the type that gets reported to the police, at any rate — is linked to deprivation, insecure employment and over-crowded housing. And those in the least secure jobs, the cab drivers and construction workers who are mostly self-employed, are the immediate losers amid the pandemic. They’ve had to wait 10 days longer than employees to find out what the Chancellor proposes to do for them. Frustrations and tensions will have been ratcheting up.

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We also know that anxious, depressed men are likely to turn to drink, with a quarter of victims of domestic violence reporting that their abusers were using drugs or alcohol at the time of an attack. During lockdown, a spike in alcohol abuse is inevitable — and people are already drinking more. Off-licences are being allowed to remain open, following reports that some supermarkets can’t cope with increased demand for beer, wine and spirits.

It’s not as though we don’t know what to expect. In China, a police station in the worst-affected province received three times as many reports of domestic abuse in February, compared with the same period last year. Some governments, notably those of Germany and Spain, have acknowledged the probable impact of coronavirus lockdowns. The German family ministry has posted emergency phone numbers for anyone experiencing ‘conflicts arising at home’, offering counselling to teenagers, pregnant women and victims of domestic abuse. In Spain, the government has set up an instant messaging service and an online chatroom to provide immediate support to victims. Such measures are welcome, even if they fall short of providing desperately-needed emergency accommodation.

When Boris Johnson was asked about the risk of a surge in domestic violence a couple of weeks ago, he replied with his usual combination of bluster and bragging, insisting that he had just put “record funding” back into councils even though the money wasn’t earmarked for — and is unlikely to be allocated to — services for victims of abuse. But the truth is that organisations trying to help women escape violent relationships were in dire straits before the coronavirus sent the country into quarantine. It was already the case that two-thirds of women in need of a refuge place were being turned away, forcing them to move in with relatives, risk becoming homeless or stay with a man who had beaten and raped them.

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Some of these women may now end up being killed in their own homes. Domestic homicides were already at a five-year high before the epidemic broke out. The latest Femicide Census makes sombre reading, listing 149 killings and demonstrating once again that that women are most likely to be killed by a current or ex-partner; in cases where perpetrator and victim were known to each other, more than half of the deaths occurred in households with a history of domestic abuse.

Perhaps Boris Johnson’s masculine War Cabinet should flick through it. The statistic that should really worry them is the fact that 68% of such killings took place in or immediately around the family home – the very place where they’ve told women to isolate.

During Gov briefings am I the only one thinking ‘where are all the women?’ Why are there no senior women in the “war cabinet” or used to convey those critical messages? Equality means better decisions. Don’t pack the women away during a crisis.

— Amber Rudd (@AmberRuddUK) March 18, 2020

In Greater Manchester, there have already been reports of abuse linked to the lockdown, according to Beverley Hughes, deputy mayor for policing and crime. Avon and Somerset police, too, reported a 20.9% increase in domestic abuse incidents in the last two weeks, from 718 to 868. And Police in Cumbria have asked postal workers and delivery drivers to look out for signs of abuse.

But thus far, despite an array of individuals and organisations — including Women’s Aid and the recently-appointed Domestic Violence Commissioner, Nicole Jacobs — pleading for some sort of Government provision, little seems to have been done.  The only concession the Government has openly made is to exempt those fleeing a violent relationship from lockdown enforcement fines.

But there’s absolutely no mystery about what the ministers could and should do. They urgently need to provide extra financial support for victims’ organisations to help cope with increased demand; they should instruct the police to check on households with a known history of domestic abuse; they should use domestic violence protection orders (DVPOs) to get the worst abusers out of their homes; and they should use empty hotels to provide emergency accommodations for women and children. They should also do everything within their power to promote the services that are already available for these vulnerable women.

As the scale of the pandemic was starting to become apparent, the Prime Minister boasted in the House of Commons that his Government has an “outstanding record in tackling violence against women and girls”. It was a dubious claim before coronavirus changed the landscape of the UK, emptying the streets and sequestering the population behind closed doors. It looks even more suspect now as thousands of vulnerable women look forward to the next few weeks not just with the anxiety we all feel during a global pandemic, but outright terror.

