A Sense of Unreality

A sense of unreality currently reigns.  The football season has been suspended until who knows when, yet the sports pages are full of transfer speculation - trying to predict who will sign what player 'during the summer'.  Yet the season is still likely to be being played 'during the summer'.  If it resumes at all.  With no actual football to write about, the media have started making up their transfer fantasies early, creating this strange feeling of disconnectedness, giving the impression that different parts of reality are moving at different speeds.  Or even that part of it has come adrift completely.  But this disconnect merely reflects the disjuncture between what our leaders keep saying is happening with regard to coronavirus and what is actually happening.  Frustratingly, we see a seemingly endless parade of world leaders addressing their nations with decisive proclamations, clearly outlining what will happen and how people will be protected financially, how order will be maintained etc.  All very impressive.  Yet here, all we get is the government suggesting and urging people to do or not do things, but not backing it up, leaving those of us on the receiving end with no real guidance, let alone any prospect of help.  Employers seem to interpret these utterings in ways which most benefit them, rather than their workers.  The hospitality industry is left in financial limbo as people are urged to avoid pubs and restaurants, rather than the government simply closing them, so that they could claim on their insurance.

Even when the government does finally come up with financial packages to support people and businesses during this crisis, they seem incomplete and we are left with the feeling that the authorities have had to be pushed, reluctantly, into taking such action.  Everything they do feels disjointed.  As if they are making it up as they go along.  Which, on the evidence of the last week, with the jolting shift from the complacency of the 'herd immunity' approach, to the current 'suppression' model.  (The former always looked dangerous, risking potentially huge fatality figures as simply allowing as many people as possible to catch Covid-19 in the hope that it would create a mass immunity in the population would inevitably completely overwhelm the NHS).  But even now it seems somewhat half arsed, with no apparent capacity to test all front line health workers for Covd-19, let alone any other suspected cases.  And testing suspected cases, isolating them and tracing their contacts if they test positive for the virus, is a vital part of the suppression strategy.  Well, in other countries it is. Countries which, mysteriously, do seem to have the capacity to carry out this volume of testing.  (It could clog up labs, according to one expert witness in front of a parliamentary committee today).   Nothing seems to make any sense.

But to move from the general to the personal, we are now being told that, from this coming weekend, those of us in 'higher risk' groups - over seventies, diabetics, high blood pressure sufferers etc - should withdraw from all non-essential social contacts.  Basically stay at home.  For up to twelve weeks.  Now, I qualify on two counts - diabetes and blood pressure - yet my employer (a government department) has so far offered no guidance as what I am meant to do.  Should I just stop turning up to work?  (which is what the government's Chief Scientist, Chief Medical Officer and Prime Minister seem to be literally saying (but only 'asking' of course).  In which case will I still be paid?  Will they sack me?  Will I have to sue them?  My employer's stance on coronavirus vis a vis its employees, as of today, is that it expects us to keep working.  The most I've been offered is an opportunity to work in the office (which isn't my job) rather than in the field.  But this isn't in line with the government's own advice - I would still be exposing myself to non-essential social contacts on a daily basis.  So what am I meant to do?  Right now I'm being asked to make choice between my income and my health.  Which isn't right.  And I'm not alone in this, but the government's reluctance to be precise is putting us into this situation.  But don't worry - we have a 'war government'.  Which presumably means that they are going to engage in a series of failed small scale military campaigns before sending the RAF to bomb Berlin.