But right now, we're eleven months in and it's illegal for me to have a single friend over for a cup of tea.
Not advised against; not something we should limit; illegal, punishable by law.
I'm at the point at which I've been told by medical health practitioners to ignore this nonsense and see people for my own wellbeing.
We have a vaccination program running in the UK and it's going fairly well. The thing that is keeping me clinging to sanity is the fact that once the vulnerable groups have been vaccinated, I'm just getting on with life.
Without that; well the news is saying 'social distancing until 2022' and the Government are telling us that maybe in a month it'll be legal to sit on a park bench with a coffee.
This is not me being hyperbolic. It is currently illegal for me to leave my house and sit on a park bench.
If I followed that stuff to the letter, I'd have already gone postal or just thrown myself in front of a train.
This is a policy that, if it works at all, works for specific types of people; nuclear families, introverts, etc.
Those might even be a majority.
But it's not viable at a population level because a significant percentage of people are either in situations whereby they need to mix households in order to function, or have brain chemistry which means that avoiding social mixing for prolonged periods (months or more) causes them to become depressed, anxious, or in extreme cases psychotic.
We're doing all of this stuff in an attempt to reduce coronavirus cases prior to vaccination, because we care about public health, not purely for the sake of it. That would be "clown world".