An interesting tweet from the BBC’s political editor, ‘Tory’ Laura Kuenssberg: “Whitty says ‘you don’t need a medical degree’ to work out that it’s a good idea to ‘deprioritise’ social events that aren’t important to you in the run up to Christmas – in other words, don’t go out unless you really feel you need to.”
Having read reports on, and seen quotes from the government press conference yesterday evening, I now realise I wasn’t paying proper attention. Not for the first time, Boris Johnson’s bombardment of bullshit distracted your humble blogger from the real business. Professor Chris Whitty, unlike Johnson, is a man of decency, honesty and integrity. His message, along with his general demeanour, was bleak: we are in a lot of trouble.
Last night, I managed to wake up in the early hours and couldn’t stop thinking about it. At the best of times, my brain is driven by a constant motor that I can’t switch off. During the day, there are enough distractions that can be deployed but at night, it’s different. Then, I started sneezing and had a dry cough which meant of course that I now had Covid. I then drifted off to a fractured, anxiety-ridden series of ridiculous dreams until the sun came up. Christ: this virus isn’t doing my mental health any good, even if my sneezing soon stopped and my asthma inhaler took care of my dry cough and anyway, I had yet another negative lateral flow test yesterday so that’s all right then. Except that it isn’t when I remember a friend who last week had several negative lateral flow tests, got pinged and tested positive on the PCR with no symptoms at all. Phew.
Anyway, I don’t have that many social events to ‘deprioritise’ this Christmas. None, in fact. I don’t have any parties or Christmas dinners to attend, I don’t have any gigs or sporting events to go to, I don’t have any family visits to carry out until on or around THE BIG DAY. But I am thinking about Whitty’s advice which, as I said above, is “don’t go out unless you really feel you need to”.
I mean, I don’t literally need to visit my local or to tour the record shops (which these days admittedly doesn’t take too long) and we have most of our shopping delivered by a large supermarket van. However, I will do all these things because I remember how awful I felt during the first lockdown in 2020.
People are already voting with their feet about whether to proceed with their Christmas parties and meals, with many thousands of cancellations and you do wonder whether they will survive the coming financial calamity. Similarly theatres and cinemas are going to struggle. The chancellor, Brand Rishi Sunak, will be on the spot in the next few weeks. The richest man in British politics, who also happens to be married to the daughter of a multibillionaire, gained popularity last time for handing out free money. What’s he going to do this time? Allow businesses to go bust, to allow thousands of jobs to go after spending a large fortune saving them? Good luck with that one, Sunak, as he continues his manoeuvres to succeed Johnson. If his boss is effectively – well, I’d say ineffectively – telling people to stay at home, depriving businesses from making money, then doesn’t Sunak have a duty to act decisively?
Take what follows with a large pinch of salt if you like, but my feeling, based on nothing other than a gut feeling and memories of how has Johnson fucked up Britain’s Covid response at every stage so far, is that we have grossly underestimated Covid in general and Omicron in particular. People as inexpert as I am say Omicron is not as bad as Delta so less people will die. Maybe they’re right? But if many more people are affected – we had record numbers yesterday and infections are doubling every day – then more people will inevitably get ill, go to hospital and die, regardless of whether Omicron is milder.
With no further mitigations, I can see a national lockdown happening as early as 27th January and, having left it all too late, the NHS being overrun at the same time. I don’t even want to think about what might follow that – civil unrest perhaps, looting? Now is the time for calm heads and sound judgement. But all we have is Boris Johnson, a journalist with a toddler’s haircut, who lies for a living. The future is unwritten, but it’s probably not a good idea to think about it too much, especially given how bad things are at the moment.
