Middle England, as epitomised by the conservative Kentish borough of Tunbridge Wells, is doing its bit to prevent the Omicron wave of coronavirus from becoming a tsunami.
Residents of this town are testing themselves for the virus before going to dinner parties. Students have resisted the temptations of nightclubs, mask wearing is de rigueur and the streets in the week of new year sales were only sparsely populated by shoppers.
It is the kind of restrained behaviour from the public that Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister, is relying on to mitigate the risks associated with the uniquely laissez-faire approach, (compared to Wales, Scotland and large parts of Europe), that he has taken in England since the libertarian right of his party mutinied in December against new anti-Covid measures.
With the help of votes from the opposition Labour party, Johnson did manage to impose the wearing of face masks in most public indoor venues, vaccine passports for nightclubs and new work from home guidelines. The vaccine booster campaign is also central to the government’s strategy.
But he has been weakened among other things by dissent from within his party, and has resisted the advice of scientists and public health experts urging more stringent protective measures in the face of record levels of Covid transmission.
One in 15 people were infected in England in the week leading up to new year according to the latest statistics and 16,163 people are hospitalised with the virus.
“It’s almost in spite of the leadership that we have done as well as we have,” said Richard Kilgarriff, who runs a literary events company and was walking his whippets through the centre of Tunbridge Wells on Thursday.
“We have to trust each other to make the right decisions and not be dictated to by the squeaky wheel, the anti-vaxxers,” he said, noting that Tunbridge Wells was a conformist place, and that people were mostly respectful of each other’s space and safety.
The latest data released this week by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which has been tracking social-mixing habits in the UK for the past 18 months, suggests something similar is playing out in many parts of the country.
Overall, according to the survey, there has been a sharp decline in the number of contacts between adults since August, when mixing peaked in 2021 at levels already well below those pre-pandemic.
There was a further drop among most age groups through December, after the highly infectious Omicron variant landed on UK shores. This was partly the result of more people working from home again and came with the exception of 18 to 29-year-olds who registered a slight increase in social contacts over the festive season.
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Christopher Jarvis, who runs the survey, said the social mixing registered in the last week of December was comparable to that seen during the second lockdown imposed by government in November 2020. This suggests learned behaviour might forestall the need for further restrictions.
But Covid is raging nonetheless and Tunbridge Wells has been no exception. There have been 1,490 cases over the past week, down fractionally on the week before but more than at any other period. Nearly everyone in the town said they had either had the virus or knew people who had.
“A lot of our friends have had it in the last three weeks,” said Scottie-Rose James. She and her friend Amy Dunne, both Tunbridge Wells residents and both triple jabbed, were among university students taking an extra cautious approach, partly to protect vulnerable older relatives over Christmas, and partly to avoid contracting Covid a second time.
“I don’t think so many people are dying any more but it slows your life down, and we don’t want to go into another lockdown,” said James. “It will keep happening. We are going to have to get used to managing it.”
For older residents like Sarvesh Mathur, a retired architect with fragile health, “managing it” means going out “only when strictly necessary”. He survived cancer before the pandemic and believed that if he had been diagnosed when hospitals were prioritising Covid patients he would have “ended up in the graveyard”.
He was scathing about “mixed messaging” from Johnson about the risks associated with the latest onset of the virus — the result, he thought, of differences between factions of the Conservative party. But the public, he said, did not take a cue from the double standards exhibited when Downing Street defied its own rules, and threw parties during the Christmas 2020 lockdown.
“If somebody tells you they are going to jump down a well, you don’t necessarily follow,” he said.
John Drury, professor of social psychology at Sussex university, echoed this, saying that since the onset of the pandemic, public attitudes have often been ahead of government, in terms of mitigating danger.
“If you track rates of infection and public behaviour, the public are taking the level of risk as a guide,” he said.
Another professor of psychology, Stephen Reicher at St Andrews University, made the point that responsible public behaviour may not in itself be enough. He said that even if there has been no lockdown, some schools and hospitals are already in dire straits, not to mention the football Premier League, because of record levels of infection.
But along the Pantiles, the upmarket shopping street at the heart of Tunbridge Wells, several passers-by were resigned to “living with the virus” and took heart at reports that Omicron is milder than other variants. They felt the government was right at this stage to rely more on individual responsibility than collective measures to control it.
One couple, a commercial property lawyer and his wife, said they favoured the lighter touch so long as the NHS “was not broken”. They were doing their bit by testing regularly.
Nathalie Dalton, a teacher, said she and her partner, James, had recently recovered from the virus. As a teacher it was difficult to be entirely safe. “We are going to have to ride out this storm and learn to live with it,” she said.
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