A New, More Contagious Strain Of COVID In The UK!

News of new regional lockdowns in the UK has begun to reach US outlets. I'm even less able to talk insightfully about the UK than I am about Canada, so I don't intend to go into detail, except insofar as the UK situation gives what I think is a comparative view of the global moral panic.

But as a distant observer, it does seem to me that the UK public throughout the 20th century was willing to take a lot more abuse from its political class, from the First War, through the Depression, Second War rationing, and postwar socialist austerity than the US public would ever have allowed, and apparenly this now continues. Just sayin'.

A vistior forwarded to me a message from someone in the UK who isn't with the program:

Greetings from Tier 4. We had the body bags delivered yesterday with instructions. We have to hang a white sheet out of the window when someone dies and they will be collected. Another 5 neighbours died yesterday. The rest have left for the country. We’re holding on. The army are still delivering food parcels. They have to be disinfected and left in the garage for 24 hours before using. The schools have closed and are now temporary mortuaries. We daren’t go out now. Letter boxes have been sealed up and armed guards are stationed at the end of each road. Apparently someone tried to get through yesterday and was shot dead. Well you can’t be too careful. The electricity is now only on 3 hours a day because of the lack of staff at the powerplants. Just a matter of time I guess. I’ll update you when I can but I can’t promise. God Bless you all and for heavens sake stay safe

A UK YouTuber whom I follow ties the new lockdowns to Brexit, which confirms for me the theory I've had that COVID is a moral panic, and moral panics reflect an underlying social tension. She doesn't use the term "moral panic", but the symptoms are there as she describes them, and she definitely identifies the social tension as Brexit -- in recent posts, she's also associated those tensions with a newly nationalist northern working class that's left the Labour reservation and is demanding respect from the southern elites.

But the COVID moral panic is a global phenomenon, so it can't be reduced just to particular national issues. The Germans are locked down, too, though they seem to be taking the abuse a little bit better. Huh.

What interests me is that the US -- and not just the sansculottes and descamisados, but institutions as well, like the observant churches and synagogues, law enforcement, and the courts -- have begun to put limits on the panic. The civil authorities have simply acknowledged at this point that churches can't be shut down, and that's a major concession, since Catholics, Evangelicals, and Orthodox Jews represent "deplorable" values that are held by the folk devils of this moral panic cycle.

When the Orthodox Jews were able to show that the moral enforcers Mayor DeBlasio and Gov Cuomo were blaming the epidemic specifically on the Jews, it was game over.

I've had an inkling for a while that the moral entrepreneurs everywhere intended to renew and extend the COVID panic with a second wave over the coming winter. They've faced a conundrum, in that over the past year, they've imposed lockdowns, social distancing, and mask mandates as a remedy for the epidemic, but those have proved utterly ineffective, and blaming Catholics and Jews is no longer an option, either.

But if "cases" are surging, skyrocketing, record-breaking, or whatever they're doing, what do the moral entrepreneurs propose if the most draconian proposals already haven't worked? At least in the US, a range of options for the political class has now been foreclosed, which to me is a sign that the panic will run its course, at least here. But the course of moral panics is inevitably destructive, and they end destructively, too. The McMartin preschool panic ended only with the Waco massacre, which I'll discuss tomorrow if nothing intervenes.