Fearful Britain: 79 Per Cent Feel Some Degree of Nervousness About End of Lockdown

LONDON, ENGLAND - JUNE 11: A boy holding an umbrella walks past a mural of a woman wearing
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Victoria Friedman

A combined 79 per cent of Britons have admitted that they feel some level of nervousness about the end of lockdown this month, in another poll pointing to Britons living in a state of fear over the Chinese coronavirus.

The YouGov poll taken on Thursday found that more than one in five — 21 per cent — said they felt “very nervous” about COVID-19 restrictions lifting. A further 34 per cent felt “fairly nervous” and 24 per cent “not very nervous”, making a combined 79 per cent expressing some form of nerves over the end of lockdown. Just 21 per cent said they were “not nervous at all” (with two per cent responding “don’t know”).

The figures come in a week of similar surveys by the polling company finding Britons reluctant to see the end of restrictions. A survey from Tuesday found that more than eight in ten Britons would choose to continue wearing a mask if they were not mandatory today.

Another poll from Monday found that a majority backed a continuation of the mask mandate on public transport and in shops, with a combined 70 per cent saying they would feel less “safe” in crowded or poorly ventilated spaces if surrounded by people not wearing masks.

Other polls in the past year have revealed similar levels of fear, with a September 202 poll finding 83 per cent of people were frightened that a second wave of the Chinese virus would hit the country “hard”. An MP had told media that same month he believes Britons were being made “fearful” by the government’s messages on the level of danger they faced over the virus. As a result, the people were ready to accept “authoritarian” lockdown rules.

When Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a delay to the end of restrictions from June 21st to July 19th at the earliest, former Conservative Party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith said that Britons had been “frightened” into accepting lockdown because of “incorrect” scientific forecasts which he claimed did not take into account the efficacy of vaccines.

“We get forecasts that seem to frighten everybody rather than reality. And the reality so far that I have seen — and the figures show this, Public Health England’s latest figures show that there is no evidence to date that the vaccines do not work on stopping hospitalisation,” Mr Duncan Smith had said in June.

The lockdown sceptic recently called for the end of the daily government and media coronavirus death toll announcements, which for months has been in the double and sometimes single digits, saying their reporting — but not deaths by other diseases — was giving a “distorted view of life in the UK and death”.

Sir Iain had also warned last month that the longer the end of lockdown is delayed, “the less likely we are to come out of this. We’ve got ourselves into a spiral of fear.”

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