If you wish to win friends and influence people, you must woo them with the perfect combination of logic and empathy, Aristotle tells us. I have used this division between logos and pathos to highlight the imbalance between our consideration of the ability of restrictions to reduce the burden of Covid and the socio-economic collateral damage that they inevitably cause. There is a third element that Aristotle mentions, however, and this is ethos. In attempting to use his rhetorical triangle to frame my arguments against lockdown, I have typically represented our dereliction of ethos with pictures of children seated behind plastic barriers and accounts of musicians whose careers have been obliterated.

It goes without saying that a life without art is generally not worth living. But there is more to art than simply offering a richness of human experience. I would argue that an exposure to the arts is central to the development of critical thinking.

I went against the wishes of her school to allow my younger daughter to take both art and drama as GCSE subjects, and both my daughters took art as well as mathematics at A-level. They are now flourishing in their respective fields of science and law. Of course, this is in part because I was able to send them to schools that had the resources to provide this education, and we should do more to provide the same possibilities for all children.

But artistic education need not end at school. It should be available, as a form of entertainment as well as learning, through theatres, orchestras and the opera. It is shameful that these have been among the first activities to be restricted in lockdowns, as if they are a mere add-on and not a core act of living.

Years ago, I heard John Bird on BBC Radio 3 speaking with eloquence and passion about how classical music had transformed his life. I know that my exposure to music and literature from a very early age was central to my own development, but we also need to collectively acknowledge that the maintenance of a humanitarian society is critically dependent on the wider engagement of the population with the arts. If nothing else, it would help people to understand risk in a more sophisticated way. Opening yourself up to the arts is a risky business. Real art opens wounds, forces you to confront your frailties and asks difficult questions.

This is why Soderbergh’s film Contagion – although highly commendable is its verisimilitude (and apparently where Matt Hancock received his inspiration for dealing with the pandemic) – does not advance our dialogue in any meaningful way. Whereas this last paragraph from Camus’s The Plague reveals how recognising both the insignificance and the wonder of human experience could lead us out of the current crisis with our dignity intact: 

“And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city”. 

Few decision-makers today, it would appear, have such humility.  

Sunetra Gupta is professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford