Much of the press is all too happy to toe the government line.
By EMILY HILL
So the logic of the latest lockdown is frying my goddamn mind. On a list of conundrums I can’t solve, ‘If a woman sits alone on a bench can she transmit a virus she probably doesn’t have?’ is now up there with, ‘If a tree falls in the middle of a forest, and there’s no one around, does it still make a sound?’.
Given three police officers were filmed arresting a woman in Bournemouth for sitting on a bench alone, they clearly thought they knew the answer. On initial inspection, there appeared to be two ways to interpret the footage. Either they had her bang to rights for a lockdown violation, or they were violating her human rights.
However, since then, heroic feats of journalism have been performed — ‘Woman, 50, “arrested for sitting on bench” is Covid conspiracy theorist’. It turns out she hadn’t just been sitting on a bench; she’d walked along the beach with her elderly father picking sea shells, and (according to an ‘ex-friend’) ‘she was going around telling everyone that coronavirus was no worse than getting the sniffles and that it was an attempt to control us all’.
Reading newspaper reports on the state of the Covid-19 situation in London scare the bejesus out of me, so I do not for a second want to upset anyone. However, this bench situation took place in Bournemouth, so I am now going to do my job as a journalist, and try to establish the facts there.
The Bournemouth Echo stated on Monday that ‘the total number of people who have died with coronavirus in Dorset hospitals surpassed 450 [since the start of the pandemic], as eight more were confirmed.’
Regarding cases in Dorset, the latest data indicates: ‘849.7 cases per 100,000 people, with 3,359 cases confirmed in the seven days leading up to 12 January… taking the conurbation’s total since the start of the pandemic to 18,123.’
It is reasonable to suggest – if the virus is as virulent as the science currently suggests – that vastly more than 18,123 people must have been infected with coronavirus in the area. Nevertheless, as it stands, 2.5 per cent of those officially recorded as being infected have sadly died. But, given the population of Dorset is 426,516 (according to the 2018 census), of whom 450 have died, that means that just 0.1 per cent of Dorset’s population has died from Covid across nine months. Surely that is worth bearing in mind amid all the fear, and the actions it is fuelling, including the arrest of a woman sat by herself on a bench in Bournemouth.