Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Covid restrictions have gone on for too long

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We can’t carry on like this. We can’t keep resurrecting restrictions every time a new Covid variant emerges. We can’t keep suspending certain liberties whenever this blasted virus mutates. Somehow we have got stuck in a spiral of doom and kneejerk authoritarianism, and we urgently need to find a way out of it.

People, of course, will say it’s only mask-wearing in shops and on buses. It’s only a PCR test if you’re coming back from overseas. It’s only mandatory quarantine if you come into contact with someone infected with the Omicron variant. These are hardly onerous regulations. And Boris says they’ll be temporary. They will be reviewed in three weeks’ time. So calm down, yeah?

This misses the point. First, because if the past 20 months tell us anything, it is that temporary Covid regulations have a nasty habit of lasting for longer than we were told they would. Lockdowns linger, emergency laws stick around, Sadiq Khan tells Londoners to carry on masking up on public transport regardless of what central government says.

One Sage adviser – professor Susan Michie, unsurprisingly – says social distancing should last forever. So, yes, we have good reason to fear that these three weeks of fairly mild regulations to tackle the Omicron variant will morph into something more.

The government’s response to Omicron confirms that the Damocles sword of Covid authoritarianism hangs over us still

Secondly, and more importantly, there’s the question of what impact all this sudden shunting back into restrictions is having on society and the individual. It is incredibly psychologically disorientating to know you could wake up on any given day and have fewer freedoms than you did the day before. It makes it impossible to plan ahead and even to live as a properly free citizen in the here and now.

Forget the actual restrictions themselves.

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