Britain’s heatwave response was straight from the Covid playbook

Hundreds of school closures across England and Wales, train companies advising people not to travel, and businesses encouraging staff to work from home. Remind you of anything? It’s the Covid playbook, which is rapidly becoming the ‘new normal’ for how our supposedly advanced society responds to an unusual and difficult event. And given that in seasonal Britain, the weather can often be unpredictable and aggravating, the playbook now has plenty of opportunities for an airing.

The Covid playbook is not about taking sensible precautions to deal with challenging situations. Very hot weather, like that we experienced last week, is uncomfortable for many and dangerous for some. We might need to adapt some of our daily practices, and some infrastructure will struggle to cope. All this has happened in heatwaves past, too.

But since Covid, the response to both hot and cold weather – like the response to the occasional outbreaks of infectious disease – has followed a predictable formula. That is, a problem is quickly turned into a drama with dire warnings of a crisis. This is far worse for our collective health than a few days of intense sunshine.

The first step in the playbook is to exaggerate what’s new. With Covid, the clear danger posed by the emergence of a novel and highly infectious coronavirus was quickly escalated into the idea that a respiratory infection pandemic was itself ‘unprecedented’: something that made little sense, given the continual comparisons with the ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic of 1918-20. But because the Covid pandemic was seen to be unprecedented, this apparently justified the implementation of extraordinary and untested containment methods, from population-wide lockdowns to business closures and bizarre social-distancing rules and paraphernalia. The authorities didn’t draw on historical experience but on present-day panic. Those in power presumed that our society could not cope with this challenge, so we had better stop functioning as a society and send everyone home.

In the present heatwave, we’ve heard a lot about the Met Office issuing a rare ‘extreme heat warning’, and we’ve been treated to daily graphics of the regions under a red or amber blob. What we hear less is that extreme heat warnings were only introduced in the UK in July 2021, and one was issued as recently as 2022. We also find ourselves beset by severe weather warnings during the winter months, accompanied by the same demands: work from home, don’t travel, close the schools. This is another feature of the Covid playbook – the invention of a new metric designed to frame the current problem as more severe than anything that has happened to date.

The problem is not necessarily that these metrics are false – UK summer temperatures may well be higher than in the past, and Covid was very infectious. It’s that these techniques are used to simplify a complex situation and to promote measures that are fundamentally anti-social. Take the closure of schools and advice to stay at home and avoid travelling. Each of these decisions can make pragmatic sense on their own terms. We know that sweaty kids in overheated classrooms are unlikely to learn a great deal, and that it’s a bad time to be stuck in a traffic jam on the M1. But since Covid, the implementation of such measures has become uniform and routine, with little consideration of the knock-on effects for certain sections of society and for social life as a whole.

As we know from the pandemic, working and studying from home might be fine for those with particular jobs and nice airy houses – not so much for families crammed into stuffy city apartments with limited technology. The debate about whether WFH is good or bad for productivity is ongoing, but most of us know that in Britain today, very little seems to be getting done at the best of times. Whenever we have some adverse weather, we immediately enter a doom loop – employees are either encouraged to WFH or they demand the right to WFH, and even those who want to come into work may find themselves prevented from doing so because their kid’s school might close or the transport might break down. Air-conditioned trains, offices and cafes find themselves half empty, while families swelter in their over-insulated homes driving each other insane. Make it make sense!

There are some exceptions to this anti-social approach. In London, a ‘cool map’ has been produced to inform people about public spaces with shade and air-con. In Paris, as the authorities are trying to cope by banning alcohol in public places, residents are taking matters into their own hands by jumping into the canal. Still, it’s striking how these practical social measures for dealing with a heatwave have come to seem like a deviant afterthought, as if what people really should be doing is sweating it out alone, glued to their phones for news about when it all might end.

Predictably, the media has made itself into the story here. Rather than simply report on the facts about the weather and official advice that might be given, media outlets – particularly those ‘trusted’ sources such as the BBC, to which Keir Starmer wants to give an algorithmic boost to counter ‘disinformation’ – immediately create a cycle of competitive escalation. Right from the get-go, a suggestion of adverse weather leads to breathless reporting about what’s been closed, who’s died, who’s struggling to cope, where there’s a shortage of water, where public transport has gone down. And it’s all interspersed with inane bits of advice about ‘how to protect yourself’ and smug mini-commentaries about climate change.

All this contributes to the anti-social effect. Who, reading about disaster everywhere all at once, is inclined to schlep to the office or force their kids into school? It’s utterly sensationalist and irresponsible, and surely makes people feel worse than they would if they were just left to get on with working out how best to cool down and keep going with their lives.

For all the excitable protestations about unprecedented events, the Covid playbook is a response to a more mundane and depressing trend. While ordinary people are not trusted to make sensible decisions about their own health and wellbeing, social institutions and public infrastructure casually withdraw from their collective responsibilities.