No one here in South Africa is known to have been hospitalised with the Omicron variant, nor is anyone here believed to have fallen seriously ill with it. So reports the chair of that country’s medical association, Dr Angelique Coetzee, the medic who first identified this variant.

Her announcement should have been met with cautious optimism. If Omicron causes only mild symptoms for most people who catch it – fatigue, slight headache, body aches, a scratchy throat – then as Dr Coetzee suggests, it could be a useful step on the road to herd immunity. Already 92 per cent of UK adults have Covid antibodies and the Covid infection fatality rate is more or less the same as flu: 0.096%.

Yet with a predictability we’ve come to expect over the last 21 months, the usual shroud-waivers sprang into action, topping up the nations’ reservoir of fear.

Give us full-on Plan B! Or better still proper lockdown. Cancel Christmas, and Easter, while you’re at it. Summer holidays? If you’ve been optimistic enough to book any to make up for those you missed the last two summers, cancel them now, you fool!

Viewed from the southern hemisphere, this reaction borders on hysterical.

“I’m afraid it seems to me that Britain is merely hyping up the alarm about this variant unnecessarily”, observes Dr Coetzee. And she’s absolutely right. Forget Keep Calm and Carry on. The urge to be seen to be doing something, even when it patently doesn’t work, has replaced it.

It’s got to a point where our tentative hopes for a return to normality have been dashed so repeatedly, and with a precision and timing suggestive of premeditation, that many of us feel beaten.

A threat hangs over our heads. Do what we tell you to do ad infinitum or else we will deprive you of your ‘privileges’– formerly known as human rights.

The UK government”s behavioural psychologists have honed the art of undermining any confidence, positivity, or independent thought the public can muster. But with Omicron, even Boris Johnson may be worried that this time they have overdone it

When Dr Jenny Harries, head of the UK Health Security Agency, told us to not to socialise at Christmas events, Johnson stepped in to contradict her. But by then the damage was done; the better-safe-than-sorry nudges had already been seeded in our brains.

School nativity plays have been cancelled. Christmas drinks, carol concerts, trips to the pub, and office drinks called off. People who were looking forward to the cheering prospect of getting together with friends and family feel scared to do so. Restaurants watch with horror as their pre-Christmas season, so critical for solvency, turns into a trail of cancellations.

Once again we are victims of gaslighting – a control technique that makes victims mistrust their own perceptions of reality so utterly that they become disoriented and internalise their abuser’s script.

Wracked with doubt, dogged by low mood, with heightened anxiety as our steadfast companion, most of us are leading lives unrecognisable before March 2020. We go out less, or hardly ever. We see fewer friends, if any. Our social confidence has plummeted. We stop making plans that would give us something to look forward to because uncertainty is pervasive, and we’d most likely have to scrap them anyway.

Winter makes the sense of pointlessness worse. It dulls the extrovert in us and coddles the hermit. It’s too much fuss, too complicated, too cold to attempt any Old Normal life. Let’s just withdraw indoors in our own comfy prisons, tranquillised by Netflix, food ‘treats’, alcohol, and drugs.

So it doesn’t matter if Johnson countermands Harries, the damage is done.

And it seems that certain powerful influencers, along with most of the broadcast media, would be jubilant if this Covid emergency mindset became permanent.

Did anyone else spot a fanatical gleam in the eye of behavioural scientist, Professor Susan Michie, as she opined that face masks and some social distancing measures should continue “forever”?

She sits on the UK government’s mind-bending advisory group, SPI-B, the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours, and openly admires the Chinese Communist Party’s way of doing things. In March 2020 she was advocating that we “learn lessons” from its modus operandi.

What a drag it must be for her when people argue back. A Chinese Communist Party approach to dissidents would soon knock that nonsense out of them.

And along with grim-faced Harries, Michie fits a mould. In their 60s, no young family, convinced of their intellectual superiority, with comfortable lifestyles guaranteed by government and academe, irrespective of the devastating impact their pronouncements have on ordinary people whose livelihoods and wellbeing suffer each time they open their mouths.

These ambitious grafters rise through the ranks of government bureaucracy. Being a steely, single-minded sociopath who doesn’t do normal human emotions may be a key job requirement.

When Harries tells us that we must not attend social gatherings if we “don’t particularly need to”, I doubt that Harries herself would ever feel any such need. I’d certainly avoid her at a party. She’d kill any fledgling festive spirit stone dead. Her appearance would cause the mincemeat pies to chill on the plate.

As for Susan Michie, she would have you pinned against the wall with her nanny-knows-best lecture on why Britain would only be better if it was much more like China.

It’s true, of course, that as a pre-requisite of our life on this earth, none of us strictly needs to participate in any sociable act. And now we have been conditioned into believing that contact with others is dangerous unless it’s on Zoom, the Perpetual Covid Cult has taken full advantage of the latest ‘scariant’ to send us running back into our bunkers.

They want us to kiss goodbye to previous notions of a well-lived life, retreat into the Omicron equivalent of the Cold War bomb shelter, and await our instructions.

This only ends when we stop going along with it. What are we waiting for?

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.