When and if the coronavirus crisis is contained, there will be many reckonings and re-evaluations, not least about the relationship between the state, individuals and markets. In this, Boris Johnson’s decision to order pubs, clubs and restaurants to close — and the seemingly inevitable follow-up, lockdown — will be significant.

It is well-known that the Prime Minister is inclined to want to keep the state out of mundane personal business. He also likes to court people who like to go out for a drink, hence his regular schtick about free-born Britons’ ancient right to a pint of beer. His reluctance to see the state telling people what to do was abundantly clear in his Mother’s Day press conference, when he spoke breezily about the joys of being out and about on a fine sunny day.

But Johnson’s worldview is a topic for someone else. What interests me is other people. What does it say about human nature that despite repeated urging and warning, despite a bombardment of information, people continued to congregate and mix in ways that put them and others at non-trivial risk of a potentially fatal disease?

And what, in turn, will the necessity to ban such congregations mean for our future understanding of the way the state should view and treat people as they go about their economic lives?

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How coronavirus exposes our fragility

By James Kirkup

I am not a libertarian, but I think libertarianism deserves some acknowledgement for its optimism about human nature. In short, this suggests that when people are left to their own devices, they will, in the end, do sensible, collaborative and even kind things.

Here’s David Boaz of the Cato Institute in The Libertarian Mind:

“The great insight of libertarian social analysis is that order in society arises spontaneously, out of the actions of thousands or millions of individuals who coordinate their actions with those of others in order to achieve their purposes.”

Free marketeers, explicitly or otherwise, tend to rest their argument for unfettered market interactions on the idea that these are dealings between rational actors. In markets, as in life, people left to make their own decisions will, in aggregate, make spending choices that benefit themselves, thus allowing markets to price and allocate resources in the most efficient way.

This is the ‘rational agent’ theory of economic behaviour and it’s one of the most fundamental ideas of our age. It’s the basis for most economics teaching and the foundation of most ideas of market operation, regulation and consumer law (even if there are quite a few people who argue, quite persuasively, that it’s wrong).

Now let’s go back to the people, in London and elsewhere, who last week continued to crowd into pubs and gyms.

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By Meghan Murphy

Why did they do it? Why was it necessary for Boris Johnson, instinctively liberal, to order the pubs to close? You only need to take such measures if people are either not nice or not rational. Neither explanation bodes well for libertarianism or free markets.

How rational were the choices made by those pub-goers or the folk crowded into parks and markets? Were they coolly assessing the pleasure they would derive from a few drinks or a stroll with friends, and assigning it a value that outweighed the risk they and others would face resulting from their choice?

If so, I think that raises a significant problem for libertarian views of human nature as benign. People who think their enjoyment of a pint of lager justifies risking the lives of others do not measure up to that nice idea that, left to our own devices, we generally do the right thing.

Or here’s another explanation for pub-going in a time of coronavirus. Maybe the people who continued to mingle were being neither good nor bad but merely inaccurately estimating the consequences and costs of their actions. Here we get to those other economists, the behavioural ones, who argue that we make our allocative choices not on the basis of neat, orderly mental spreadsheets weighing cost and benefit, but because of messy, complicated human frailty.

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Why are the elderly dicing with death?

By Mary Dejevsky

The decision to keep going to the pub during a pandemic looks a lot like an illustration of what Daniel Kahneman called the availability heuristic, the tendency of people to over-state the probability of familiar things they can easily imagine, and underestimate the chance of hard-to-concieve things happening.

How many of us can easily conjure up a simple mental picture of an invisible virus spreading exponentially through a population of tens of millions, and be clear in our minds about who we might be harming by popping down the local for one last pint or a walk in the park? I don’t think the Londoners who continued to go out drinking or strolling were callous. I think they just couldn’t easily conceive the potential consequences or the probability of those consequences.

