AS ANOTHER lockdown finishes (sort of, perhaps, with exemptions, depending on the time of day and what you’re eating / drinking and where you live), it’s a moment to reflect.   

It’s time to wonder what percentage of British people are stupid or sheep-like or both as we journey across the land of many tiers and even more confusion. 

There’s an odd split in the way in which people approach restrictions.  

On one hand, many were outraged that gyms, pools, pubs and social mixing were off their calendars. 

On the other, they allow themselves to be herded in lines towards touch tills and wander unthinkingly against clearly-marked arrows while others must squeeze past. 

Companies are cutting costs more as Covid sweeps away both our ability and inclination to buy. 

So some shops which remained open in lockdown reckoned a couple of assistants at most is all you needed on the tills, leaving the customers to do their best with DIY checkouts. 

Wilko, the replacement Woolworths for washing up bowls and pick ‘n’ mix, did not even pretend to be offering self-service tills in our town. It simply swivelled around most of the screens on normal checkouts and expected each customer to repeatedly touch them – and, extraordinarily, people queued up to do so. 

WH Smith, whose cluttered merchandising and threadbare floors are the subject of the brilliant @WHS_Carpet account on Twitter, likes to truly maximise the times potential Covid carriers (customers) touch the screens. 

Touch 1: PAY 

Touch 2: Do you want these inappropriate offers consisting mostly of slabs of chocolate? 

Touch 3: Do you have your own bag? 

Touch 4: Do you want to pay by card? 

Touch 5: Receipt? 

The solution? (That’s not Touch 6, that’s me) Use a till with an assistant or tell the manager you want an assistant to operate the till (if you can find anyone). 

Compare all this nonsense with an account by Katherine Whitfield back in March from Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. She wrote in The Observer that an armed security guard stopped her at a restaurant door to take her temperature before ushering her to a table.  

A MAN WITH A GUN. And we are still, eight months after the first lockdown started, merrily caressing shared tills and strolling around where we fancy – with nobody to police us.  

Taiwan has been praised globally for reacting swiftly and decisively, severely restricting flights from China at the first hint of a virus at the start of the year as well as surveillance of those in quarantine. 

In the UK, we keep our fingers crossed that people will sort of quarantine vaguely, maybe, hopefully, when they return from trips and continued to allow planeloads of people to stroll out the airport untroubled by health checks. 

The UK government is starting a ‘Test for Release’ scheme on December 15 under which people can CHOOSE to pay for a Covid test to reduce their period of self-isolation if coming from a country outside the travel corridor list.  

Do you genuinely believe all British people returning to this country quarantine for 14 days, unsupervised, when required to do so? No, neither do I. In fact, I know several people who have not done so. 

Does it matter whether you use self-service tills, quarantine or give a toss about those ‘annoying rules’?  

It turns out the UK’s ‘touching’ response to infectious disease control may be a lethal combination of libertarianism and non-existent enforcement.  

Here are some figures: 

Taiwan has registered just over 690 coronavirus cases and seven related deaths, according to the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control today. 

The UK has registered 1,674,134 coronavirus cases this year and 60,113 deaths within 28 days of a positive test, according to today’s government website. 

Bloody hell – should we blame the UK government or ourselves?