Mike Hosking: Time to see the back of our Covid obsession - The Mike Hosking Breakfast

The good news for me this week around the relinquishing of the Covid rules, was not so much the masks, lights, or mandates, but the case numbers.

We will no longer publish the case numbers daily. Like all the other changes we have been ruinously slow to move on with life.

But the numbers were possibly the most insidious of the factors at play without us perhaps even realising.

The Prime Minister's line by the way, that we are "taking back control” must never be seen as anything other than more of her polytech marketing puffery.

We didn’t take anything back because we never gave anything away.

We had our lives and freedoms forcibly removed from us by a government driven by a mix of fear, panic, lack of experience, and to be fair a little bit of genuine leadership.

They had to do something. But in totality what they did proved to be over the top, with a slew of damage that resulted and results in what we are still living through and paying for to this day and many, many days to come.

But think back on those numbers, the obsession around them, the one o'clock announcements, and the invention of the pulpit of truth. Remember those bizarre sessions with a media that got so hopelessly exposed for their lack of rigour, knowledge, and ability to follow a non-answer with a proper question that might lead to any sort of accountability.

Psychologists and psychiatrists must still be having a field day looking and studying the way we behaved. The guessing of the case numbers, the trends, what they meant, the absurd placement of importance on every utterance that came from a Jackson, Baker, or Wiles.

Did the number mean freedom? A light change? A rule dropped?

Media would build up to the release of the numbers . Every day, day in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out we saw "today's numbers about to be released," "Ministry about to announce new update", "what are today's numbers?"

The psychological damage that must have done to us. The stress, the time wasted, and the energy burned. We detailed a virus like no other virus has been detailed.

Even now, that weekly update going forward is tragic. We are not listing cold or flu numbers, we aren't counting delayed operations, surgical waiting lists, access to doctors, or mental health help.

It is a fantastically interesting study into the power of fear and control. It was an experiment and we were all part of it whether we know it or not.

We cannot get it behind us fast enough, and move on.

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