Opinion / Chris Smith
Outside chance
One very visible symptom of coronavirus is its effect on the hospitality industry. I should know: I live opposite a pub. This week the pumps hissed back into service and pints began sloshing into glasses again. Patrons emerged, glasses held aloft, with expressions like they’d uncovered the Holy Grail, though in some parts of the UK you wouldn’t see the ear-to-ear grins owing to the mask mandated by some local authorities even for people drinking outside.
Presumably the killjoys responsible are from the same intellectually bereft band of brothers that have people on Spanish beaches wearing masks with their trunks and bikinis, and are clamouring for a block on the use of Astrazeneca’s incredibly effective vaccine over fears of a side effect less likely than being struck by lightning. In fact, that’s a good point – why aren’t umbrellas banned for people sitting in pub gardens, just in case?
What’s really needed here is an injection of common sense. Apart from promoting lockdown fatigue and fuelling an existing pandemic of obesity and inactivity, demonising outdoor activities only serves to drive more people to indulge in covert indoor get-togethers, which are the real elephant in the room. This is a sentiment echoed recently in an open letter penned in Germany by specialists who work on the behaviour of aerosols – in other words, things like viruses that move through the air.
As England’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty has also pointed out many times, the risk of catching coronavirus indoors is far higher than through outdoor contact, where the combination of fresh, humid air and sunshine dilutes and destroys coronavirus particles faster than you can say “nose swab”. On the flipside, the longer you spend sharing recycled air and the more people involved – even if they’ve left the room by the time you come in – the more likely you are to encounter a dose of coronavirus particles sufficient to cause infection.
So what we should be doing now, while the weather is good, is encouraging people to get outside. And, while they’re out of the way, use the opportunity to rip the unhealthy guts out of our existing office and leisure spaces, install 21st-century ventilation and air-purification systems and insert windows that can actually be opened. It’s the crowded, poorly ventilated work and living spaces that are the demons – not the beer garden.
Chris Smith is Monocle’s health and science correspondent. He is a consultant virologist at Cambridge University and editor of the ‘Naked Scientists’ podcast.