You know nothing, John Snow

He knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake

There’s a weird little video doing the rounds. It was produced by the John Snow Project, a Zero COVID activist group largely based in Australia. (They are not to be confused with the John Snow Society, a long-standing academic organisation linked with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. By the way, just what is it with ZC groups choosing names which can be easily confused with official bodies? - not just the John Snow Project and Independent SAGE, but also the World Health Network).

Anyway, if you haven’t seen it, the video is here, and it’s well worth a watch.

And the text is as follows:

Twas the night before Christmas. Santa took a deep breath.

If only he’d known it would lead to his death.

Santa always listened when the famous doctors spoke.

Too bad they didn’t mention that the virus spreads like smoke.

It feels pretty troubling to me, and it’s not obvious who it’s aimed at. I think pretty much everyone knows that #COVIDIsAirborne - it’s not like people are sanitising their hands either, it’s more that most people have had multiple jabs by now. And certainly it doesn’t feel like responsible messaging to be using manipulative messages about Father Christmas to scare young children about the risks of COVID.

But actually I wonder whether there’s something deeper and more unsettling going on. I can’t help thinking of H.L. Mencken’s definition:

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

Once you start to notice it, it’s striking how much Zero COVID messaging these days is aimed at ways that people might be having fun. I wrote about this in the summer, looking at how music festivals and concerts were the target of ire, at a time when COVID numbers were essentially as low as they’d been since the pandemic started.

But another example is brunch. As fanciable bowling instructor Jacques from The Simpsons put it:

It's not quite breakfast, it's not quite lunch, but it comes with a slice of canteloupe at the end. You don't get completely what you would at breakfast, but you get a good meal.

Yet somehow, in the Zero COVID lexicon, brunch has become the ultimate sin. No longer does Eve’s temptation by an apple cause the fall of Mankind. Now, one lapse into having unmasked smoked salmon scrambled eggs with bottomless prosecco will damn you to an eternity of Long COVID. If you don’t believe me, try searching Twitter for “brunch” and any combination of words like “Long COVID”, “minimizer” and “FAFO”, and you’ll find no shortage of comments like this:

It’s more than a bit bizarre. It’s not like brunch is intrinsically riskier than lunch or dinner, but it just somehow sounds more frivolous. If you pick up COVID there, it’s made out to be your fault. In the same way, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Christmas, with its parties, presents and pleasures, is a regular target for the Zero COVID folks.

But actually the truth is this: Santa was never at the greatest risk of COVID. A lot of his job involves logistics: dealing with letters, planning routes, ordering in supplies. He’s in a managerial role, a lot of it can take place remotely. The people that the John Snow Project should have been worrying about are his elves.

For example, here is data from the UK’s Office for National Statistics about COVID deaths by profession in the 20-64 year old age group between 9th March and 28th December 2020. It’s pretty stark. People in factories and those with “elementary occupations” (see here for definitions of all this) were three or so times more likely to die than professionals and managers.

In the same way, because early Long COVID was strongly linked to whether you managed to avoid infection before you got vaccinated, there was a clear gradient in the April 2021 figures by social class: the more deprived you were, the more likely to have Long COVID from the pre-vaccination waves.

All of this comes back to the fundamental fact that lockdown was not an equal experience. If you had a professional job which could move online and a garden to work in on sunny days, the whole thing had some attractions. There were drawbacks for sure, but also compensations compared with paying thousands of pounds per year to stand on the train for 45 minutes each way with your head in the armpit of a total stranger, for example.

Whereas if your job involved the risks of infection from working on a zero hours contract while crammed in a dark kitchen, racing to fulfil online orders in a warehouse or stitching together clothes in a tiny factory somewhere¹, it probably wasn’t anything like as fun. And it’s hard not to notice that the latter jobs largely involved servicing the online orders of the former: there’s an extent to which lockdowns didn’t remove risk, they rather outsourced it to groups who were less visible in the media and in online debate.

And so when I see thing like the John Snow Project video, and other such messages which almost betray nostalgia for the lockdown days of 2020 and 2021, it’s hard not to see the class messages associated with them. In their cosy little world, COVID is always avoidable, so long as you #MaskUp. People have the luxury to prioritise this goal over the need to earn money. And if someone gets infected, it’s probably because they dared to have fun or didn’t listen to The Right People.

But of course, that’s all only ever been the case for a certain set of people, and it’s important that we don’t forget that when thinking about how to respond to future pandemics. And honestly, if you want to go out for brunch or you’re lining up a Christmas party, then I hope you enjoy it - have a good one!

1. Or indeed wrapping up billions of Christmas presents in a magical sorting office somewhere near the North Pole.