California is bringing an end to its Covid restrictions, and with them, the “crisis mentality” it has been operating under for the past two years, according to Governor Gavin Newsom. Here too, as plans for “living with the virus” officially kick in this week, we can only hope for the same.
In truth, the two-year state of calamity in which we have been living, in which our threat response has been to shut down and lock up, will likely prove harder to shake. It has become an ethos no longer just applied to the virus, but other areas of life; a now-default mechanism in which, having grown so used to cancelling everything at the drop of a hat and operating entirely from within our own four walls, doing so ad infinitum is now muscle memory.
Take the recent storms, which have led to mass train and flight cancellations, and the closures of a number of parks, libraries and shops. Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, expressed concern at the scale of travel disruption, warning that shutting off services must not be the “default position”; evidently, closing down where there is the risk of genuine danger is the right course. Why it is the default one for so many, however, presents the bigger question. During tumultuous weather, as well as much else, pandemic mode has become the natural go-to – even creeping into the lexicon (yesterday’s storm was dramatically described on the radio as a meteorological “third wave”). In reality, stopping our whole lives for one outside event is about as unnatural as it gets.
In pre-coronavirus times, the everyday was a pick’n’mix of global threats: a North Korean nuclear war, terrorist attack or extreme weather event being an occurrence that would at most provoke some harrumphing/terse dinner table chatter. Having spent two years reducing life to one main threat – Covid – all others faded into the background, fooling us into believing that we could live safely and normally if we just avoided the monster beyond the front door.
At points and places during the pandemic, the shutdown approach has been necessary. Now it is not, but the same gusto that went into creating this elevated state of fear has not been applied to the messaging that it is no longer required. Like the various other catchphrases the Government likes to repeat in the hope of signalling a strategy they’ve not bothered to form, “living with the virus” sounds snappy enough, but focuses little on unpicking the behaviours formed (and mandated) over the past two years. You can lift restrictions and tell people they no longer need to behave in a certain way, but we are creatures of habit, prone to changing little unless explicitly necessary; it’s the same reason we stick with overpriced phone providers, or bring the same lunch to work every day. Expensive and boring, certainly, but deemed less hassle than changing course.
We have spent most of the pandemic being among the worst, globally speaking, at living with the virus, resorting to starker, longer lockdowns in lieu of more sustained periods of lower-level restrictions elsewhere. This constant snapping back and forth between total inertia and normal-ish living has only heightened, for many, the sense that any lifting of rules will soon after be met with a crackdown – something Boris Johnson has not ruled out. Add to this the fact that Covid will not fade from view like normal outside threats, but bubble away for the foreseeable, and detaching from a crisis mentality seems harder still.
The post-crisis messaging is muddled all the more by the fact the Government’s “great return” has been more sluggish than hoped; that the scientists they elevated during the past two years frequently disagree entirely with their stance, further dampening the likelihood of people believing the risk level truly has dropped. And that the Prime Minister’s popularity has plummeted since Partygate, chipping away yet more at the credence of official assurances.
In California, Newsom’s goal is to rebuild “sustainable” lives – exactly what lives filled with shutdowns are not. For any benefits perceived, there are genuinely few wins to be had by yanking the handbrake every time a challenge is presented; of spending life jolting between stop and start. To ditch the crisis mentality requires two things: for people to genuinely believe that the crisis is over, and that responding to it, and other stressful events like it, in such a manner is now surplus to requirements. Like any unused muscle, it just needs flexing, and this week is beginning to feel like the last chance to do.
