Could Lives Be Saved by Asking and Answering A Simple Question in Relation to Covid 19?

 

You could possibly save yourself from becoming ill and from the embarrassment of inadvertently spreading the virus to your team-mates, family, friends by asking and answering a simple question.

As well as paradoxically finding that 

‘most people believe [that] people should follow the rules yet when it comes to their own behaviour they don’t follow the rules’, ‘ 

‘surveys also show that people have very high levels of intending to do everything necessary and report trying to do it most of the time. And where people fail to do it, it’s not really that they’re deliberately trying not to do it it’s that, often for personal reasons, it’s quite difficult for them to do it’. 

This was Lucy Yardley’s answer to the paradox put to her, above, by Andrew Marr yesterday morning  (Sunday morning 18^th October, 2020) on his weekly show on BBC television.

Professor of Health Psychology at Southampton  University, Lucy Yardley OBE is a member of the Sage committee that advises the UK government in relation to the pandemic. She continued by saying,

 ‘Sometimes people can’t do it because they can’t afford to and people have all sorts of other  personal reasons where they might have to feel they bend the rules a little and where people are not following the rules. It’s not necessarily [that] they’re doing it in a really blatant … risky way. A lot of people are, for example - when they’re asked to self-isolate, nipping out to do “one last shop”, because they don’t want to bother people with having to do it for them and they don’t really think they can get online and do it. It’s not really the kind of deliberate non-adherence that you might think.’

Lucy Yardley thinks that success in keeping the virus sufficiently under control so that our hospital systems have not been overwhelmed is down to how well people have being doing - a success she thinks we might be better focussing on than on our failure to keep to the rules.

She says, 

‘… it might be a question of helping identify where people are finding it difficult to do  infection control and coming up with positive solutions.’

The distance between us narrowed in the collegiality of our grief

I know that, with hindsight, I didn’t keep the social distance I rigidly adhere to – even outside – on the one occasion I was outside with neighbours and intent on having a moment to honour, and then wave good-bye to, the remains of a lively neighbour who had suddenly passed away as result of an accident abroad. The distance between us narrowed in the collegiality of our grief. In family, too, I lose sight of my good intention. In the moment it seems so much more important to connect.

Happiness is most experienced in moments of forgetfulness. 

Flow experiences researched by author Csikszentmihalyi and described in his book of the same name make us happy. We may experience them when writing -  maybe that’s the reason for this piece, it makes me happy to write it – making music, in sport, being creative and the other myriad ways we momentarily experience forgetfulness. No wonder we want to jubilantly hug the fellow supporters of our favourite team or groan together in despair and leave all thought of the pandemic behind for a moment of respite. Unfortunately they’re also the moments when the opportunity arises for the virus to jump the now non-existent gap. Flea-like it can hope merrily from person to person.

Here’s the question that could save a life, or keep you from the ignominy of discovering you’ve inadvertently become a super spreader. 

What is your personal let out from following the guidelines? When do you feel your personal circumstances require you to be a little more flexible? When do you find you forget to follow your good intention?

 Of course the follow-on question it would be good to find an answer to is: what could you do differently to both remind yourself of your good intention in the moment and find a way to stick with it?

I don’t know how not to forget it all sometimes.

I think a lot of us are embarrassed to appear to be following rules too rigidly. I certainly know I feel embarrassed when I think people are looking at me a little pityingly. I assume they think I’m afraid, see my behaviour as an understandable lack of courage in the face of the fear of being a certain age with a possibly compromised immune system. I can face the look down. We’re in this together. But I don’t know how not to forget it all sometimes. Surely it’s not beyond the IT world to add a tone of reminder when we get too close to others? I'wondering what other remedies we might collectively be creative enough to put in place so that we can support each other to remember, and act in accord with, our best intentions.