I want to see death in the U.K.
At the start of the pandemic, news outlets were flooded with images of PPE clad medical staff, of patients on ventilators, of grieving families who couldn’t say goodbye to their loved ones. Now all we see are faceless graphs and a constantly climbing death toll. And we don’t care. The number is already too high for us to meaningfully comprehend without some sense of scale, and we don’t really want to comprehend it. We want to have a haircut and a pint.
The news regularly puts other numbers into context. It often involves the height of double-decker buses, the length of football pitches, or the volume of an Olympic swimming pool. Other subjects are brought to life with green screened graphics as Jeremy Vine talks us through a virtual House of Commons. But the UK’s Coronavirus death toll is hidden behind a bloodless number, and behind phrases like:
“I’m young, I’ll be fine”
“We need to get the economy started again”
“At least we’re not America!”
I don’t want to scare-monger, I don’t want to be gratuitous, but I want the virus to be real again. For several weeks we all obeyed lockdown. We were sensible. We embraced “the Blitz spirit” as we all united against our common fear. But the British public became fatigued with the relentless onslaught of misery. Misery doesn’t drive viewer figures, anger does, and it’s very difficult to be angry at a virus. Some tried being angry with the Chinese state, but it’s similarly faceless, alien, and undaunted by criticism. Instead we focused on being angry at the hypocrites. The news reported anger at Dominic Cummings, at beaches full of people, at BLM protests. Whether it’s right or wrong to be angry at these things, the focus shifted. The news had some anger to harness, and anger is the opposite of misery. Anger drives clicks, shares, comment section warfare, polarisation, and commentary. Endless commentary. And that anger is a double edged sword. Yes, we’re angry at the hypocrisy, but we also use it to justify our own less significant bending of the guidelines, safe in the knowledge that we are the ones with ‘common sense’.
I want to know that the equivalent of 733 double decker buses full of people, have died.
I want to know that if you laid out all the corpses of people who have died from Coronavirus in a line it would, by a strange coincidence, be the length of 733 football pitches.
And I want to know that doing something as simple as wearing a mask could prevent another corpse being laid down in the long line of bodies that now stretches from the beach at Southend to the doors of Parliament.