The choice to go on going out was, in other words, hard to describe as rational, even in the narrow terms of rational choice theory. And if people aren’t rational about a situation that risks tens of thousands of lives and deep damage to our society and economy, how much weight should we put on the idea of rational actors in future?

Arguably, this shouldn’t even be a debatable point. There’s a good case to be made that the 2007/8 financial crisis should have put more of a dent in the idea of rational economic actors.

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Why the Government changed tack on Covid-19

By Saloni Dattani

When no less a figure than Alan Greenspan admitted that markets did not work the way he had believed they did and that he had “made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, was such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders” then policymakers the world over should have shown more scepticism about ‘rationality’.

Maybe this time really will be different. Maybe this time, when the dust settles on the graves of the last Covid-19 victims, we can start a serious conversation about how and why human beings really do what we do. And about the role of the state in markets that are made up of frail, human people who we cannot expect — or require — to be either nice or rational.

I am no fan of narrow, classical, rational agent economics, but I do admire the optimistic view of humanity that underpins the libertarianism that is its intellectual cousin. I like to think that with a bit of help, most people will mostly make the right choices. But the refusal of many people to do the sensible and altruistic thing over coronavirus leaves me gloomily wondering about that.

If people cannot be trusted to make decisions that can make the difference between life and death, if they and others must be protected from the exercise of their free will in something so fundamental, where else should restraint be imposed by the state, for the good of the individual and society? Put it another way: once you’ve closed pubs and banned people from going outside, imposing, say, a tax to deter people from consuming sugary drinks is going to seem like a very small thing indeed.

This, not the size of the state or the tax burden, will be the real change the virus brings to countries founded on liberal ideas of human nature.

It seems relevant, now we’re in lockdown. I’d been thinking about it a lot recently with all the images of Columbia Road Flower Market, and the Tube, and various Norfolk coastal resorts, all rammed with people. Presumably those photos were taken by humans who were at the time in Columbia Road Flower Market, or on the Tube. You’re not in a crowd; you are a crowd. No doubt you have excellent reasons for being there, but no doubt so does everyone else. Hence, I presume, the lockdown.

It’s the same with panic-buying (with the caveat that true “panic-buying” and major stockpiling probably isn’t actually going on very much, as the excellent Stephen Bush of the New Statesman points out). In a chemist’s near my house, a parent was grumbling that all the Calpol had gone: “It’s so selfish. What if my kid gets ill?” But, of course, everyone else is thinking the exact same thing; that’s why there are no Calpols.

These concerns all map on very neatly to game theory, and specifically to the game-theory ideas known as “coordination problems”. The most famous two are probably the “prisoners’ dilemma” and the “tragedy of the commons”.

In the prisoners’ dilemma, two people are suspected of a crime, and are locked up separately. The police have enough evidence to convict them on a lesser charge, but they’re told – separately – that if they grass up their accomplice, the accomplice will get a longer sentence and they will go free. Of course, if they both turn grass, then they’ll both get long sentences (but these won’t be as long as if they were to stay schtum while their buddy narks on them).

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The options are called “cooperate” (with your accomplice) or “defect”. So if you both cooperate, you get one year. If you both defect, you get two years. But if you defect and your accomplice cooperates, you walk free and they get three years (and vice versa).

Obviously, the best outcome from the point of view of minimising the total number of years served is for both to cooperate. You each serve one year; it’s just two years in total. But if you know your buddy is going to cooperate, it’s best to defect, because then you get away.

But your buddy knows that too! So he will defect. But then: if he defects, it’s still best for you to defect, so you get two years rather than three.

So even though you both could have got out after one year by cooperating, the optimal, “rational” (in the economic sense) decision is always to defect, so you end up serving two years. (Watch this gameshow clip for a remarkably dramatic demonstration; it’s so illustrative of the dilemma that it attracted academic attention.)

