May I begin by quoting a tweet from the Daily Mail writer Dan Hodges: “Ministers were told on Friday about the danger of the new strain. It’s now Monday morning. London and the South East are in Tier 4. Again, what are the Government waiting for. Why is the rest of the country not being protected?” Suffice to say I do not always agree with Hodges on all manner of subjects, but I do on this one. First, I enclose the minutes of NERVTAG:
My loyal reader will, by now, have sussed that I am probably not your go-to expert on epidemiology and virology but those in attendance at the NERVTAG meeting certainly are experts and my conclusion from reading their conclusion is that we are, to use a technical term, in the shit.
Those wretched foreigners, AKA our European friends, have done what any country in its collective right mind would do, which is to bring in tough measures to stop the new strain of COVID sweep across their countries, as it has already done in parts of ours. I would be absolutely appalled if we lived in a country that happily allowed a virus to arrive in our country without doing anything to try and stop it. Oh, wait: that’s exactly what happened in the UK when Boris Johnson’s hopeless government did just that until it was far too late. But that Boris, eh? He makes you laugh, doesn’t he, unless you are among the 80,000+ families who have lost loved ones to this virus. You might not think him quite so loveable then?
It’s safe to say that the countries who are stopping transport links to the UK are acting sensibly, given the evidence shown above. So, why are we not, as Dan Hodges points out, protecting the rest of the country?
It’s almost as if the government is run by London-centric and home counties MPs who only see a crisis if it’s happening on their doorstep. If you live in, say, Bristol, Liverpool, Newcastle and Manchester, it’s absolutely safe to carry on as normal, with only pubs and restaurants being forced to close, but in the south-east it’s of paramount importance to properly lock down. But surely, the whole point of Johnson reintroducing a lockdown, even if he does dress it up by calling it Tier 4, is to prevent a dramatically increasingly transmissible virus reaching out across the south east? Does he think that it will not spread everywhere else? I repeat: I have no expertise in science, but even a simpleton like me can see that unless the rest of the country takes increasingly stringent measures, the new strain will quickly reach all points east, north, west and south in days, if it hasn’t spread already?
If we thought Tier 3 was like the Hotel California (“You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave”) then what price Tier 4 lingering around until the summer, maybe beyond that? Christ, we don’t know for sure yet whether the new strain will weaken or render useless the vaccines that are starting to be rolled out. No point panicking about this, but it’s something we don’t know yet.
One thing is for sure: Boris Johnson is going to have to abandon his clown act, listen to the experts his ministers have constantly decried and to stop dithering. After promising just a few months ago that Christmas would be near normal, it turns out things are becoming worse than ever.
