Covid-19 Rule Breakers

Like most people with social media I have witnessed a number of people breaking UK Covid-19 rules and it still baffles me after being in and out of lockdown for a year now. In the first UK national lockdown last year I think we were all guilty of breaking a couple of the rules, perhaps meeting up with one person we shouldn’t have for a walk or meeting up with a family member. Yet the fact that people are continuing to do it seems ludicrous, surely now we are all so fed up with lockdown that we can sacrifice meeting up with friends for a while longer so that we can then meet properly, sooner?

The number of people I have seen sharing pictures and videos at house parties is quite extraordinary. It goes without saying that we have all had enough of being restricted to our home for the majority of our time and the majority of the year but I am not quite sure why that constitutes some people to believe that they can do whatever they want and break the rules. I think we would all like to meet up with our friends and more importantly our families but the idea, as I have perceived it, is that if we stay away from people it would control the spread of the virus and thus allow us to go back to normal sooner. These people seem to not be considering this. Or anyone but themselves really.

Of course, there is some obvious fault with the way that the UK government has dealt with the coronavirus pandemic, going in and out of lockdowns has not been sustainable or worked particularly well. Which is why it surprises me that the support for Boris Johnson is still quite high but that is an argument for another time. However, these faults don’t give people an excuse to then go and break the rules, especially if their reason is that nothing is changing and that they want to return to normal. The government problems aside, we will hardly be going back to normal if these people are breaking the rules and, it if it hadn’t been happening for the past year there might have been a chance that we would be coming out of lockdown sooner. We cannot assume that because these vaccines are being rolled out quickly we can become lax on some of the rules, the spread of infection still needs to be controlled.

I think as a student I have perhaps had more experience seeing people break the rules which is hugely disappointing for me. My student house and many of my friends’ student houses have been sticking to the rules rigidly which might be why these rules breakers anger me so much. Not only does it seem unfair and selfish that I am making an effort to stick to the rules and they get to have parties and ignore them but it also plays into this reputation that has been placed on students during the pandemic. A significant number of people have made the point that students are the ones breaking the rules and causing the spread of the coronavirus which in my case, and many of my friends’ cases, is simply not true. However, these people that do break the rules do then gain publicity and this plays into the narrative of university students during the pandemic; ultimately making us all look incompetent. I think there should be a conscious effort on all student’s parts to properly follow the rules and set an example for the country, although most students have been doing this, the select few have been clearly letting the side now.

The main thing that also seems the most outrageous is the fact that these ‘rule breakers’ seem to blatantly advertise their rule breaking. Many people who I have seen breaking the rules have been posting videos and pictures on social media, if you’re going to break the rules then why would you show it off to your followers. It also seems to me that the kind of people that are breaking these rules are the people who seem to openly air their frustration at the virus and ‘want to go back to normal, to party again’ yet they are the very people that have prevented this from happening sooner or even at all.

As someone with a conscience these people clearly anger me, they are being selfish. They don’t seem to recognise the fact that some people are following the rules strictly and sacrificing their social life but these people clearly don’t seem to care and in my opinion they should be incredibly ashamed of themselves. I understand that lockdown is frustrating and that staying inside clearly affects many people’s mental health, especially for the length of time that it has been going on in the UK. However, this does not give people the excuse to have parties every other weekend, to be meeting up with friends in their house. We are all in this together and we should understand that most people feel the way we do and so there is no reason for people to break the rules so detrimentally. Coronavirus has demonstrated to me that people can pull together in times of serious hardship but it has also demonstrated the significant selfishness and ignorance of a select few of the population.