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By Jonathan Tepper

The tragedy of the commons is a similar but grander-scale idea. Imagine you have some common resource: a meadow where everyone can graze their livestock. There’s enough grass to graze 100 sheep comfortably and there are 10 farmers; if everyone keeps a flock of 10, the meadow will remain healthy and the animals will have enough to eat.

But if one farmer decides to add an 11th sheep, he gains all the value of that sheep, but pays only 10% of the cost to the resource. Of course, the other farmers make the exact same calculation, so everyone puts on an 11th sheep, and a 12th. The meadow gets overgrazed; the sheep become malnourished; and everyone ends up poorer than they would have if they’d just cooperated, but everyone was acting perfectly rationally (again, in the economic sense) at every juncture.

If you could coordinate the responses of the different agents – the prisoners or the farmers – the best outcome would be easy to achieve. If the prisoners could just talk, or some authority simply ordered the farmers to stick to 10 and punished those who didn’t, that would be the end of the problem. But the prisoners can’t talk, and there’s no Farming Czar to step in.

These are just thought experiments, but they turn up in real life. In the Cold War, the USA and USSR could have spent billions of dollars/roubles on hospitals and schools and made everyone’s life better, or on lots of big missiles with nuclear bombs on the top. You can cooperate and build the schools, or you can defect and build the missiles. As the thought experiment would predict, they ended up building the missiles.

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I'm frightened I'll die of Covid-19

By Stephen Pollard

And the parallels between the tragedy of the commons and the climate situation — it’s in everyone’s interest if we all reduce carbon use, but if you do emit carbon, you gain all the benefit of your economic activity while paying only a tiny fraction of the cost — are almost too obvious to state. (Although I did just state them anyway.) Again, if some world government were to be set up and punish countries for emitting too much, it would be simple to solve; but no real world government exists, so coordination remains hard.

In the time of the coronavirus these problems are being illustrated amazingly starkly. It’s in everyone’s interests if everyone strictly self-isolates and washes their hands 10 times a day. But these actions are costly – self-isolation is lonely, and thanks to the washing my hands at least are red and cracked and look like they’ve aged 20 years. So if everyone else were to do it, but you carried on walking around, licking lampposts, cuddling strangers and never washing your hands, just as normal, then you’d gain all the benefit of that while (assuming you’re relatively young and healthy) paying only a fraction of the increased risk.

Similarly, it’s in everyone’s best interests if we all agree to only buy one bottle of Calpol so the shelves are always full – but if you don’t trust other people to do that, it’s in your interest to buy extra, to make sure you have some. So everyone buys more than they need, spending too much money, and other people end up with none, even though there’s enough to go around.

That’s before you get into the utilitarian calculus: the moral mathematics of “if I do X, it will probably cause X good things but Y bad things; is X bigger or smaller than Y?” Doctors are going to have to decide who lives and who dies. Decisions made by politicians will do the same, and not always as obviously as you might think; Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, points out that during the Ebola crisis, more people died of malaria than the actual epidemic, because all the resources that would have been directed to curing them went to stopping the spread of the disease. 

But even on a personal level, we are going to have to make those sorts of decisions. If I take my children to the park — even if I am incredibly careful — I am slightly increasing the risk that they or I will pass on the disease. There is a small but non-zero chance that someone will die because of that decision. But if I don’t take them to the park, their lives will very probably be slightly worse. How do you trade low-probability but high-impact events off against high-probability, low-impact ones like that? How many days at the park is worth one death? The answer is not “infinity”; we don’t think that lives are infinitely valuable. We take small risks of terrible things happening all the time, in order for nice things to very likely happen: we cross the road to the restaurant, we drive to the seaside.

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Now, though, those decisions are being made starkly obvious. And the awful thing is that sometimes it is rational, on the utilitarian calculus. If your children gain +10 Happiness Points from going to the park, someone dying is worth -100,000 Happiness Points, and the risk of someone dying from your specific actions is 0.005%, then since 0.005% of -100,000 is -5, the park visit is worth it. How do you factor that in, when you’re already struggling to overcome the Molochian trap of the coordination problem?

