CV19, why the inequity?

[2nd tenor]

CV19 is here and it won’t be gone for a while yet, well that’s my opinion. What’s surprising me is that there is a somewhat large discrepancy allowed to happen and persist between reasonable behaviour in terms of infection control and what folk are actually doing on mass. I doubt that this BBC report isn’t untypical of what’s happening in many (other) places: Crowds descend on south's beaches

Banding is out for the foreseeable future and if you’re a Church goer then heavy restrictions apply but if you go to the Pub then who knows what happens (think Aberdeen local lockdown causes, BBC report: 'Fury' at Aberdeen players as city ) and as for the beach literally thousands of folk are going to such places and crowding together. There’s seemingly no Policing to stop such incidental and spontaneous gatherings yet to some large extent they are predictable. You can’t hold a football match but you can allow such large gatherings? Schools will restart soon and kids just don’t social distance (kids are kids) so there are bound to be consequences. Flights are being allowed again (I don’t know the exact details) and breathing common air (via the air conditioner) with fifty plus strangers is very likely to spread disease.

Have I missed something here? It just seems to me that the Government has a soft approach on some things whilst being quite controlling (which for now is mostly what’s needed IMHO) on others. However if literally thousands are allowed to crowd together in beauty spots then I’m puzzled why Bandsmen can’t gather together in some way - doesn’t even have to be indoors. It seems to me that the rules have become blurred, confusing and unequal, and that they are not actually enforced. What do others think?

 

[John Brooks]

I agree with you and see similar things happening here in Canada as well. One example is the border between Canada and the US is supposed to be closed to all but essential travel which is proving to be a bit of a joke (if only it weren't so potentially serious it would be funny). I see so many exceptions that it becomes impossible to police them. Just my opinion.

 

[MoominDave]

I agree. The crisis continues to be badly mismanaged by the UK government, sad to say, whose rules often seem questionable and whose communication strategy seems designed not to create clarity. Most of the rest of the world looks on in bafflement at our approach.
Against that, in all fairness, juggling lockdown criteria to keep R below 1 is always going to result in artificial and infuriating inequities - there will be sets of activities of similar risk levels where opening up all of them would create too much risk, but some of them can be managed. I don't judge them for not having complete consistency across the cultural board - that is too hard a goal. But it really does feel like more consistency than this is both possible and better for public health.

Practically speaking, stopping large beach gatherings requires a co-ordinated and well-resourced response. The police have, like other state services, not been financially encouraged by their paymasters in recent years, and are depleted at present from the resources capable of performing this job without causing friction. (Did I put that diplomatically enough?)

 

[dennis78]

Many here in the US, myself included think this is all way to much. It’s all a new world order deal and nothing about the future will be the same. Lots of stuff kills us as humans every year.........
but this is where we draw a line?
Small businesses are forced out of business but fast food is essential?
I could stand in line at the grocery store but not go and vote?
It’s the large cooperations taking more control

 

[MoominDave]

Dennis, I share some of your concerns, but not all of them. Large corporations (I assume that's what you meant) replacing the nation state as brokers of global power concern me a great deal - not because the nation state has achieved perfection, but because the nation state usually has some accountability built in, while Facebook et al follow nothing but the logic of making money.

Governments bowing to powerful pressure groups and supporting corporations and the wealthy - those who don't really need the support - but letting the rest of society go hang? That's not fair. This situation is Armageddon for small businesses and freelancers. I wrote above that there will inevitably be inequities in trying to work our way out of this situation, but this is the kind of structural system bias that we have to work hard to counteract, in everyone's interests except the most selfish and grasping of the corporation owners.

But I don't think that we are doing too much in response to Covid. Rather, I think that we are doing too little - or sometimes (often) the right things, done the wrong way. Who is "we" in that sentence? Well, the UK for starters. The US too. Various other countries that also don't seem focussed on either preserving the health of their citizens or supporting the lower income parts of their economic chain. Often, these countries seem to be ruled at present by governments explicitly in hock to the interests of the large corporations, and that has concerned me for a long time. Compare with other countries where the governments bow down less to the big corporations, where Covid's first wave has largely been suppressed, rather than being allowed to more or less run its course and become endemic through the use of slow, ineffective, or compromised measures.

 

[Tom-King]

One thing that I can't quite understand is the bending over backwards to placate industries that would rise like the phoenix almost the exact moment this is all over, whilst allowing others that would take years or decades to rebuild to go to the wall.

Travel, for example, is an industry that would grow from next to nothing if it fizzled out during this crisis. It taking a while to regrow (potentially under new regulations) could be managed to subject it to a much needed greener way of operating anyway, so there's a potential silver lining there too.
Yet we're opening up international travel far sooner than advisable and for what? And at what cost, in delayed recovery/eradication, to every other industry and many cultural pursuits (including our own)?

These are indeed exceptional times, but I think what's most maddening of all is the seeming lack of a coherent set of principles or end goal - it's all a bit scattergun and bowing to where pressure is, rather than doing the right thing...

Not that anything I say can influence it a jot.

Back to practice...