Masked anxiety

So there we had it: our first flights in over a year: to Edinburgh and back for a four-day break. The only ‘foreign’ holiday this year, as everywhere else was either booked or that plonker Grant Shapps has placed it on the red list, or the amber list, or the amber-plus list, or the oh-what's-the-point list. Or Iceland. And, yes, it wasn't lost on us that the train from London to Scotland would have been more environmentally friendly, but with exorbitant ticket prices for a family of four, plus a five-hour journey each way, we wanted to both maximise our budget and what little holiday we were actually able to get this time.

Edinburgh was, thanks for asking, very pleasant. So pleasant we got engaged there. Yes, I am now a fiancé. The things you do on holiday, eh? What was noticeable in the charming Scottish capital was, firstly, how relaxed it felt for a busy administrative city, and secondly, how well drilled everyone appeared to be under Ms. Sturgeon's jurisdiction. Call the Scots Nats upstarts if you will, but Covid-discipline was impeccably observed wherever you went, even by the vast majority of tourists. There really was precious little obvious civil disobedience when observing the still-enforced coronavirus etiquettes, both social distancing and mask wearing in shops, restaurants, on buses, and inside attractions. No one, from what I could tell, was abstaining on grounds of belligerence or twattery, and that made for a pleasantly anxiety-free time. Only the occasional tourist - who clearly hadn't received the memo - sauntered around indoor venues with their fizzogs fully on display.

You see, I’m a self-confessed zealot when it comes to observing the COVID rules. Despite having had two jabs and indeed a mild dose of the virus itself back in November, I’m diabetic and over 50, and bloody paranoid about catching this thing again (a possibility - even the double-jabbed health secretary Sajid Javid got it). 

I’ll admit that having a  compromised immune system is partly the result of my own misadventure, but I can’t help being 53. Basically it meant that the final leg of our journey back from Edinburgh, from London City Airport to home, was one tightly knotted ball of anxiety, as every carriage we entered on the DLR, the Tube and the SWR train was full of maskless Covidiots, looking back at my petrified eyes, peering over the top of my mask, as if to say “Yeah? What’s your problem?”.

To be somewhat fair, part of the problem is not necessarily ignorance but our dear Prime Minister. Ever since Boris declared 19 July “freedom day”, the wearing of face masks in England has been largely a matter of personal choice. How very doctrinal. This is despite warnings from the scientists - those people who, it would be decent to point out, know a thing or two - that easing rules on masks will reduce public protection. So with “personal choice” the most ambiguous health and safety stipulation you could make (I could jump out of a hot air balloon without a parachute or cut off my legs with a chainsaw - it’s all a matter of personal choice), it’s no surprise that anyone with an aversion to wearing masks, due to comfort, personal freedom or because being told to do something is not for them leads to people cramming onto our trains with their faces bare, breathing in and breathing out in crowded compartments with little concern for their own wellbeing and, more bluntly, mine.

This all stems from one of the few consistencies throughout the pandemic in the UK: inconsistency. And indecision. Boris Johnson appears so eager to please freedom-loving party acolytes that something as simple as mask wearing in environments where the virus can be passed with amusing ease can not be countenanced out of common sense, above anything else. It’s why London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has deemed that masks will remain mandatory when traveling on all Transport for London services, including the Underground, buses and trains. Not that he’s been able to enforce the rule, as our journey home the other night amply demonstrated.

“I’ve repeatedly made clear that the simplest and safest option would have been for the Government to retain the national requirement for face coverings on public transport,” Khan has said. “But ministers aren’t willing to do what’s right. I’m not prepared to stand by and put Londoners, and our city’s recovery, at risk.” He has since doubled down on that view, last week calling for mask wearing to be made legally enforceable with criminal prosecutions an ultimate sanction for failure to comply. Khan’s view is partly out of the hope that a bye-law on London’s transport network would partly reduce any further spread of COVID-19, but perhaps as importantly, it would increase the confidence of commuters like me in returning to the capital for work or pleasure, giving a much-needed boost to the economy. Sadiq Khan says that 86% of passengers do observe the mask etiquette, but that means that a sizeable 14% don’t, which is a problem as scientists have said repeatedly that masks only curb the spread of the disease if everyone wears them. I think we’ve lived long enough with the Covid numbers to know what risk that represents to public health. 

