Time to break "lockdown ideology"

It’s common to see the case for easing the coronavirus lockdown portrayed as an example of putting the economy before human lives. I don’t need to tell you that’s a gross simplification, but it doesn’t mean that public opinion and politics aren’t influenced by this way of thinking.

The virus is a complicated disease, but the total number of deaths and infections attributed to Covid-19 is reported daily, while the unintended consequences of mass quarantine are more difficult to calculate.

We know that the focus on coronavirus is affecting attendance at A&E, even for conditions as serious as heart disease and stroke, while many hospital wards are half full. We know as well that elective surgery, cancer treatment and outpatient appointments ground almost to a halt during the peak of the crisis.

It’s exceptionally unlikely that these policies haven’t already cost a significant number of lives. That’s before we get to the less immediate potential consequences of lockdown, like declining mental health, suicide, alcoholism and domestic abuse. Or the long-term effects that unemployment and poverty will almost certainly have on life-expectancy.

So why has the debate about restarting the economy and easing restrictions been reduced so easily to populist tropes?

It seems, at times, that a section of the public has accepted quarantine, not just as a necessary means to stop the virus spreading, but as a way of thinking, or even an ideology that has merit in its own right. In his columns on TheArticle, Sean Walsh has described this in much more erudite terms as internalising “the grammar of lockdown” and “Corona-inspired Stockholm Syndrome”.

Recent polling by YouGov and the ONS’s Opinions and Lifestyle survey both showed surprisingly strong support for maintaining quarantine and a striking level of adherence to government advice. If social media is any kind of barometer, the protest over the relaxation of the lockdown will be much noisier than any objections when it was imposed.

Even if we assume that the case for closing down the country was overwhelming, this conformity of thought is surprising and it wasn’t expected when behaviourists predicted the public’s likely response.

Admittedly, people have been bombarded with slogans supporting quarantine through every medium possible. In contrast, the case against its imposition has not been seriously articulated outside columns in a few mainly right-leaning newspapers, websites and magazines.

There must be something more going on though. Members of the public, and not a few institutions, are becoming accustomed to the lockdown — some of them even like it. A tentative return to normality is going to wrench them out of their new routines into something unknown and unsettling, because we know things won’t be exactly like they were before.

On Louis Theroux’s “Grounded” podcast, the documentary maker Jon Ronson speculated that many people would try to maintain elements of their quarantine lifestyle after they are required to get back to school or work. He seemed to view that as a positive development.

Of course, to do that, they’ll need employment to return to. And despite the way the debate has sometimes been characterised, you don’t have to be a free market extremist to worry about the difficulties of restarting the economy after such a lengthy spell of inactivity. It was never going to be possible to insulate the arguments about Covid-19’s impact on public health from wider questions about the lockdown’s effects on economics and politics.

The debate about lockdown has inevitably become political, and like many political debates, our attitudes are as much about what we want to say about ourselves as they are to do with evidence or science. It’s difficult to tell whether this tendency has been exacerbated by social media or whether Twitter and Facebook are just the perfect media to show how we flock to positions that we believe project the values with which we want to be associated.

For now, supporting lockdown is commonly seen as the virtuous, responsible position for anybody who prizes lives over money. It doesn’t matter that this depiction is clearly a caricature — because it fits with a broader mood, it strengthens our resolve at a difficult time and it gives meaning to our new rituals, like clapping for the NHS on a Thursday evening.

As the government moves on to “phase 2” of quarantine and tries tentatively to shift the burden of paying the country’s wages back on to the private sector, it will have to slowly break down this way of thinking as well as easing restrictions. The debate can no longer focus narrowly on Covid-19’s direct effects on public health.

If we aspire to return to some form of normality, we’ve got to get over the populist arguments and simplifications and start to discuss coronavirus and quarantine like grown-ups. Phase 1 involved building a kind of lockdown ideology: phase 2 will have to involve destroying that mindset.