I cycled into Chelmsford today to shop for groceries. Lots of people about, busy; nothing like the Spring “lockdown”. One wise soul had brought three primary school age children with him to the CoOp; he masked up, they didn’t. Thanks, mister!
– “…fears lockdown ‘too lax’ to beat variant”
Flippantly – that looks likely to me.
Less superficially:
1) It’s a shame, and literally fatally stupid, that this has become a matter of enforcement. In Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea etc. nearly everyone understood what needed to be done, and just did it. Many here may prefer the racist explanation that Asian foreigners are just compliant sheeple, but in fact, having had experience with SARS, they exercised social self restraint because they understood that it was right and sensible to do so.
I suppose that Europe and the US has so many antisocial idiots pushing various shades of conspiracy theory that a lot of people “don’t know who to believe”. Choosing who to believe has certainly been Node’s method in this and other technical matters, and it’s the example set by the corporate media over the course of decades; “expert versus expert”.
2) Laxity versus strictness isn’t the issue. The problem is that merely telling people to stay home is nowhere near enough. We need all the measures listed at endcoronavirus.org (appropriate page linked below), plus proper quarantine, local distribution of necessities especially food, more and better ventilation, activities moved outdoors, temporal segregation, stable groups of workers, and universal basic income so that people aren’t forced to work when feeling ill and have no need to hide from testing.
But even Marxists like N_ aren’t prepared to advocate any of this. Apparently, such measures are beyond our imagination.