However, imposing such rules is still reliant on enforcement. Given the number of trains and buses operating in London, most of which now are driver-only (and in the case of the DLR, driverless), restoring guards as, effectively, enforcers, on the scale required would be problematic. Transport for London has some 400 enforcement officers already, but given the prevalence for some of London’s finer citizens to carry knives, you can understand the reluctance for confrontation. This places extra pressure on depleted police ranks to enforce what is at present little more than a polite request.

Picture: TfL

The challenge for Khan, however, isn’t just safety: TfL faces a budget deficit of as much as £500 million over the current financial year, having been severely impacted by the pandemic. As restrictions ease, Khan desperately needs people back on public transport. That said, there are already signs of private car usage increasing, and second-hand car sales have gone through the roof as people spend saved cash on used vehicles to get around in.

Back in Scotland - where Nicola Sturgeon has appeared to be one step ahead of Johnson throughout the last 18 months - the government intends to continue with the wearing of masks “unless exempt for special circumstances” until at least next year. “The law says you must wear a face covering in most indoor public places including public transport,” official guidance states. “The Scottish government recommends that face coverings should be worn when moving around when it is crowded. This is encouraged for busy outdoor events.”

In England, Boris has customarily faffed on the issue, conceding that “If it’s not mandated it probably won’t do any good” and that he “expected” people to carry on wearing face coverings in enclosed spaces, which is hardly an imposition. Here, in the midst of all this, is us and especially me, the paranoid. The trouble is that the issue is now at risk of getting bogged sown in politics. One scientist worries that this will mask the actual point about wearing a face covering to begin with: “We know wearing masks, particularly in crowded, poorly ventilated environments, has a big impact on the levels of transmission that can take place,” Professor Clifford Stott, who sits on the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (Spi-B), told LBC last week. “But also I think [that] wearing a mask is also communicating to others about a sense of responsibility, and I think that’s a key issue in mask-wearing now, unfortunately. It’s become almost a little bit politicised whether one wears one or not, which is I think a shame.” Stott is firmly of the belief that masks have had a “big impact” on stopping transmission.

In truth, according to the Office for National Statistics, mask wearing in England hasn’t changed all that much in the last month since the legal requirement to wear them in enclosed spaces was dropped, with figures showing that 95% of people were still covering their face when leaving the house. Our public transport experience, however, suggested otherwise. Perhaps it’s an East London thing, as the majority of abstainers were on the DLR west from London City Airport, and then from Canning Town to Waterloo on the Jubilee Line. That degree of mask-free fellow passengers has done nothing to restore my confidence in getting out and about again. A shame after so many months cooped up at home (including three confined to the sofa following foot surgery). I’ve been desperate for freedom to return, but I won’t hide my anxiety at what I see as other people’s inconsideration and ability to comply with something as relatively simple as wearing a mask.

Perhaps, then, it’s just for me to deal with, but it does rub with me that my liberty can be curtailed by an inconsiderate few. Perhaps I should move to Scotland, where Sturgeon’s position - admittedly, not universally accepted - has at least been unambiguous. “It is my view that if a government believes measures like [face coverings] matter, and this government does, we should say so,” the Scottish First Minister has stressed. I won’t gloss over the fact that the overall numbers are falling, as vaccinations and so-called ‘herd immunity’ take effect. It’s true, too, that the R rate appears to be dipping, but with the school holidays in force, this may well be the ‘circuit break’ needed. 

Come the autumn, and the possible return of colds and flu as more and more companies open up their offices for the first time since March last year, the whole issue of travelling to work on public transport will come under the political and clinical microscope again. This, I’m sure, will put Boris’s chronic prevarication on the line.

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.

Behind the mask

It occurred to me this morning that COVID-19 is just the pandemic Britain needs. I don't mean this flippantly, of course - 40,000 people have now died of this thing here, after all. No, what I mean is that if any country was attuned to social distancing, it's us. We're an island nation, for starters, and when taking the famous British reserve into account, probably more comfortable keeping a measured space between each other as anyone.

The reason this only occurred to me today is that I ventured out for a doctor's appointment, wearing a face mask, and I don't think I've ever felt so self-conscious. It was hard enough wearing it and sunglasses, with the latter steaming up as I pegged it down the road to a last-minute appointment that had opened up suddenly, like a coveted Ocado delivery slot. I must have looked like Griffin in HG Wells' The Invisible Man. Actually, I did. Thankfully, I was not alone.

