The "lockdown" has affected me relatively little: things I mail-order
take longer to arrive, role-playing games have moved online, and I
haven't seen my boardgame groups at all. But now it starts to feel as
though people have gone into a kind of stasis.
Many people I know are able to work from home anyway, so they're
continuing to do so. Thus the relatively minor loosening of
restrictions makes very little difference to them, or to me.
The first six weeks or so were taken up with building new ways of
doing things. But now we're used to staying at home; we've reached
accommodations and formed new habits with spouses, cohabitants,
children, etc., and we've settled into routines.
Meanwhile, local Lidl has finally started to limit the number of
people who go into it… by having a chap standing right next to the
door (without mask) to tell you when you can walk directly past him
and go in. Two and a half weeks ago quite a few people had masks on
inside; this time I saw only three masks other than my own, only one
of them on a staff member, and it felt only a little less crowded than
usual. There were no no one-way aisles; everyone was apparently happy
to brush past at close quarters; and there were at least three people
in there coughing continuously.
I've seen some suggestions that the rate of people staying at home,
compared over the world, is primarily correlated not with government
policy (it's hard to spot a difference in mobile phone movements
before and after changes of policy) but with culture; certainly many
people I know were doing it well before the official word went out,
and are continuing to do it in spite of the present muddled advice. In
the UK at least we have many people who have joined the "the virus is
not a problem therefore I'll take no precautions" culture. (There's a
remarkable correlation between this view and "climate change isn't
real/isn't a problem", "Brexit was and is a good idea even if you're
not a millionaire", "capital punishment is a good idea", and dislike
of people who don't look, sound and smell exactly like the speaker.
And of course the opposites of all these opinions tend to go together
too.)
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