PETER HITCHENS: The Government’s National Panic Service is being used to keep us in a condition of perpetual alarm about coronavirus

 

The most common symptom of Covid-19 is that you feel just fine. A huge number of those now being absurdly listed as ‘infected’ with this bogeyman disease are perfectly healthy.

If the trained hunters of the Government’s National Panic Service had not tracked them down, most of them would never have known they were supposed to be ill. Why do we take this seriously?

It is a fact, not a ‘conspiracy theory’, that the power of the state is now being used to keep us in a condition of perpetual alarm. We are ceaselessly threatened with a ‘second wave’ for which there is, in fact, no evidence.

As I began to write this, I received a ridiculous text message from my GP squawking urgently: ‘We have been made aware that the number of coronavirus cases in Oxfordshire is starting to rise.’

No doubt Oxford will be one of the next cities to undergo some sort of renewed shutdown, to keep us in our place. This fatuous propaganda is just preparing the way. The more scared we are, the more we obey.

It ended by intoning: ‘We must each do our bit to protect ourselves and others.’ The use of the phrase ‘do our bit’, of course, invokes the phoney Blitz spirit that is used against anyone who looks at the actual researched facts and says, as I do: ‘Don’t be silly.’

For daring to stay calm, I am then accused of being a collaborator with the wicked Nazi virus. The played-out, once-independent magazine Private Eye, now a boring mouthpiece of wokeness, actually did this to me last week.

The truth is that the number of deaths from Covid, even the fiddled and inflated version which the Government clings to, is falling closer and closer to zero.

So, even more significantly, are hospital admissions, which would be rising steeply if these ‘infection’ figures actually represented large numbers of seriously ill people.

These things are true both of Britain and of Spain, whose supposed spike in Covid was used to destroy the holiday plans of more than a million people last week in an arbitrary decision of astonishing uselessness.

At the peak of the epidemic in April, Spain at one point suffered 961 deaths in one day.

According to the Coronavirus Worldometer, the daily Covid deaths in Spain for the past few weeks have rarely risen above five a day, and have often been fewer than that.

And for this we destroy the happy innocent pleasures of hundreds of thousands, and deal another smashing blow to a travel industry already devastated by Government folly? Why do we put up with it? I have no idea.

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/

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