It’s pandemic panic stations again – but why is it always a choice between fear and freedom?

Boris Johnson has pressed the flashing red button on his emergency control panel again and the nation listened. But there must be a better way to navigate this health crisis?

I’ve been coughing… a lot. I cough when I try to talk, lie down, sleep or eat. It’s exhausting. I’ve done lateral flow and PCR tests – all came back negative. The GP says it’s a chest infection with asthma, so I’m now popping antibiotics, steroid pills and sucking away on inhalers.

It seems to be working, but try telling that to the man on the street yesterday who did the full two-metre fandango into oncoming traffic just to avoid me. I haven’t seen terror in a stranger’s eyes like that since the first lockdown when extreme social distancing led to playgrounds being chained shut and park benches taped off like mini crime scenes. But it’s not really his fault.

Like most Britons since the grand lifting of Covid restrictions on 19 July, in which Boris Johnson and chums appeared to signal the end to this claustrophobic nightmare of masks and waving at frail elderly relatives through closed windows, this man has probably been enjoying the euphoria of physical human contact – the giddy heights of being squashed into a crowded tube train at rush hour, or rubbing sweat with another reveller bouncing on a sticky nightclub dance floor at two in the morning.

And like most people in the UK, this man is now no doubt currently in full freak out mode about the seemingly unstoppable rise of the omicron variant. He, like all of us, doesn’t understand how one day we can be allowed to sip Sangrias on a sunny beach in Spain and the next Covid is back to cancel Christmas – again. Not that we’re calling it Covid anymore – no, this is a totally different threat. With a name that sounds like a cross between a Transformer and Marvel supervillain, the narrative appears to be that this grotesquely mutated virus has crash landed from space with the intention of wiping out half the world’s population in order to restore balance to the galaxy... or whatever.

So it’s back to pandemic panic stations again. Boris Johnson grit his teeth and cancelled his annual festive Downing Street rave to press the flashing red button on his emergency control panel and made a televised statement to the nation telling everyone to scramble to their nearest vaccine centre for a booster – or else! The graphs are back too, showing the terrifying trajectory of infection rates and deaths. And we’re told it’s already too late to stop the Darth Omicron from devouring all our puny human cells and replacing us as the dominant species on the planet.

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But what has really changed? Covid never left. It was just on holiday for the summer, biding its time before the winter set in and it could find a warm host to infect and multiply in. Of course, the scientists said it at the time – they’ve warned us all along– but no one wanted to hear the truth, including our gung-ho government, which prefers the sound of a buoyant economy over inconvenient truths. So instead of preparing the nation for the inevitable winter resurgence, they too popped open the champagne and told everyone to get sloshed and dance naked (and maskless) in the rain – because we were a little short of sun this year.

But why is it always a choice between fear and freedom with this government? A more measured, cautious approach which sees restrictions such as masks stay in place, positive incentives for young people to get jabbed – rather than the stick of Covid passports – and an end to the mixed messages and hypocrisy which this government embodies, would surely better prepare us for future waves and variants.

Perhaps the UK government isn’t overreacting in its response to omicron – as the South African doctor who alerted the world to the new variant claims – but worrying and panic leads to rash decision-making and a nation clearing supermarket shelves of loo roll. Not to mention the catastrophic impact on people’s mental health, already an epidemic in this country since the coronavirus crisis began – there are only so many twists, turns and corkscrews people can take in this emotional rollercoaster before they’re screaming (or vomiting) to get off.

In short, we need another button – a big yellow one that reads “caution”. If only Boris could find it.