What is even the point? This is in a *hospital lab* ffs.

Are we actually the only people who understand how this works? Is that what's happening? Is it us?

Genuinely feels like we're delusional, like we've got a shed filled with Cold War-era conspiracy theories made up of unrelated newspaper clippings, but it's COVID and everyone is just humouring us until they can clear the legal barriers required to lock us up for our own safety.

We've felt all along that the pandemic should have been framed as the natural disaster that it is, rather than the personal failing that is sickness under capitalism. https://twitter.com/T2Toaster/status/1344282133435703296?s=19

If a volcano erupted in your town, you probably wouldn't make kids walk to school through burning ash falling from the sky, masked against the toxic fumes, and then just cross your fingers that a lava flow wouldn't sweep away their classroom that day.

"Hardly anyone is killed by tornadoes," you chuckle nonchalantly as a cyclone rips through your street, shaking your head at these liberal snowflakes running from the churning funnel edge.

"Don't you understand?" you bellow, voice raised over the sound of collapsing buildings, "The mortality rate for earthquakes is less than 1%!" A huge chunk of masonry misses you by inches. "You're making a fuss over nothing!"

Can't close pubs over a little thing like an asteroid strike.

Suppose the main difference between all these scenarios and a pandemic is that not only does treating them like actual threats save lives in the immediate term, but also stops the disaster in its tracks, so it makes even more sense to take precautions.

Like if the volcano was actually *powered* by algebra lessons and bullying, so keeping kids away from school meant it would gradually sink back into the earth.

And just to clarify, because it's always relevant, despite it seemingly being one dickhead who might bring the virus into our isolated-for-a-whole-fucking-year household, we don't blame the public for fucking this up.

That's why we talk about the framing of the crisis. In the West, we have simply not internalised that this is a global disaster that must be weathered, because admitting that will spook the markets and tank our economies.

So our governments have desperately tried to convince us that this is something we can handle with minimal impact on our lives and don't need to worry about. Basically, it's better to take the hit of mass casualties than deal with an economic crash.

People are messing up because the information they have access to is confusing and contradictory. It was scant months ago that we were being told to Eat Out to Help Out and Sunak was cheerfully (and masklessly) serving food in a crowded restaurant for a photo-op.

At the same time the government were forcing unis to gather teenagers from all over the country and mix them all up in halls of residence and lecture theatres, we were also being told not to gather with more than six people, even in the open air.

And that pubs were safe until 10 pm, as long as you nibbled a scotch egg while you drank seven pints.

It's essentially impossible to follow the government's advice in the UK, so everyone is doing what they think is best. For many of us, that means going much further than the guidelines, but for others it means shrugging and doing whatever because who's to say?

We're in tier 4, but we don't even know what that means because we're already living like hermits and have been since about mid-February.

Are pubs open? No idea: we're not going in one if it is anyway. Sorry, there's a plague on.