From yesterday’s Guardian:
Contentious advice will be removed from the government website, a spokesperson confirmed on Tuesday evening. It had advised against all but essential travel to and from eight areas of England where the Covid variant identified in India has been spreading. Instead, people will be advised to “minimise travel”.
This gets to something that I observed last spring when I (like many people) decided to immerse myself in the literature of epidemics — The Last Man, La Peste, Journal of the Plague Year, Pale Horse Pale Rider: In an epidemic, people can’t help but think of contagion as a moral failing, and so, thinking of themselves as blameless, underestimate the possibility that they could unwittingly infect someone else. This makes it socially uncomfortable to insist that others practice necessary hygiene, because it sounds like you’re accusing them of secret turpitude. Strangers should wear masks, but “we’re friends”, or even — much too casually — “you’re in my bubble”.
Thus two Bolton residents, whose hotel reservations on the Isle of Wight had been cancelled purely from abhorrence of their municipal origins, complained to the press: “Bolton people are being treated like lepers”.
On a literal level we have here people who are feared to be at high risk of carrying an explosively contagious infection that produces an acute disease with no very good treatment, that is often rapidly fatal; complaining that they are being unjustly shunned as though they might be carrying a different, mildly contagious infection, that produces a chronic disease that can be completely cured with medication.
But, of course, what they really mean is, we’re being treated like morally culpable potential disease carriers. This is a status that has traditionally been conferred on carriers of leprosy, something we do not question, but that only highlights our moral — hence also virological — purity.
Common Infirmities 