The dystopian nightmare of "zero COVID"

If we’re honest, we’ll admit that the chilling message issued by that drone in Shanghai – ‘Control the soul’s desire for freedom’ – was the unofficial slogan of our lockdowns, too. Sure, a nighttime drone didn’t bellow those words from the skies. Our politicians are not so crass that they would utter such a sentence at a Covid press conference. But, like those Chinese cities, we suspended almost everything – civil liberty, democracy, the right to protest, the right to associate, the right to go outside (except for one hour a day) – in the name of tackling Covid. Public life and private life were made subservient to the war on a virus. In the UK drones didn’t shout at us, but they did spy on dog-walkers in the Peak District. Cops threw people out of parks. A man was warned (wrongly) that he was forbidden from being in his own front garden. Let’s not get on our high horse over China’s crazy lockdowns – we did it, too.

What is being pursued in China is the mad and hopeless ideology of ‘Zero Covid’. The lunacy in Shanghai is ‘China’s latest attempt to achieve Covid Zero’, as the New York Post said. And we have our fair share of Zero Covidians over here: activist academics, ‘experts’, public-health fanatics and others who openly said society should be shut down until Covid had been eliminated. If they’d had their way, we would be like Shanghai now, putting on hold everything – from socialising to shopping, education to leisure – in pursuit of that most impossible of tasks: erasing Covid.