The Lockdown Chronicles Year 2: Paying Dividends (Eoho!)

Just sayin’.

N.B. I am not suggesting EOHO (sic) was the trigger, even less the sole trigger of the second wave. For me, however, EOHO scheme remains the poster strategy (as in “poster boy”) of the failed overall approach.

Explaining a joke ruins it, but things are so grim anyway that joking is not even appropriate, so I’ll clarify the intention is to be onomatopeic (EOHO reads like a sound effect, like a cry), to point towards the grim poor taste of the acronym and the scheme, and to ask the viewer to reflect on that period of the Summer of 2020, in which cases (and hospital admissions, and deaths) were lower, and how they start increasing again from September.

Images, like data, invite the user to ask questions: what happened, or did not happen differently in that period? Why has the increase in cases and deaths from September remained ever-growing? Methinks it cannot simply be blamed on the new, more contagious nature of the UK variant of the virus or the virus itself. What could the government have done differently to stop so much suffering, pain, loss and grief?

Sources: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8978/; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/11/police-in-england-say-they-wont-enforce-masks-in-supermarkets; https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/

Catch up with the series at https://epriego.blog/tag/the-lockdown-chronicles/.