I went up to London last Friday during the day. I obeyed all the rules. I caught a cold.

Notice how the health policy discussion has changed? Nobody now even makes a gesture to the idea that the Virus is serious or life-threatening. Sometime in the last month or so, everyone accepted that it was the flu, unless you were unlucky, but then you can get unlucky with the flu as well.

Nobody thinks there is any `science’ behind lockdowns, social distancing and masks. Equally, most people accept that crowds, indoors, and / or poor ventilation encourage infection. Turns out that 75% of all infections happen in family homes, hospitals and homes for the elderly. Or halls of residence, which combine crowds and lack of decent air-conditioning.

We have accepted that there are four of them, locked in a folie a quatre, making stuff up as they go along. Doubling-down on actions that don’t work is the first sign of desperation. But then, thinking that you can legislate and penalise your way out of a public health event is the first sign of political madness. It turns out that the people in SAGE have lost the plot as well.

It should be obvious that all a lockdown does is temporarily halt the spread of any virus, unless you can lock everyone down, seal the borders and hold on until the last virus cell dies. Then you can't let anyone or anything in from anywhere else in the world without decontaminating it and them. Virus gonna virus. The only people who don't know this are SAGE and a bunch of professors whom I would not hire as a junior analyst.

I went up to London last Friday during the day. I obeyed all the rules. I caught a cold. Not the Virus. A cold. I don't need to say any more.

If there were dead bodies in the streets, the sounds of ambulance sirens throughout the day, hearses daily on every street, if our work-mates were falling before our eyes... there would be no need to make any rules. Those of us who could carry on with our laptop jobs would, and the rest could choose between death by bankruptcy or the Virus. It’s exactly because the Virus was not killing everyone in its path that Governments could do a ‘national lockdown with more holes in it for essential services than a sieve’ that kept far more of the economy going than anyone had a right to expect.

In other words, the politicians can only **** around like this because the Virus is not that serious. And that's what we all know in the back of our minds.