Let's be careful out there

It was the oddest experience. Saturday morning at a shopping centre, surely one of the most normal things before lockdown. And, yet, here I was, feeling like I was dodging rounds in Sniper Alley. We'd gone to Westfield White City to get a broken mobile phone screen fixed - as strong a candidate for the description "essential items, only" as ever there was one. And while there is a growing list of essentials to buy (not least of which being new shirts to replace those rendered as kaftans due to losing almost a stone-and-a-half in lockdown), this was no more than a lightning raid - the only branch of iSmash in the south-western hemisphere of London that could do the job urgently.

Getting there, getting in and finding the shop was the easy bit: it was what happened between handing over the phone and collecting it and its new screen that proved the tricky part. Because it meant traversing the shopping centre's floors in search of the only other immediate urgency, coffee. In turn, that then meant negotiating other people. I was wearing a mask but it was astonishing as to how many others weren't. In fact, I estimated that for every ten people in that mall yesterday, only one was wearing a face covering. Coupled to that, a patent lack of understanding of what social distancing means, not to mention the awkwardness of not following the floor markings clearly indicating direction of travel, and you had the onset of anxiety like no other.

Political zeal to get Britain shopping again is clearly going to require time and patience. The mask-wearing thing, in particular, doesn't help. Some shop staff wore masks, some not. In the one cafe at Westfield where you could sit and have a coffee, only some of the serving staff had any kind of PPE at all. And while, in the main, the admirable lengths of organisation that the centre and its tenants had gone to demarcate distancing, from floor markings to roped-off queuing systems, people still didn't know what to do, and I couldn't wait to get out of there. 

Almost a month ago to the day I posted on this channel about the new reality of emerging from lockdown. That was almost an additional 5,000 COVID-19 deaths ago. Five weeks on, and restrictions have been eased even further, which seems to have become a licence for everyone to forget why it was we went into lockdown in the first place. Even our local high street, which early on had been a noticeable paragon of mask-wearing virtue, has started to lose its discipline. It's almost as if Boris has actually said: "get out there and spend your money as you used to do", rather than "go out if you have to, and remember there is a killer virus - possibly airborne - with no cure or vaccine as of yet".

This week the prime minister is expected to make the wearing of face masks compulsory in shops amid the ridiculously late realisation that they do, actually, offer some benefit to slowing the spread of COVID-19. Even Boris has admitted that views have changed on wearing them, saying yesterday that: "The balance of scientific opinion seems to have shifted more in favour of them than it was and we’re very keen to follow that." The caveat, here, that they offer little benefit out doors, makes sense, but if we're to get back into shops again, it's clearly the way to go. Scotland even made wearing masks in shops compulsory as of yesterday. And, yet, we Brits seem to have a problem with wearing them: the Office for National Statistics has found that just 52% of adults have worn a mask, an increase, granted, but we're still well behind France and Italy and, of course Asian countries where mask wearing is simply a way of life. Even in the United States, where infections are now at the ridiculous stage, two thirds of people there have worn masks. Including, reluctantly, the president.

The UK's leading scientific institute, The Royal Society, takes the view that wearing a face mask should be strictly observed, regarding non-compliance as criminally anti-social as drink-driving. And yet the practice doesn't even earn universal support within Johnson's own cabinet. "I don't think mandatory, no," Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove said this morning on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show. It was, he said "basic good manners, courtesy, consideration" to wear a face covering in indoor environments and when mixing with the public, but remained hawkish on imposing their use. "It's always better to trust people’s common sense, to give them a clear sense of what is wise and I think that individuals and businesses are responding well to that lead.". Maybe people's common sense wasn't so well trusted on Bournemouth Beach the other week. And on my anecdotal evidence yesterday, it's still not to be trusted while out at the shops. 

"Face masks are appropriate in some settings and not in others," Gove said this morning. "Wearing a face mask when you are out and about outdoors is significantly less necessary than when you are indoors". Fair point, but if Britain's retail economy is going to return to anything like normality, everyone is going to have to play their part, so that the medically vulnerable - me, for example - can also get out there and do their bit. Until then, I'm going to remain mostly indoors, and if I do venture out, I'm going to happily resemble the fully-bandaged incarnation of The Invisible Man.