#GetOutToHelpOut
Listening to the heavily-leaked, repeatedly delayed press conference by Boris Johnson on Saturday, it was impossible to avoid a grim sense of de ja vu.
After belligerently promising that a national lockdown could be avoided, failing to create a functioning test-and-trace system, and again delaying the inevitable by not acting fast enough, a new national lockdown was predictably being announced. What sent a Halloween chill down my spine, though, wasn’t the announcement of a necessary new national intervention but the return of the ‘Stay Home’ mantra.
Back in March, when it seemed as if the air might genuinely be thick with covid-19, and that touching food packaging or door handles might really be a high risk behaviour, the logic of ‘staying home’ made some sense. Lockdowns are blunt instruments, and when knowledge is low, uncertainty is high, and preparation time is scarce, locking everyone in their houses wasn’t a totally unreasonable approach.
Although even in those early days, it seemed pretty clear that transmission through associating with people outside at a distance was a low risk activity.
Fast forward to November, and one of the consistent messages from scientists and public health officials over the course of the pandemic has been that ‘being outside’ (either completely away from or at a safe distance from other humans) creates negligible risk of covid transmission, especially if people are wearing face coverings.
Being outside — in parks, greenspaces, beaches, forests — does have lots of physical health benefits though. And seeing other people — at a distance, in large open spaces — has critical mental health and wellbeing benefits.
So if we’re trapped in a multi-year cycle of lockdowns ( its difficult to see how we won’t have a third shutdown period in early 2021 at the very minimum) then surely we can get past ‘stay at home’. In fact, shouldn’t we be incentivising people to be (safely) outside as much as they can? Even amongst single households, transmission between family members or friends is much more likely indoors.
There’s nothing surprising about winter drawing in, and infection rates going up as people retreat indoors, so why couldn’t we have invested in the kind of infrastructure you need (e.g. more toilets, open-sided shelters) that would allow people to spend more time outside not less?
Instead of articulating the new rules in terms of needing the right ‘reason’ to leave your home (as if leaving your home is an inherently dangerous thing to do) why couldn’t the starting point have been to accept that people want and need to safely have human contact, and that encouraging/facilitating the safest option for maintaining relationships and physical health is better than providing an incentive for rule-breaking ‘out of sight’ inside.
This isn’t going away any time soon. Lurching from one false certainty (‘we’re winning, do your duty, get down the pub and return to the office’) to another (‘its not safe to go outside’) is an insultingly misleading way to message and communicate about the most challenging public health crisis in living memory.
Surely we deserve better than this?
#GetOutToHelpOut