On the rare occasions I have ventured out into my local high street during the lockdown I've been struck by the number of others wearing face masks. New Malden has a sizeable Korean community, so pre-coronavirus, someone wearing a mask wasn't all that unusual a sight, given the cultural popularity of facial coverings among Asian nations, dating back to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. But whereas we might have once looked upon our Korean neighbours with the wry smile once worn while watching Clive James's Sunday night observations of life in Asia, the bandit look is fast becoming de rigueur. In fact, it's conceivable that for the forseeable future, this is how we'll be looking at most people we encounter. From next Monday it will be compulsory to wear face coverings when travelling on public transport and for all staff and outpatients visiting hospitals. Wearing a mask might, too, become a condition of entry to shops as they start to reopen from next week.

Slowly but surely, Britain is losing its chin - literally. The lower halves of our faces are retreating behind a layer of cloth as the price to be paid for venturing into the community again. Soon, we will be recognisable only by our eyes, eyebrows and whatever state our newly-bouffant hair is in. Throw on the Wayfarers, as I did this morning, and we're almost in the realm of The Who's Tommy - "...put in your earplugs, put on your eyeshades - you know where to put the cork". However, despite health secretary Matt Hancock's claim that COVID-19 itself is "in retreat", it is not. New infections and deaths in the UK may have come down considerably, but as it stands, there is neither a cure or a vaccine, and people are still dying, which in my view means that it's still out there.

There are two issues with this: firstly, there is still no consensus amongst experts as to whether face masks, of the kind most people have managed to acquire privately, do any good. A German study has suggested that the mandatory wearing of masks has coincided with a drop in infections, but there is still some doubt as to a direct link. The coronavirus is a tricky bugger and unlike any other when looked at from a micro-biological point of view, which means that all the masks and anti-bac gels in the world won't do a damn thing unless social distancing continues to be rigidly applied. Although the medical and scientific community does agree that masks - even if just fashioned crudely from your once-favourite tour T-shirt - do offer some protection (to you and to others), it's still only limited.

They might stop virus-laden droplets from spreading out into the 'cone' of dispersal after you cough or sneeze but, apparently, they're not so good at preventing the tiny particles from getting in from other people. Then there's the false sense of security they might give: even masked up, the high street this morning was full of foreboding - some wearing masks, some not, some observing two metres' social distance, some not. One man I encountered, almost immediately after I left the surgery, came out of a newsagent coughing copiously, albeit into his mask, which must have been pleasant for him. He certainly showed no sign of concern that he was right in front of me and others as he went.

Masks are, therefore, not shields. I may not fully understand the epidemiology at work here, and I may also live in one of the London boroughs with the lowest number of coronavirus cases of all, but I still view the world outside my front window as being a hostile one that could kill me. My mask, this morning, would have only offered a limited amount of protection. So what's the alternative? Are we now only to venture into exposed environments wearing hazmat suits? Well, it's a thought. Ever since I was told to stay home or stay alert, whichever government doctrine was in force at the time, I have consistently looked at 'outside' as a danger, as if Chernobyl had moved in across the road, and anyone out there was suddenly glowing like the kids in those Ready Brek ads in the 1970s.

The message from government is, increasingly, give up your fears. The economy is on its knees and won't return unless we get out into the great unknown and start putting ourselves at risk. "Some risk," the experts might say, but still a risk. No doubt soon we'll be told that the risk is no more than that associated with crossing the road, though with the number of idiots using the lockdown to speed up and down suburban backstreets, that's not such the low-risk experience it once was. Others will say that the face mask is a small price to pay for freedom, but think of what - and who - it cuts off. My elderly mother, who has been losing her hearing, struggles at best to hear what you say to her, let alone from two metres away. Not being able to read my lips will cut her off further.

But, as I opened this post suggesting, perhaps the country being forced to look like The Lone Ranger for the foreseeable future will not be so bad. Maybe we'll just get used to it. Maybe, until this thing gets beaten, we'll just have to get used to walking around with only half our facial identity visible. Some, I'm sure will like that. Others, like me, will have to accept it as simply essential.