Hands, face, outer space. The alien view of the UK’s corona regulations.

A little thought experiment.

You’re an alien on a mission. There’s a planet in a neighbouring solar system which is grappling with a pandemic and you are going to beam down to a little island in the Northern Hemisphere to get a taste of what life is currently like.

Can you piece together the rules that now govern the human inhabitants?

You can work undercover and do what extraterrestrial sociologists like to call participant observation. Thanks to invisibility cloaking and short-range teleportation being integrated as standard into your travel package, you are free to move wherever you want to go and see whatever you want to see.

But it’s really not going to help you.

In fact, every time you move from one environment to another, you’ll see something that confounds your previous assumptions.

The bottom line is your mates in Alpha Centauri are going to be completely bamboozled by your investigative report. Because the reality in October 2020 is that absolutely nothing about the UK’s handling of the coronavirus crisis makes any coherent sense whatsoever.

Social distancing for starters.

This idea — in theory — is pretty straightforward. The further we keep away from people, the less easy it is for a Covid carrier to transfer the disease. Six months ago, there was a lot of stepping off pavements and serious avoidance of contact. And the lockdown imposed in March was primarily designed to enforce social distance. We couldn’t be near people because most of the time, we were in our homes.

As the lockdown eased over the late spring and summer, social distance became confused. Maybe — with the right kind of mitigation in place — two metres could become ‘one metre plus’. (Weirdly, two metres was never ‘two metres plus’, but we’ll set those semantics and pedantics to one side.)

Now, no one knows whether they should be one metre away or two metres away from someone else. No one seems to have any real idea how big a metre is anyway. One thing is pretty clear though. If an organisation or venue tells you to social distance via faded floor signage and Tannoy announcements, they have done their job. If you find it’s impossible in practice at your local Lidl, that’s tough tomatoes.

As an alien visitor, you would see crowded supermarket aisles with zero distancing, while hearing an injunction to distance wafting from speakers around the store. You’d see signs in buses saying they are restricted to half the usual number of passengers. And then you’d read online that the drivers are pressured to accept allcomers by the companies that operate the vehicles.

One of the reasons the humans seem to be unfazed by these distancing dilemmas and distractions is that they’re now wearing masks. Well, most of them are.

And we all know that masks protect us, don’t we? Except that we didn’t six months ago.

We were told back then they were of limited value and we’d be picking up germs from handling them and would get complacent about distancing.

And the WHO agreed. Until they decided they didn’t any more.

Now, we have a love-hate relationship with face coverings.

For some, they are a minor irritation. Others treat them as a gross infringement on liberty. A third category of person sees them as fashion statements, to which designer labels and edgy messages and motifs can be added. No one really knows how long to wear them, or whether they should wash them or if the efficacy of the mask is undermined by a spin at 60 degrees.

As an alien investigator, you’d at least be looking for some consistency over their use. But you’d be very disappointed. It was previously the case that you didn’t have to wear one in a Welsh shop, but were obliged to sport your mask in an English store just across the border. That anomaly got ironed out a few weeks ago.

Previously the retail staff wouldn’t wear them but the customers would, even though the shopper was there for a few minutes only and the staff were encountering a far greater number of strangers. That anomaly got ironed out too.

But transport yourself down the road to the local gym and the masks are optional for the staff. And pretty much non-existent for those working out.

In a restaurant, you wear your Covid-splattered mask to a table and then take it off. And put it where exactly? And the staff member wears a visor when they come up to serve you. And everything seems safe. Except that the waiter or waitress is most likely a student at the local university, where the rona is potentially rife.

The gym or the restaurant is deemed as ‘Covid-secure’. Why? Mainly because of cleaning and sanitising. Sometimes temperature checks of those going in and out. But is this really keeping anyone safe?

As part of our interplanetary investigation, we might learn that there is increasing dispute about the idea of picking up Covid from surfaces. Some early studies suggested the bug could last for 72 hours on cardboard and other materials. The New Zealand government even investigated whether air freight could have been to blame for the re-emergence of coronavirus over the summer. But many scientists now think there’s little evidence for the remnants of virus actually being infectious. And they argue we’d have been better prioritising masks over Boris Johnson’s 2x Happy Birthday.

Perhaps when establishments spend so much time, money and effort on Dettolising counter tops and sanitising hands in a bid to prove themselves ‘secure’, they are simply creating a clean area in which people still pass the bug as they always have — through droplets while chit-chatting or coughing?

So should the humans abandon all the cleaning and hand-washing? That seems crazy. A little bit like giving up an insurance policy against a lightning strike. You can bet your bottom dollar that as soon as you stopped paying the premium and spraying the tables, there would be a rumble of thunder. And we’d start finding cases of corona spreading from chairs and door handles.

We won’t trouble our alien visitor with the fact that a visit to Asia would reveal teams of people in biohazard suits liberally spraying public spaces with disinfectant as a prophylactic against plague. That’s not the British style.

The British style is to tell people they should go to work if they can. Or maybe stay at home if they can. And if they did start going to work, they’d travel on a bus or tube that said it had a restricted capacity, but didn’t really.

The UK is a country where everyone says how important test and trace is, but where Kings College London discovered only a fifth of people actually self-isolate when they’re phoned or texted by contact tracers.

The UK is that place where universities, schools, hairdressers and nail salons are all fine, but open-air sports events are banned. Where library books are quarantined for 72 hours, but you can sit down in a bar or restaurant where someone else was sitting 72 seconds ago.

Deep breath. One confused researcher ready to beam up.