A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic, Laura Dodsworth [the two towers ebook .txt] 📗

Fines threatened for activities which were previously normal, like working, travelling, seeing friends and family, dating, worship etc. Vague threats of mandated vaccines and vaccine passports create stress. Threats of repeated lockdowns if measures don’t work and compliance is not high enough.

Occasional indulgences

Provides positive motivation. Occasional favours. Fluctuations of interrogation attitudes.

Reopening of some social and sporting activities and civic functions at certain points, then taken away again.

Demonstrating ‘omnipotence’

Suggests futility of resistance. Demonstrating complete control over victim’s fate. Confrontation. Pretending cooperation taken for granted.

The previously unimaginable situation of basic rights being withdrawn. Claiming omnipotent scientific and medical authority, by ‘following the science’. Proclaiming that we must not act on basic human instincts such as hugging family. Repeating and assuming adherence to the values of collectivism and solidarity and showing you care.

Degradation

Makes cost of resistance appear more damaging to self-esteem than capitulation. Reduces prisoner to ‘animal level’ concerns. Personal hygiene prevented. Filthy, infested surroundings. Demeaning punishments. Insults and taunts. Denial of privacy.

Shaming people for struggling with or refusing to wear masks, which may be impossible with a disability, or feel dehumanising.

Enforcing trivial demands

Develops habit of compliance. Forced writing. Enforcement of minute rules.

Standing on dots in shops and public spaces, queuing, following illogical rules such as entering a restaurant with a mask on, taking it off when seated, but putting it on to go to the toilet.

MAVIS, 35

We can’t do what we normally do. I’m too afraid to even go to the park, I keep my son indoors all the time. We do the Joe Wicks exercise every day and reading. That’s how we manage the lockdown.

It’s better to stay indoors than go outside and catch the virus, but I don’t know how long this can go on. I pray for it to be over soon.

We have lived here for one year. We have one room, we sleep together in the same single bed, there is a cooking area and a fridge. There is no window and no ventilation. There is a cooker hood but it doesn’t suck up the smoke and steam. We have our own bathroom at least. I do my best to make my home nice, but it’s not easy. There is damp and some things are broken. The landlady says she can’t fix things, it will cost too much money.

There is no space for my son to play. If I cook, he is under my feet, I tread on his toys. We have to squeeze around each other. It’s not easy. Sometimes I tread on his feet or something, and he starts crying, and I say, ‘Mummy is so sorry, so sorry, I didn’t mean it.’

My son is three, so normally he goes to nursery. He misses his friends. I miss it too, because I do my shopping and jobs when he is at nursery. He cries a lot at the moment.

I don’t know how online shopping works, but I know a Sainsbury’s delivery man from church and I tell him what I need and he buys it for me, delivers it, and I pay him.

I pray that we will be released quickly from lockdown. Summer is coming and this room gets very hot with no ventilation.

10. THE METRICS OF FEAR

‘Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfilment.’

Jean Baudrillard

Logic is slow and fear is fast. Understanding numbers requires logic and sound reasoning. Politicians and the media very often use fear to circumvent our logic, because it slows our thinking. We can be dazzled and alarmed by a big number, or a steep line on a graph, and then we’re less likely to question the nuance and more likely to be suggestible. From the beginning of the epidemic, the government and media reported the daily death tolls with a macabre dedication and, as I have said before, without context, such as comparisons with deaths from other causes, or total deaths, or recovery figures.

Humans can’t sustain fear indefinitely: we get bored, we relax or, some might say, we become complacent. Covid didn’t impact our lives in the ways the Chinese social media videos promised. People didn’t fall over in the streets, to be instantly surrounded by medics in hazmat suits. The weight of rational evidence and experience could have started to outweigh fearful imaginings, and then people’s sense of ‘personal threat’ – as SPI-B put it – might have relaxed. How was the government to sustain the belief in the necessity of restrictions to our lives over the months? One method seemingly favoured by the government was the choice of metrics.

Daily death tolls dominated government press briefings and media reports until they stopped ‘surging’ and were perhaps too low to report, or didn’t seem newsworthy. At that point the focus switched to the reproduction number (R) and then cases. However, hovering just above or below 1, the R is not a very attention-grabbing number, whereas cases have seized headlines, because the absolute totals are large.

I spoke to David Paton, Professor of Industrial Economics at Nottingham University, who has taken a keen interest in the reporting of data during the epidemic. One of his worst data moments came in mid-April 2020 when ‘it was clear deaths were going down, but Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, said we hadn’t seen the peak yet. That was a big one for me. He was downplaying the downward trend in deaths. I think there were obviously deliberate policy decisions to make people take it seriously, but the data should be presented factually and then interpreted.’

Fear is a depreciating asset and we found ourselves in a time of short selling. Cases which don’t translate into deaths can’t sustain the fear, which is perhaps why Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance delivered a ‘shock and awe’ presentation on 21 September 2020 about cases and hospitalisations. Metrics selected for maximum impact gave way to fantasy. A red chunk of predicted-but-not-predicted cases loomed like a child’s red crayon drawing