Letters

IN PRAISE OF LOCKDOWN In their piece “Welcome to Covidworld” (November), Ian James Kidd and Matthew Ratcliffe complain that the “orthodox Covid-19 narrative (according to which there is an unprecedented threat, best dealt with via extreme social restrictions)” has become uncritically accepted. We have “slipped into a sort of ‘Covidworld’,” they say, “and moved the flag of truth to that world, via a process that resembles religious conversion more than it does the adoption of new beliefs that remain open to critical scrutiny”.

I couldn’t disagree more. Kidd and Ratcliffe suggest that while Covid-19 is a nasty virus, it isn’t clearly so much nastier than influenza or many other nasty things we tend to tolerate in the normal course of life. But in