Chocolate shops and stationery stores were busy as usual. Universities held in-person lectures. And workers crowded into some offices and factories, often with nothing more than a bottle of communal hand sanitizer to protect them from the rampant spread of the coronavirus.
In England on Thursday, the first hours of Lockdown 2.0, as local newspapers called it, looked very little like a lockdown at all.
The situation exposed the enormous difficulties of European governments, struck by a second wave of the coronavirus, as they try to put the genie back in the bottle after months of encouraging people to flock back to offices and pubs.
Since the spring, when lawmakers with little dissent ordered people to stay home, the political consensus around lockdown measures has collapsed. As a result, England’s new shutdown rules were shot through with loopholes, and companies openly flouted what relatively lenient restrictions were in place. At the same time, citizens and scientists alike fretted about the virus spreading unchecked for much of the winter.
“It feels very much like a lockdown in name only,” said Steve Gremo, a software developer in Kent, in southeast England. “In March, it seemed like the country came to a complete halt. It was not the same vibe this morning at all.”
The latest shutdown — under which pubs, restaurants and other nonessential shops were supposed to close, but schools, universities and many workplaces were left open — is slated to end on Dec. 2. But many scientists doubt that four weeks of spotty restrictions will be enough to stamp out the virus, or that the government will have done enough by then to revamp its contact tracing system to allow officials to keep track of the virus’s spread for the rest of the winter.
Despite skepticism from scientists, Prime Minister Boris Johnson insisted on Thursday that the new restrictions would work.
“This is not a repeat of the spring,” he said. “Four weeks is enough for these measures to make a real impact.”
But the busy subways, motorways, shops and workplaces that were in evidence across England on Thursday made plain that companies were reluctant to take the same precautions they did during the first lockdown.
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November 07, 2020 at 01:22AM
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A lockdown with loopholes: Some flout new restrictions in England. - The New York Times
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