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.’ 

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