Lockdown 2.0

 Well, this is a funny lockdown. The Committee for Public Safety might have decreed (on the usual fraudulent prospectus) that the nation must lock down again to prevent a medical catastrophe, but things seem to be going on pretty much as normal out there. True, the 'hospitality sector' is, to varying degrees, closed down, despite having been sedulously Covid-compliant and having already been punished with the ludicrous 10pm curfew. Similarly, the almost absurdly Covid-compliant churches have been ordered – apparently as an afterthought – to close their doors again. 'Non-essential' (to whom?) businesses, many of them already on their knees, have been shut down, and various other healthy communal activities have been curtailed. And yet, out on the street, this really doesn't feel like a lockdown – not the way the last one did, when people were genuinely anxious and afraid, and fear and uncertainty were in the air, along with a kind of unifying wartime spirit, a sense that we were 'all in this together.' Then, the high street was all but deserted, people were crossing the road to avoid contact with another human being, supermarket queues snaked round the block, and every week the besieged population would emerge, blinking, to applaud 'our NHS'. Now, it seems, 'our NHS' is going to be unable to cope even with a limited resurgence of Covid-19, so the nation must be closed down again to protect them (or rather to save their face). Has the NHS learnt nothing from the first wave? It would seem so – unlike the supermarkets, who faced colossal difficulties last time round but had got on top of most of them in about ten days, and who are now so well prepared that there are few queues and no shortages: toilet paper is piled as high as the towers of Ilium, and hand sanitiser to plentiful they're practically giving it away. It's arguable that the supermarkets and their under-appreciated workers were the true heroes of the epidemic: imagine the chaos and deprivation if those stores were being run by the state. 
  What is also striking about Lockdown 2.0 is that there are so many more dissenting voices. Last time around, I rarely came across anyone (at least in the early weeks) who had serious doubts about the government's approach. This time, I have yet to talk to anyone who is buying it, and it is obvious just from walking the streets how much more relaxed people are, and how much readier to bend or break the rules. This time, I think, lockdown won't wash, and the government will have to lift it on or before the appointed date, whatever The Science might be saying by then.