I should admit: at the weekend, we took our children to a local park, moved as far away from others as we could, and played football and frisbee just between the four of us. Around us – at a distance – we could see dozens of others, all slowly moving around in their families or other groups. It looked like everyone was horribly aware of the utilitarian trade-off they were making, even if they weren’t thinking in actual numbers. 

Millions of people around the country have been finding themselves in the middle of a massive multiplayer game of something like the coordination problems described above, played for real-world stakes of lives and happiness. People are having to try to work out what the right thing to do is, and sometimes having to do the right thing even though it is technically irrational — it will have worse outcomes for that person whatever everyone else does. I don’t blame them for not solving problems on the fly that people have spent entire PhDs on.

Coordination problems are not impossible to solve for the actors involved. The Cold War ended; progress has been made on carbon emissions. But it’s hard, and it takes time we don’t have. The Government’s lockdown represents the equivalent of the Farming Czar coming in and ordering everyone to cooperate. We’re not stuck in traffic, we are traffic, and right now we need the roads to be clear.

”It’s kind of the perfect place to be quarantined,” Ms. Gallo said. “We have the most spectacular views, and we’re not around anybody. But at the end of the day, we’re still quarantined. We don’t know how we’re going to get home.”

It is difficult to think of an occupation that more perfectly encapsulates the 21^st-century media fusion of marketing, simulacrum and self-promotion than the travel influencer, carefully staging aspirational spontaneity on Instagram to sell global hypermobility as a consumer product. Half a century ago, Guy Debord saw it coming. In The Society of the Spectacle, he argued that in a fragmented and mass-mediated world, simulation and reality are increasingly inseparable.

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail,” he wrote: “life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”

In a discussion of celebrities, long before social media was even invented, Debord could have been describing Gallo’s The “Five Foot Traveller” blog, writing that “As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specialisations that they actually live.”

That is, we invest emotionally in these public figures and their simulated lives to compensate for the increasing atomisation of our own existence. No wonder, then, that social media is often accused of making us more lonely, more narcissistic and more anti-social.

But if Debord is right, this Babel of socially-mediated self-performance is not the cause of our alienation but its consequence — or, at least, the two are inseparable. Would a different society produce a different public discourse? We may be about to find out, as the coronavirus pandemic rips through global economic systems and, piece by piece, the elements we think of as ‘society’ — offices, public spaces, theatres, supply chains, travel and tourism — are shut.

And with the coming cornavirus lockdown, our attenuated social networks built on personal affinity rather than geography seem as brittle as the crumbling global supply chains. I had lunch with one of my oldest friends on Sunday near my small town in the shires, then waved her off back to London afterwards with a feeling of unreality, wondering when — or even if — I would next see her.

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By James Kirkup

So as everything we recognise as “normal life” grinds to a halt around us, has our hyper-real, hyper-mediated public discourse shifted away from clickbait spectacle to engage with the strange new realities?

On the surface, not so much. The Very Online mass punch-up of politics as entertainment, populated by the commentators Graeme Archer recently described as “blue-tick conspiracists” and the engaged-but-inactive spectators Eitan Hersh calls “political hobbyists”, has embraced coronavirus mainly as the latest vehicle for pushing whatever it is they usually push.

The peddlers of conspiracy theories are now, naturally, peddling coronavirus-flavoured conspiracy theories. The same FBPE-ers who not long ago fantasised about Brexit-voting pensioners dying off are now accusing Boris Johnson of wanting to ‘cull’ the elderly to save on social care fees. Meanwhile, Owen Jones calls for his supporters to mobilise around five demands – and also for suggestions as to what those five demands should be.

As the crisis escalated last week, the increasingly frenzied culture-war weaponisation of this deadly and disruptive virus struck me first as tin-eared, then baffling, and finally monstrous. What do people think they are doing, scrabbling for points in another round of biff-bam-pow when, as Graeme Archer put it, a virus is trying to kill us all?

