Translate the following six paragraphs into Chinese
With Covid infections rising, the Tories are conducting
a deadly social experiment
Apandemic is a political event. It exposes who is
vulnerable and who can afford to escape, who is prioritised for treatment and
who is neglected. The politics of a pandemic are both large-scale and intensely
personal. How we behave towards each other, what balance is struck between
safety and freedom, how blame is distributed, what a country considers an
acceptable level of illness and death: questions that may once have been
philosophical have become frighteningly real.
In Britain, the politics of Covid have been thought about and discussed almost
entirely in party terms: the relative caution and competence of the SNP
government in Scotland and its Labour counterpart in Wales; the recklessness and
lethal mistakes of the Conservatives in England, and whether Labour can make the
Tories pay for them. The pandemic has been seen as a potential turning point for
all the main parties.
That it has not worked out like that – so far – has been a huge disappointment
for the Conservatives’ enemies. But this focus on the parties has also been
convenient for voters. Uncomfortable questions about whether our individual
behaviour during the pandemic has matched our political values have not been
asked.
These questions particularly matter now. Since Boris Johnson declared “freedom
day” on 19 July, almost all the previous restrictions on everyday life in
England under Covid have been removed. “Personal responsibility”, as Johnson and
his ministers like to put it with a libertarian relish, has replaced emergency
legislation as one of the main weapons against the virus. In effect, a giant
experiment in individual ethics has been under way.
The results look increasingly alarming. In pubs, in shops, on public transport
and in other enclosed spaces where the virus easily spreads, many people are
acting as if the pandemic is over – or at least, over for them. Mask-wearing and
social distancing have sometimes become so rare that to practise them feels
embarrassing.
Meanwhile, England has become one of the worst places for infections in the
world, despite a high degree of vaccination by global standards. Case numbers,
hospitalisations and deaths are all rising, and are already much higher than in
other western European countries that have kept measures such as indoor
mask-wearing compulsory, and where compliance with such rules has remained
strong. What does England’s failure to control the virus through “personal
responsibility” say about our society?
It’s tempting to start by generalising about national character, and how the
supposed individualism of the English has become selfishness after half a
century of frequent rightwing government and fragmentation in our lives and
culture. There may be some truth in that. But national character is not a very
solid concept, weakened by all the differences within countries and all the
similarities that span continents. Thanks to globalisation, all European
societies have been affected by the same atomising forces. England’s lack of
altruism during the pandemic can’t just be blamed on neoliberalism.
Other elements of our recent history may also explain it. England likes to think
of itself as a stable country, yet since the 2008 financial crisis it has
endured a more protracted period of economic, social and political turmoil than
most European countries. The desire to return to some kind of normality may be
especially strong here; taking proper anti-Covid precautions would be an
acknowledgement that we cannot do that.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/22/england-covid-ethics-personal-responsibility