Then on Saturday it hit me: the armchair epidemiologists, #boristhebutcher hashtaggers and all-round political tinfoil-hatters back-seat-driving national policy are doing it because they think that is what ‘helping’ looks like. In an ever more fragmented society, the only remaining space where mass action even feels possible is social media.

Contributing to the like-and-share spectacle of social media gives us an illusory closeness to national decision-making, and a sense of contributing to matters of state. So as the systems that underpin our society of spectacle fall away one by one, millions flock to help in the only way the spectacle has to offer: “the debate”. But while Sir Patrick Valance’s decisions are now very high stakes, I have nothing useful to add to them. Debating his decisions on that front, or offering my own alternative policies, was doing little save to heighten my sense of helplessness.

When I realised that, I got off Twitter and talked to my next-door neighbour instead. She told me she had deleted social media from her phone: it was just making her anxious. We agreed on the need to do something concrete and local instead, and decided for us that meant contacting everyone on our street and offering to support anyone needing to isolate.

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We made a leaflet, and then my neighbour and I and our children posted them on Sunday. At the time of writing, 48 hours since we posted the leaflets, we have heard from around half of the households on the street. We get a few more messages every hour or so. Everyone is keen to pitch in. We have a WhatsApp group, which is strikingly calm compared to the pandemonium on social media. Updates so far have been on practical matters, such as help with dog walking or where to buy infant formula. It feels grounded, sane and – importantly – human-scale. It has saved my sanity.

Similar groups are now forming all over the country, as people realise that to cope in this strange new reality we need less performative outrage and more practical offline action. Cheeringly, a growing chorus of voices is challenging those still stuck on politics-as-performance. Ever more of us are opting to “stop being angry and scared on Twitter and do something more useful”, as Centre for Policy Studies director Robert Colvile put it.

The internet is the locus for a culture of performative outrage that feels increasingly ill-suited to a time of national crisis. But it also has phenomenal power to connect people in practical ways, to do things in real life. We are seeing social media increasingly used in service of local networks, rather than replacing them.

Rightly so. As normal life comes to a standstill, meaningful action does not look like shouting at the government, who are making balance of probabilities decisions in good faith, with a rapidly evolving situation and enormously high stakes. It looks like supporting people near us, in our families, apartment blocks or streets.

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And, this is taking place, quietly, beneath the surface. Though we are being told to stay physically apart, connections are being formed. Local groups are beginning to coalesce into larger-scale hub-and-spoke networks, and organisers are sharing ideas and best practice via groups such as Covid-19 Mutual Aid or the list hosted by the anarchist website Freedom News.

My prediction is that this will be significant. Our nation has had its civil society capacity reduced by both the right and left, in the name of (respectively) market and state, and this outbreak of new, mutualistic networks could have a powerful effect well beyond the coronavirus crisis.

Its emergence will raise many new questions. What is the right scale for a peer-organised support group? I would give someone who I know lives on my street a tenner to pick up my shopping, but someone from the next street over? Perhaps not. How can volunteer capacity support state systems without being exploited (as happened under Cameron) as a cheap replacement? What is the appropriate scale for safeguarding regulations to kick in? These and more are questions we will do well to consider in coming weeks.

But we should take the time to do so, because these green shoots of civil society regrowth that are beginning to appear may become increasingly valuable. The 21^st century will be an era of confronting limits, whether of economic growth or natural resources, and we are likely to find ourselves needing to learn once again how — or when, or in what manner — to trust our neighbours.

The hologram is flickering. We are catching glimpses of a different society beneath the spectacle, one that is more place-bound, more mutualistic and more viscerally focused on everyday survival. Growing numbers are turning away from the spectacle and seeking to refocus the power of the internet on enabling real, meaningful offline networks. We should nurture those networks, because we are likely to need them during a difficult and trying time.